The Marquise of O— and Other Stories by Heinrich Von Kleist

Author:Heinrich Von Kleist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2004-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Beggarwoman of Locarno

IN the foothills of the Alps, near Locarno in northern Italy, there used to stand an old castle belonging to an Italian marquis, which can now, when one comes from the direction of the St Gotthard Pass, be seen lying in ruins; a castle with high-ceilinged spacious rooms, in one of which the mistress of the house one day, having taken pity on an old sick woman who had turned up at the door begging, had allowed her to lie down on the floor on some straw they put there for her. The marquis, by chance, on his return from hunting, entered this room to place his gun there as usual, and angrily ordered the woman to get up from the corner in which she was lying and remove herself to behind the stove. As she rose, the woman’s crutch slipped on the polished floor and she fell, dangerously injuring the lower part of her back; as a result, although she did manage with indescribable difficulty to get to her feet and to cross the room from one side to the other in the direction indicated, she collapsed moaning and gasping behind the stove and expired.

Several years later, when the marquis found himself in straitened financial circumstances owing to war and a series of bad harvests, he was visited by a Florentine knight, who wished to buy the castle from him because of its fine position. The marquis, who was eager to effect this transaction, told his wife to accommodate their guest in the above-mentioned room, which was standing empty and was very beautifully and sumptuously furnished. But in the middle of the night, to the consternation of the husband and wife, the gentleman came downstairs to them pale and distraught, assuring them on his solemn word that the room was haunted: for something that had been invisible to the eye had risen to its feet in the corner with a noise as if it had been lying on straw, and had then with audible steps, slowly and feebly, crossed the room from one side to the other and collapsed, moaning and gasping, behind the stove.

The marquis, filled with an alarm for which he himself could not account, dismissed his guest’s fears with feigned laughter, and declared that to calm them he would at once get up and spend the remaining hours of darkness with him in his room, but the knight begged to be permitted to remain in the marquis’s bedroom in an armchair, and when morning came he called for his carriage, took his leave, and departed.

This incident caused an extraordinary stir and, to the marquis’s extreme vexation, deterred a number of purchasers; consequently, when his own servants began to repeat the strange and inexplicable rumour that a ghost was walking at midnight in that particular room, he resolved to take decisive steps to refute this report, by investigating the matter himself on the following night. Accordingly, when evening fell, he had his bed set up in the room in question and, without going to sleep, awaited midnight.

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