The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes. Bernard Capes

vultu et oculo respiciens in eum, dixit: ‘Ego, vado, et expectabis donec veniam!’ Itaque juxta verbum Domini expectat adhuc Cartaphilus ille, qui tempore Dominicae passionis – erat quasi triginta annorum, et semper cum usque ad centum attigerit aetatem redeuntium annorum redit redivivus ad illum aetatis statum, quo fuit anno quand passus est Dominus.

      Matthew of Paris, Historia Major

      The girl – from whose cheek Rose, in his rough rising, had seemed to brush the bloom, so keenly had its colour deepened – sank from the stool upon her knees, her hands pressed to her bosom, her lungs working quickly under the pressure of some powerful excitement.

      ‘It comes, beloved!’ she said, in a voice half-terror, half-ecstasy.

      ‘It comes, Adnah,’ the stranger echoed, struggling – ‘this periodic self-renewal – this sloughing of the veil of flesh that I warned you of.’

      His soul seemed to pant grey from his lips; his face was bloodless and like stone; the devils in his eyes were awake and busy as maggots in a wound. Amos knew him now for wickedness personified and immortal, and fell upon his knees beside the girl and seized one of her hands in both his.

      ‘Look!’ he shrieked. ‘Can you believe in him longer? believe that any code or system of his can profit you in the end?’

      She made no resistance, but her eyes still dwelt on the contorted face with an expression of divine pity.

      ‘Oh, thou sufferest!’ she breathed; ‘but thy reward is near!’

      ‘Adnah!’ wailed the young man, in a heartbroken voice. ‘Turn from him to me! Take refuge in my love. Oh, it is natural, I swear. It asks nothing of you but to accept the gift – to renew yourself in it, if you will; to deny it, if you will, and chain it for your slave. Only to save you and die for you, Adnah!’

      He felt the hand in his shudder slightly; but no least knowledge of him did she otherwise evince.

      He clasped her convulsively, released her, mumbled her slack white fingers with his lips. He might have addressed the dead.

      In the midst, the figure before them swayed with a rising throe – turned – staggered across to the couch, and cast itself down before the crucifix on the wall.

      ‘Jesu, Son of God,’ it implored, through a hurry of piercing groans, ‘forbear Thy hand: Christ, register my atonement! My punishment – eternal – and oh, my mortal feet already weary to death! Jesu, spare me! Thy justice, Lawgiver – let it not be vindictive, oh, in Thy sacred name! lest men proclaim it for a baser thing than theirs. For a fault of ignorance – for a word of scorn where all reviled, would they have singled one out, have made him, most wretched, the scapegoat of the ages? Ah, most holy, forgive me! In mine agony I know not what I say. A moment ago I could have pronounced it something seeming less than divine that Thou couldst so have stultified with a curse Thy supreme hour of self-sacrifice – a moment ago, when the rising madness prevailed. Now, sane once more – Nazarene, oh, Nazarene! not only retribution for my deserts, but pity for my suffering – Nazarene, that Thy slanderers, the men of little schisms, be refuted, hearing me, the very witness to Thy mercy, testify how the justice of the Lord triumphs supreme through that His superhuman prerogative – that they may not say, He can destroy, even as we; but can He redeem? The sacrifice – the yearling lamb; – it awaits Thee, Master, the proof of my abjectness and my sincerity. I, more curst than Abraham, lift my eyes to Heaven, the terror in my heart, the knife in my hand. Jesu – Jesu!’

      He cried and grovelled. His words were frenzied, his abasement fulsome to look upon. Yet it was impressed upon one of the listeners, with a great horror, how unspeakable blasphemy breathed between the lines of the prayer – the blasphemy of secret disbelief in the Power it invoked, and sought, with its tongue in its cheek, to conciliate.

      Bitter indignation in the face of nameless outrage transfigured Rose at this moment into something nobler than himself. He feared, but he upheld his manhood. Conscious that the monstrous situation was none of his choosing, he had no thought to evade its consequences so long as the unquestioning credulity of his co-witness seemed to call for his protection. Nerveless, sensitive natures, such as his, not infrequently give the lie to themselves by accesses of an altruism that is little less than self-effacement.

      ‘This is all bad,’ he struggled to articulate. ‘You are hipped by some devilish cantrip. Oh, come – come! – in Christ’s name I dare to implore you – and learn the truth of love!’

      As he spoke, he saw that the apparition was on its feet again – that it had returned, and was standing, its face ghastly and inhuman, with one hand leaned upon the marble table.

      ‘Adnah!’ it cried, in a strained and hollow voice. ‘The moment for which I prepared you approaches. Even now I labour. I had thought to take up the thread on the further side; but it is ordained otherwise, and we must part.’

      ‘Part!’ The word burst from her in a sigh of lost amazement.

      ‘The holocaust, Adnah!’ he groaned – ‘the holocaust with which every seventieth year my expiation must be punctuated! This time the cross is on thy breast, beloved; and tomorrow – oh! thou must be content to tread on lowlier altitudes than those I have striven to guide thee by.’

      ‘I cannot – I cannot, I should die in the mists. Oh, heart of my heart, forsake me not!’

      ‘Adnah – my selma, my beautiful – to propitiate—’

      ‘Whom? Thou hast eaten of the Tree, and art a God!’

      ‘Hush!’ He glanced round with an awed visage at the dim hanging Calvary; then went on in a harsher tone, ‘It is enough – it must be.’ (His shifting face, addressed to Rose, was convulsed into an expression of bitter scorn). ‘I command thee, go with him. The sacrifice – oh, my heart, the sacrifice! And I cry to Jehovah, and He makes no sign; and into thy sweet breast the knife must enter.’

      Amos sprang to his feet with a loud cry.

      ‘I take no gift from you. I will win or lose her by right of manhood!’

      The girl’s face was white with despair.

      ‘I do not understand,’ she cried in a piteous voice.

      ‘Nor I,’ said the young man, and he took a threatening step forward. ‘We have no part in this – this lady and I. Man or devil you may be; but—’

      ‘Neither!’

      The stranger, as he uttered the word, drew himself erect with a tortured smile. The action seemed to kilt the skin of his face into hideous plaits.

      ‘I am Cartaphilus,’ he said, ‘who denied the Nazarene shelter.’

      ‘The Wandering Jew!’

      The name of the old strange legend broke involuntarily from Rose’s lips.

      ‘Now you know him!’ he shrieked then. ‘Adnah, I am here! Come to me!’

      Tears were running down the girl’s cheeks. She lifted her hands with an impassioned gesture; then covered her face with them.

      But Cartaphilus, penetrating the veil with eyes no longer human, cried suddenly, so that the room vibrated with his voice, ‘Bismillah! Wilt thou dare the Son of Heaven, questioning if His sentence upon the Jew – to renew, with his every hundredth year, his manhood’s prime – was not rather a forestalling through His infinite penetration, of the consequences of that Jew’s finding and eating of the Tree of Life? Is it Cartaphilus first, or Christ?’

      The girl flung herself forward, crushing her bosom upon the marble floor, and lay blindly groping with her hands.

      ‘He was a God and vindictive!’ she moaned. ‘He was a man and He died. The cross – the cross!’

      The lost cry pierced Rose’s breast like a knife. Sorrow, rage, and love inflamed his passion to madness. With one bound he met and grappled with the stranger.

      He had