The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849 Page 7
He arrived at the convent without further adventure; but, when unsaddling the horse, was surprised to observe the bundle, which, in the confusion of his mind, he had taken for a pillion. He carried it notwithstanding to his cell, telling the porter, in reply to his questions, that it contained a cloak and other habits he had received as a gift. Unfortunate falsehood—as true as any truth he could have told! It was in reality the cloak and other every-day habits of the Knight of Keridreux! The monk, thunderstruck at this new calamity, gazed upon the articles in silence. He felt all the horrors of actual guilt, and all the contrition of sincere repentance; he looked upon himself as a convicted criminal in the eyes of God and man, and upon the hose and doublet before him as the true corpus delicti of his villany.
“Cursed be the minute in which I was born,” cried he, “and the year and the day thereof! Cursed be the steed that bore me on its back on that nefarious errand! And may its master who seized me, even as a prisoner, in the snares of hell never see salvation! What misery is this that has come upon me? Cannot people sin without my sanction? If they imagine treason, am I to be drawn into holes and corners to hatch it! If they murder, can nobody else be found to sharpen the dagger? And if they turn their husbands into beasts, is it still I who must hide the old doublet? Begone, evidences of guilt, and snares of perdition! I spurn ye, filthy rags of unrighteousness! yea, I spurn ye with my foot—” and in a phrensy of rage and fear, he kicked the old clothes about the room, buffeting his breast, and tearing handfuls of hair from his beard.
The next morning he saw Father Bonaventure at matins as usual, looking as if nothing had happened; and his choler re-awoke, as he considered that all the misfortunes of the previous night ought to have fallen by right to him.
“Plague on the wavering fancies of women!” thought he; —“of all the days in the year, what made her send for me at that identical time? And I—I would supplant thee! Ah, rogue, I supplanted thee in good season, if thou but knewest it. From the gallop, and the embrace, down to the old doublet, all should else have been thine—all—all—with a murrain to thee!”
But when the reports, as yet vague and mysterious, at length reached the convent of the misfortune which had befallen the Sire of Keridreux, the unhappy monk was ready to go wild with apprehension. In a few hours more, it was known that the knight, for his sins, had been converted into a loup-garou, and that the anxious search instituted by the distracted wife—if we should not rather say widow—had hitherto been productive of no clue either to the man, or to what were of as much importance in such cases, his clothes.
“I will not stand this!” cried Father Etienne, leaping from the bed where he had thrown himself in a fever—“I will not carry off, in a single evening’s confessorship, what Brother Bonaventure so richly deserves by the labours of a whole year! By the Holy Virgin, he shall have the old clothes, if I die for it!” and in pursuance of this resolution, the very same evening, he conveyed secretly into his friend’s cell the mysterious bundle.
When Father Bonaventure discovered the present, he had not the remotest idea of the real quarter from whence it had come. The dame, on finding her priest absent from the spot where she had directed him to wait, being too far advanced in the business to recede, had sent the bundle by Hugues, merely commanding him to “fix it on the monk’s palfrey;” and meeting Father Bonaventure soon after ascending the stairs, the two proceeded to the execution of their plan without explanation, and without being the least aware that a second monk was in the house. On the present occasion, Father Bonaventure, without thinking of any intermediate channel, set down the gift at once as coming from the lady direct; whose fears lie imagined, when the reports and surmises began to buzz, had impelled her thus to get rid of the proofs of their mutual guilt.
“Nay, nay,” said he; “I will not put up with this. She might have burned them, if she had chosen; she who has opportunity for such things, and there would have been an end. But to send them to me! Why, what can a monk do with the old clothes of a knight? By my faith, I will not be put upon by any dame of them all! She has as good a right to any risk that is going as I; and they shall e’en find their way back as they came, and let her do with them as she lists.”
Hugues, who ever since daybreak had ridden from convent to convent, like one distracted, alarming the enemies of the devil with news of his triumph, and entreating their spiritual aid, arrived at this moment at the religious house of Ploërmel, and presented a fair opportunity to Father Bonaventure to get rid of his bundle. The dependant was easily persuaded to take charge of the precious deposite, which our priest desired him to deliver into the hands of the Dame of Keridreux; and being assured that the ghostly efforts of the monks should be devoted to the cause of his master, he turned his horse’s head towards the castle, and began to jog homewards in a melancholy and meditative trot.
He had not journeyed far, ruminating sadly on the transactions of the last two days, when his eye was caught by a projecting corner of the bundle, which was strapped to the rear of his horse. He had not before bestowed much attention on the charge thus committed to his care, nor indeed on the instructions of the monk regarding it; but at this moment some dim associations were suggested to his mind which gradually led his thoughts to the bundle he had fixed on the same place the night before by command of his mistress. The more he gazed, the more his suspicions of its identity were confirmed, and at last, unable to resist the suggestions of that devil (or angel, as it happens) curiosity, he undid the fastenings, and drawing the huge pillion to the front, opened it out. His emotions on discovering the lost suit of his master may be conceived. At first he merely tied it up again, and applying whip and spur with all his might, set forth at headlong speed towards the castle; but in a few moments, as some sudden thought occurred to him, he pulled in the reins with a jerk, which sent the animal back on his haunches.
“Fair and softly!” said he. “Whither, and for what reason, do I haste? If a lady sends a bundle to a monk, and the monk returns the bundle to the lady, it is clear there is some collusion between them. And further, if that bundle be of the clothes of a loup-garou, is it not evident that nothing honest can be meant? Fair and softly, I say again, honest Hugues, and let us consider, as we go along, what is best to be done.”
The result of this consideration was a string of resolutions highly favourable to Father Bonaventure, but in nowise redounding to the credit either of the Dame of Keridreux or Father Etienne; and in conclusion, Hugues determined to steal quietly round the castle at nightfall, and, in spite of ghosts and men, to betake himself to the corner of the belt of the forest described by his master, and wait there till the dawn with the clothes, let who would come to claim them.
When it was sufficiently dark for his purpose, he advanced towards the castle, and muffling his horse’s heels with handfuls of hay, reached the stable unobserved; then shouldering the bundle, he set out with a good heart for the forest.
While passing an angle of the building, however, a sound met his ear which made him pause. It was of so peculiar a nature, that he was uncertain for the moment whether it came from above, or below, or around, and he therefore stood stock still where he was, in the shadow of the wall. Presently the sound waxed louder, and the ground beside him seemed to tremble and give way; and in another moment a part of what appeared to be a subterranean arch fell in, and disclosed an object from which he recoiled in terror. Its form was human; it gleamed in the dark as white as snow; and when it began to ascend, as dumb as a spirit, to the surface of the earth, Hugues, unable any longer to combat his feelings, turned tail without disguise, and fled.
The footsteps of the phantom pursued him for some time, lending preternatural swiftness to his; but at length, conquering what might after all have been but imagination, he arrived alone at the corner of the forest, deposited the bundle upon the perpendicular stone, and sank fainting at its base.
When he opened his eyes again, startled into life by the howling of the wolves, his hairs stood u
p one by one upon his head, and cold drops of sweat beaded his brow, as he saw his master standing stark naked before him. The phantom (for such it seemed) seized hold of the bundle, and undoing the knots, dressed himself quietly in the clothes, and bestowing a hearty kick upon the squire—
“And thou, too!” he cried—“thou too must needs be in the cabal! Thou must skip, thou must fly, with a murrain on thy heels! as if there was no other place for a Christian knight to dress in than this accursed corner, with its upright stone of detestable memory!”
“As God is my judge,” said Hugues, “it was not from thee I fled! I thought thou wert a loup-garou, and I came hither with thy clothes, of which some villainous treason had despoiled thee. But who, in the name of the Virgin, could have dreamed of seeing thee rising from the earth like a spirit—and from thy own ground too—and as naked as thou wert born!”
“When sawest thou the monk Bonaventure?” asked the knight.
“This afternoon,” replied Hugues; “but if he said true, he is by this time in the castle consoling thy disconsolate widow.” The knight ground his teeth, and tearing down a branch from a tree, walked with huge strides towards the castle. The noise he made at the gate speedily roused the servants, who were by this time asleep; but in their surprise and confusion, and joy, so long a time elapsed before admittance was afforded, that the birds their master sought were flown.
The Dame of Keridreux, as the history relates, betook herself, Latin, monk, and all, to a far country; and the knight, after mourning a reasonable time for his loss, went forth again to the wooing, this time successful, of the fair Beatrix.
Father Etienne, on one pretext and another, declined farther intermeddling in the spiritual concerns of so dangerous a family; and Hugues, who could not get the affair of the bundle out of his head, was not sorry for it.
This faithful factotum waxed daily in the good graces of both master and mistress; and when the knight, after supper, would relate the story of his translation into a loup-garou, Hugues as regularly took up the thread of the relation at the passages where he came in himself as a witness.
As for the truth of the stories so related and so confirmed, it is presumed there can be only one opinion. It need not be concealed, however, that some have supposed the supernatural adventure of the knight to have taken place either in his own imagination or by the frolicsome agency of his neighbours; and that his final resumption of his clothes was not really made in the character of a loup-garou, but in that of a self-delivered man who had been incarcerated in the dungeons of his own castle by the fraud and force of a rascally priest and a faithless wife.
But these questions are left to the sagacity of the reader.
Catherine Crowe
(1790-1872)
Introduction
A Story of a Weir-Wolf
Catherine Crowe is the only female author in this compilation of the best werewolf short stories from 1800-1849. And, this could very well be the first werewolf short story by a woman, assuming Elizabeth Stone did not pen “Hughes the Wer-Wolf” in 1838. Crowe wrote a few novels, with Susan Hopley being her most popular. Yet it is Crowe’s supernatural stories for which she is remembered today.
Two years after “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” appeared in the May 16th, 1846 (Vol. III) issue of James Hogg’s magazine Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, Crowe published The Night-Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost-seers. The later is a solid compilation of supernatural short stories from purported real life events. Unfortunately, this tale of the weir-wolf that begins “on a fine bright summer’s morning” was not contained in The Night-Side of Nature and was apparently never re-published by Crowe.
Thankfully the story will live on. Like any weir-wolf, it has shapeshifted. In 1876—four years after Crowe’s death—William Forster produced a play called “The Weirwolf: A Tragedy” that he made clear was “from a story by Mrs. Crowe” in the printed script.
Before you is the complete text of the original short story, which, like a number of others in this collection, is set in the Middle Ages. Like “The Man Wolf,” I am unable to find the following tale collected in any anthology since its original publication in 1846.
A Story of a Weir-Wolf
(1846)
IT WAS ON a fine bright summer’s morning, in the year 1596, that two young girls were seen sitting at the door of a pretty cottage, in a small village that lay buried amidst the mountains of Auvergne. The house belonged to Ludovique Thierry, a tolerably prosperous builder; one of the girls was his daughter Manon, and the other his niece, Francoise, the daughter of his brother-in-law, Michael Thilouze, a physician.
The mother of Francoise had been some years dead, and Michael, a strange old man, learned in all the mystical lore of the middle ages, had educated his daughter after his own fancy; teaching her some things useless and futile, but others beautiful and true. He not only instructed her to glean information from books, but he led her into the fields, taught her to name each herb and flower, making her acquainted with their properties; and, directing her attention ‘to the brave o’erhanging firmament,’ he had told her all that was known of the golden spheres that were rolling above her head.
But Michael was also an alchemist, and he had for years been wasting his health in nightly vigils over crucibles, and his means in expensive experiments; and now, alas! he was nearly seventy years of age, and his lovely Francoise seventeen, and neither the elixir vitæ nor the philosopher’s stone had yet rewarded his labours. It was just at this crisis, when his means were failing and his hopes expiring, that he received a letter from Paris, informing him that the grand secret was at length discovered by an Italian, who had lately arrived there. Upon this intelligence, Michael thought the most prudent thing he could do was to waste no more time and money by groping in the dark himself, but to have recourse to the fountain of light at once; so sending Francoise to spend the interval with her cousin Manon, he himself started for Paris to visit the successful philosopher.
Although she sincerely loved her father, the change was by no means unpleasant to Francoise. The village of Loques, in which Manon resided, humble as it was, was yet more cheerful than the lonely dwelling of the physician; and the conversation of the young girl more amusing than the dreamy speculations of the old alchemist. Manon, too, was rather a gainer by her cousin’s arrival; for as she held her head a little high, on account of her father being the richest man in the village, she was somewhat nice about admitting the neighbouring damsels to her intimacy; and a visiter so unexceptionable as Francoise was by no means unwelcome. Thus both parties were pleased, and the young girls were anticipating a couple of months of pleasant companionship at the moment we have introduced them to our readers, seated at the front of the cottage.
‘The heat of the sun is insupportable, Manon,’ said Francoise; ‘I really must go in.’
‘Do,’ said Manon.
‘But wont you come in too?’ asked Francoise.
‘No, I don’t mind the heat,’ replied the other.
Francoise took up her work and entered the house, but as Manon still remained without, the desire for conversation soon overcame the fear of the heat, and she approached the door again, where, standing partly in the shade, she could continue to discourse. As nobody appeared disposed to brave the heat but Manon, the little street was both empty and silent, so that the sound of a horse’s foot crossing the drawbridge, which stood at the entrance of the village, was heard some time before the animal or his rider were in sight. Francoise put out her head to look in the direction of the sound, and, seeing no one, drew it in again; whilst Marion, after casting an almost imperceptible glance the same way, hung hers over her work, as if very intent on what she was doing; but could Francoise have seen her cousin’s face, the blush that first overspread it, and the paleness that succeeded, might have awakened a suspicion that Manon was not exposing her complexion to the sun for nothing.
When the horse drew near, the rider was seen to be a gay and handsome cavalier, attired in the
perfection of fashion, whilst the rich embroidery of the small cloak tint hung gracefully over his left shoulder, sparkling in the sun, testified no less than his distinguished air to his high rank and condition. Francoise, who had never seen anything so bright and beautiful before, was so entirely absorbed in contemplating the pleasing spectacle, that forgetting to be shy or to hide her own pretty face, she continued to gaze on him as he approached with dilated eyes and lips apart, wholly unconscious that the surprise was mutual. It was not till she saw him lift his bonnet from his head, and, with a reverential bow, do homage to her charms, that her eye fell and the blood rushed to her young cheek. Involuntarily, she made a step backward; into the passage; but when the horse and his rider had passed the door, she almost as involuntarily resumed her position, and protruded her head to look after him. He too had turned round on his horse and was ‘riding with his eyes behind,’ and the moment he beheld her he lifted his bonnet again, and then rode slowly forward.
‘Upon my word, Mam’selle Francoise,’ said Manon, with flushed cheeks and angry eyes, ‘this is rather remarkable, I think! I was not aware of your acquaintance with Monsieur de Vardes!’
‘With whom?’ said Francoise. ‘Is that Monsieur de Vardes?’
‘To be sure it is,’ replied Manon; ‘do you pretend to say you did not know it?’
‘Indeed, I did not,’ answered Francoise. ‘I never saw him in my life before.’