A to Z Classics - Bram Stoker - The Complete Novels

Such a crucial moment was now for Esse. She had come to that great temple of the hillside to laugh — to laugh at the brain-sick, love-sick fancies of an old woman whose whole being seemed a mockery of the possibilities of love; and she had remained to pray, with a bitter pang of hope and fear. In the whirling of her thought she got glimpses into her own soul which made her cheeks burn, even while half in a fainting mood she felt the solid earth slipping beneath her feet. Her mind must have been earnestly occupied, for she did not hear Miss Gimp go on with her story. It was strange to her that after a pause of mental blankness, during which she sat still, she felt the roaring in her ears pass away and realised that Miss Gimp was speaking — speaking with the volubility of one who has entered on a congenial theme and is under its sway:

“Of course, my dear, Dick being a hunter thinks that he should make his — he! he! — offerings of a suitable kind. It is most embarrassing, for a girl can’t put a leg of a deer, or a bear ham, or a wild turkey, into a jewel case, or lock it up in a drawer, so that she can take it out when no one is looking and kiss it. In fact there is no sense in kissing a ham or a leg of raw meat at all, and if you lock it up in a drawer it doesn’t smell very nice, even if it does not go bad altogether. The matter is now getting serious. I assure you, my dear, that my room is beginning to get into a shocking state. I am positively afraid to open the lower section of my chest of drawers, for I put the first of the — the offerings in there; and there’s a very suspicious odour from it already. I wish you’d advise me, my dear, what I ought to do!”

There was such a delightful air of seriousness about Miss Gimp as she made her strange disclosure, and it seemed so absolutely out of harmony with the ridiculous matter, that Esse felt once more an almost overpowering desire to laugh. She felt that she could not overcome it if she remained where she was, so she started up briskly, and, taking Miss Gimp by the arm, called out:

“Come along quick! — We must look over the jewel casket, and see what can be done.”

Miss Gimp would rather have sat still and nursed her sentiment, but she was overborne by Esse’s spirits and energy; and so hand in hand, like a pair of children, they raced to the house.

When they went into Miss Gimp’s room there was no possibility of mistaking the odour. Even a properly arranged larder is not always the most pleasant of places, but a lady’s bedroom is in no way adapted for the storage of dead flesh. Esse for a moment felt qualmish, and would have decamped at once only that Miss Gimp had silently and mysteriously locked the door, and so she remained, supported solely by the humour of the situation. Miss Gimp walked on tip-toe over to the chest of drawers and opened the top drawer.

“Here is the last,” she said as she lovingly surveyed a fine wild turkey which was huddled into the drawer, wings and neck and tail twisted about ruthlessly. She put in her hand and began to stroke its feathers, whilst she sighed pensively.

The idea of a hunter’s bride was strongly fixed in her mind, and with it a tenderness towards all belonging to his craft. Esse now wanted to see the job over so she asked:

“And where is the first?”

Miss Gimp pulled out the lowest drawer of all and disclosed to Esse’s gaze a horrible looking leg of deer meat all blue, damp and sodden; and which had been rudely hacked from the carcase. The look and the smell almost turned Esse faint, and with a sudden jerk she shut up the drawer. What an awful thing to send you!’ was all she could say. Miss Gimp was pathetically apologetic in her manner as she said:

“Well, it is an odd way of showing affection. If it had been a nice gold specimen now, or one of those opals in the matrix, like the one that was presented to your mother in Mexico, or a slab of onyx, one would understand it better. But the dear man has his own ways I suppose! He is a fine figure of a man, isn’t he?”

This she said in a burst of something like rapture. Esse tried to cut this short — the new light still shone round her enough to make it seem unfair to let the other woman show her heart, more especially when her hopes were so baseless; so she turned the conversation to what was to be done with the offerings. Miss Gimp was beginning to be seriously alarmed about being found out, on one side as hoarding the provisions in such a ridiculous way, and on the other of being laughed at if she broached the subject at all; so she was glad to embrace Esse’s suggestion that they should during the darkness of the evening take out the gifts and bury them.

This fell deed was achieved before they went to bed that night, and Miss Gimp slept peacefully, with the consciousness of a weight taken off her mind.

The next morning Esse came across Dick, who was for once in a way in a tearing rage. She asked him the cause, and he told her:

“It’s that durned crowd — dirty, thievin’ scoundrels; an’ I believe that Heap Hungry is at the bottom of it. I’d make some of them own up, but that it don’t suit me to quarrel with them just now. I’ll lay for them some night an’ I’ll put a hole through some of them.”

“What have they been stealing?”

“Not much — nothin’ of any value, but it’s the beginnin’, and I mean to stop it right here. An Indian is real pizon when he gets off the square, and this may be only one in the lot; but it’s a beginnin’, and I won’t stand it!”

Esse began to have an understanding, so she asked again:

“What did they steal, Dick?”

“Oh, only some meat and such like. A week ago I had a buck hangin’ up, an’ in the night the durned thieves came and hacked a leg off it; last night it was a turkey. By gum, Little Missy, what air you laughin’ at now?” for Esse had gone off in peals of laughter after his own manner.

At first he was annoyed, but in a few seconds the anger of his face disappeared; then his features relaxed into a grin and the pent up whirlwind burst, and Esse’s laughter was drowned in the volume of his stentorian tones. When Esse recovered her breath she told him what she had found out, and as Dick’s laughter broke out afresh at every step of the doing, of Heap Hungry’s stealing the meat and placing it in Miss Gimp’s window as an offering to the parrot, of her taking it to herself and as a love gift from Dick, and of the mysterious burying. Then she suggested that to complete the circle Dick should come each night and dig up the offering and use it either for himself or for Mrs. Elstree’s household. The humour of the idea took hold of Dick, and his imagination was so manifestly touched that Esse got a little frightened lest he should in some way betray the secret. She was only made easy when he solemnly swore not to betray the secret in any way.

And so this night Dick went to his cabin shaking with laughter; and Esse put her head on her pillow filled with a secret but fearful exultation that Dick and she shared a secret between them.

Esse’s first quarrel with Dick arose from wounded vanity. Remotely the feeling may have been on his side, but the immediate cause was on her own part. When the secret had been shared for some time, she began to take Dick to task in a purely feminine way. She wanted his hands to be always clean, and his nails to be properly regulated. Dick was something of a dandy in his way, but in the mountains vanity prefers more picturesque forms than the manifestations of soap and water. He was not by any means a dirty man; but more than the mere absence of dirt is demanded by the exigence of feminine propinquity, and Esse, greatly daring, took him to task. He received her monitions well enough at the time, but later on developed a certain huffiness which told her that his self-love had been wounded. Anxious to set matters right, she took an early opportunity of saying to him: