The drums redoubled their wild rataplan, and the shouting grew more frenzied as La Murciélaga mounted a low block of stone and stood outlined in torchlight, great sable wings a-flutter, as though she were in very truth the dread Death Angel come to grace the sacrifice of poor lives with her presence.
“Look, sors, for th’ love o’ hivin!” bade Costello.
Across the torchlit square there walked, or rather danced, a man. In his hand he held a tether, and I felt a wave of sick revulsion as I recognized the thing he led. It was the Commandant of Tupulo. He was chained and muzzled like a dog, and he went upon all fours, like a brute beast. As his keeper led him to the altar-stone on which the Bat-Woman was poised, he sank back on his heels, threw back his head and held his hands, drooped at the wrists, before him in simulation of a begging dog. At a kick from his keeper he sank down at the altar’s base, drew up his knees and folded arms around them. His depth of degradation reached, he crouched in canine imitation at his mistress’ feet.
“Corbleu, I think that we three chose the better part, n’est-ce-pas, my friends?” de Grandin asked.
The hot breath rising in my throat choked off my answer. Four men were staggering from the shadows with a cross, a monstrous thing of mortised timbers, and despite myself I felt my knees grow weak as I saw the red stains which disfigured it. “Mine will be there soon,” a voice seemed dinning in my ears. “They’ll stretch my limbs and drive the great spikes through my hands and feet; they’ll hang me there—”
“La Traidora—la Traidora—the Traitress!” came a great shout from the crowd, as three masked women struggled forward with a fourth. All were garbed identically, but we knew before they stripped her mask and gown and sandals off that the captive was poor Nancy Meigs.
There was no pretense of a trial. “Á la muerte—á la muerte!” screamed the congregation, and the executioners leapt forward to their task.
Birth-nude, they stretched her on the blood-stained cross and I saw a hulking ruffian poise a great nail over her left palm while in his free hand he drew back a heavy hammer.
Costello started it. Hands joined, he dropped upon his knees and in a firm, strong voice began:
“Hail, Mary, full of grace, blessèd art Thou among women . . .”
De Grandin and I followed suit, and in chorus we repeated that petition of the motherless to Heaven’s Queen. “. . . Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of death.”
“Amen,” concluded Jules de Grandin. And, in the next breath: “Sang de Dieu, my friends, they come! Observe them!”
Their motor roars drowned by the screaming of the crowd, three planes zoomed down above the square, and a sudden squall of bullets spewed its deadly rain upon the close-packed ranks which lined the quadrangle.
I saw the executioner fall forward on his victim’s body, a spate of life-blood gushing from his mouth; saw the Commandant leap up, then clutch his breast and topple drunkenly against the altar-stone; saw La Murciélaga’s outspread wings in tatters as the steel-sheathed slugs ripped through them and cut a bloody kerf across her bosom; then de Grandin and Costello pulled me down, and we lay upon the stones while gusts of bullets spattered round us or ricocheted with high, thin, irritable whines.
The carnage was complete. Close-packed, illuminated by their own torch flares, and taken wholly by surprise, the bat-men fell before the planes’ machine-gun fire like grain before the reaper.
That the three of us escaped annihilation was at least a minor miracle, but when the squadron leader gave the signal for the fire to cease, and, sub-machine guns held alertly, the aviators clambered from their planes, we rose unharmed, though far from steady on our feet.
“Muchas gracias, Señor Capitán,” de Grandin greeted as he halted fifteen paces from the flight commander and executed a meticulous salute. “I assure you that you did not come one little minute in advance of urgent need.
“Come, let us see to Mademoiselle Nancy,” he urged Costello and me. “Perchance she still survives.”
She did. Shielded by the bodies of her executioners and the upright of the cross beside which she had rolled when the gunfire struck the bat-man down, she lay unconscious in a welter of warm blood, and it was not till we had sponged her off that we found her only hurts were those inflicted by the jungle vines the night before.
Carefully they placed the Commandant’s shot-riddled body in a plane for transportation back to Tupulo, and a military funeral.
“He died a hero’s death, no?” the flight commander asked.
“Was he not an officer and gentleman?” de Grandin answered disingenuously.
“BUT NO, MY FRIENDS,” he told us as we lay sprawled out in deck chairs on the steamship Golondrina as she plowed her way toward New York “it was no magic, I assure you. That commandant at Tupulo, I mistrusted his good sense. There was a weakness in his face, and lack of judgment, too. ‘This one loves himself too much, he is a strutting jackdaw, he has what Friend Costello would call the silly pan,’ I say to me while we were talking with him. Besides—
“We knew the countryside was terrified of La Murciélaga; the bare mention of her name drove men indoors and women into swoons. That anyone would have the courage to complain of her—to come to the police and ask that they send out an expeditionary force—pardieu, it had the smell of fish upon it!
“Furthermore, I am no fool. Not at all, by no means, and it is seldom that I do forget a face. When I saw this Señor Epilar, there was a reminiscence in his features. He reminded me too much of one whom I had seen the night poor Mademoiselle Rita met her tragic death. Also, there was a savage gleam within his eye when it rested on our Nancy—the sort of gleam a cat may show when he finds that he has run the little helpless mouse to earth.
“‘Jules de Grandin, my friend, are you going into the jungle with this so idiotic Commandant and this young man who looks uncomfortably like the Lady of the Bat?’ I ask me.
“‘Jules de Grandin, my esteemed self, I am going,’ I reply to me, ‘but I shall take precautions, too!’
“Accordingly, while Monsieur le Capitaine was fitting out his force and you were packing for the trip, I hied me to a telephone and put a call through to the military airport at Merida. ‘Monsieur le Commandant,’ I tell the officer in charge, ‘we are going in the jungle. We go to seek that almost legendary lady, La Murciélaga. I fear it is a foolish thing we do, for it is more than possible that we shall be ambushed. Therefore I would that you make use of us for bait. Have flyers fly above the jungle, and if we do not return by tomorrow noon, have them investigate anything suspicious which they may see. And, Monsieur le Commandant,’ I tell him in conclusion, ‘it might be well to order them to make investigation with machine-gun fire.’
“Eh bien, I think they carried out their orders very well, those ones.”
Nancy laid slim fingers on his arm. “We owe our lives to you—all of us—you little darling!” Impulsively, she leant forward and kissed him on the mouth.
Tiny wrinkles crinkled round de Grandin’s eyes and in their blue depths flashed an impish gleam.
“Behold, ma chère,” he told her solemnly, “I save our lives again.
“Mozo,” he hailed a passing deck steward, “bring us four gin slings, muy pronto!”
Satan’s Palimpsest
IT WAS A MERRY though oddly assorted party Philip Classon entertained at Saint’s Rest, his big house beside the Shrewsbury: a motion-picture star, a playwright quietly and industriously drinking himself to death, one or two bankers, a lawyer, several unattached ladies living comfortably on their dower or their alimony, Jules de Grandin and me. Dinner had been perfect, with turtle soup, filet of lemon sole in sauce bercy, Canada grouse and an assortment of wines which caused my little friend’s blue eyes to sparkle with appreciation. Now, as he sat with Karen Kirsten on the big divan before the roaring fire of apple logs and sipped his Jérôme Napoléon from a lotus-bud shaped brandy snifter, he was obviously at peace with all the world.
&nbs
p; “Mais certainement, ma belle,” I heard him tell the actress in an interval between the efforts of the duet at the piano to retail the nostalgic longings of the old cowhand from the Rio Grande, “it is indubitably a fact. Thoughts are things. We may not see or handle them, nor can we weigh them in a balance, but they have a certain substance of their own. They can penetrate, they can permeate the hardest matter, and like the rose-scent in Monsieur Moore’s poem, they will cling to it when it is all but worn away by time or smashed by violence.”
“Sure of that, are you, de Grandin?” our host asked quizzically as he leant across the sofa back and rested one hand on the little Frenchman’s black-clad shoulder, the other on the actress’ gleaming arm.
“As sure as one can be of anything—only fools are positive,” de Grandin answered with a smile.
“You’re certain?”
“Positive, parbleu!”
As the laughter died away Classon nodded toward the curtained doorway. “We’ve a chance to test Doctor de Grandin’s theory,” he announced. “There’s something in the gunroom I’d like to show you and see what effect it has.”
Amid murmurs of mystified conjecture he led the way across the wide hall lit by a pair of swinging boat-shaped lamps which gave that odd, pale light that comes only from burning olive oil, swept aside the heavy Turkish hangings at the door and motioned us to enter.
The “gunroom” was a relic of the days when New Jersey had no need of conservation laws for game, and the fowling-piece and rifle were as much a source of daily meat as were the meadow, the pig-sty and the poultry yard. An ancestor of Classon’s who built ships when Yankee mariners dropped anchor in every port from Bombay to Southampton had built Saint’s Rest as sturdily as he built his craft, and though slaves’ quarters and summer kitchens had long been turned to modern usages, like the gunrooms they still retained their ancient designations.
It was a lovely place. There was a walnut table of Italian make surely not a year younger than the Fifteenth Century, French rosewood chairs upholstered in brocade which must have been worth its measurement in gold, a lacquered Chinese cabinet dating from the days when the Son of Heaven bore the surname Han; across one wall was hung a lovely verdure tapestry from Sixteenth Century Flanders depicting decidedly naughty al fresco goings-on with the same lack of restraint as that displayed by that amazing little manikin in Brussels which every year decants champagne with utter unconventionality.
With a taper Classon lit two oil-dish lamps—the house was wired for electricity, but I’d seen nothing thus far but the light of lamps and candles—and directed our attention to a white-wood table like an altar which stood just within their zone of radiance. “This is it,” he told us, and it seemed to me there was a sharp intake of breath, almost like a sigh of pain, as he made the brusk announcement.
Something like the tabernacle of a Catholic altar showed aureately in the lamplight. Two feet in height by eighteen inches wide, pointed like a Gothic arch, plain and unadorned with ornament as a siege gun’s shell, its dull mat gold shone dimly in the mounting luminance cast by the gently swaying lamps.
“What is it? Is it a—” the querying babble started, but Classon raised his hand.
“This is just the frame,” he answered. “Look.”
He pressed a hidden spring and twin doors sprang apart, revealing three pictures integrated into one, all worked in deft mosaic. On the inside of the left-hand door there ranged a group of dancing youths and maidens clad in the chiton of the classic Greeks as modified for use in Constantine’s Byzantium. The other panel bore a group of creeping children, nude and chubby with the chubbiness so dearly loved by early artists, while in the center, deep-set between the back-flung doors, there stood a slender, pale ascetic figure with a clout of camel’s hair about his loins, rough sandals on his feet and a cross-topped staff in his right hand. The ancient artist had worked cunningly, so cunningly that the tiny lines between the variegated-colored marble were finer than the minute crevices in Chinese crackle-wear, and no detail of the groups or portrait had been lost. The saint’s blue eyes, wide, deep and extraordinarily sad, seemed to look into our own with a searching, deep intensity, as though to chide us for the worldliness that lay within our hearts and say: “Behold these dancing youths, these creeping, puling babes; the babes grow into youth and maidenhood and have their hour of silly pleasure, then comes old age and death and dissolution. Vanity, vanity; all is vanity!”
“Well?” Classon asked when we had gazed upon the ikon for a long moment in silence. “What d’ye see?”
“A sacred picture.”—“Beautiful!”—“Exquisite!”—“Sweet!”—“Divine!”—“Superb!”—“Swell!”
The fatuous comments fluttered thick as snowflakes, phrased according to the speaker’s wealth or paucity of diction.
“Yes, of course, but what d’ye see? What’s the picture of?”
“A saint?” I hazarded when no one else seemed willing to express conjecture.
“That’s what you all see?” asked Classon, and it seemed to me there was an eagerness about his question and an air of quick relief entirely unwarranted by the triviality of the entire business.
I was turning to examine the Chinese cabinet when de Grandin’s hand upon my elbow brought me round.
“Observe her, if you will, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded, motioning toward Karen Kirsten with his eyes.
She had not replied to Classon’s questions nor expressed opinion of the ikon’s artistry, I realized, but I was unprepared for what I saw. She was standing looking at the triple picture, head thrown back, hands hanging limply open at her sides. The lamplight played across her, accentuating her unusual beauty in a way no cameraman had ever managed. Tall she was, almost six feet, and every line of her was long, but definitely feminine. Her hair, like silver-silken filaments, was smoothed and plaited in long braids about her head; her dazzling fairness was set off by a slim gown of apple-green baghera draped in Grecian fashion; there were bracelets of carved gold upon her arms and a strand of pearls about her throat, and I caught my breath in sudden wonder, for lustrous pearls and lucent skin almost exactly matched each other. Her ice-blue Nordic eyes habitually held the commanding look which is the heritage of Northern races, but now there was another, different look in them. The pupils seemed to spread until they stained the blue irises black; I could see fear stealing into them, stark, abysmal fear which radiated from a sickened heart and was mirrored in her eyes.
“All right, folks,” Classon’s brusk announcement broke the spell; “that’s all there is. Let’s go back and have another drink.”
“But why did you insist we tell you what we saw, Phil?” asked Mrs. Durstin as we reassembled in the drawing-room. “It’s just an ordinary lovely piece of mosaic, isn’t it?”
Classon laughed shamefacedly. “Just a gag, Clara,” he assured her. “Didn’t you ever notice how the average person can be bullied out of sticking to the evidence of his own senses? Why, I’ve had people here who declared they saw all sorts of things—even swore they saw the figures move—when I kept asking ’em what they saw in those pictures. Seems as if this is a pretty level-headed crowd, though; I didn’t have a bit of luck with you.”
The evening passed with a surprising variety of liquid refreshment, some passable singing, much ultra-modernistic dancing and a number of stories, some of which were funny and risqué, some merely ribald. By midnight I had managed to convince myself that the vision of Miss Kirsten’s terror in the gunroom had been due to some illness which had stricken her—any doctor knows what changes indigestion-pangs can work in patients’ faces—and dismissed the recollection from my mind.
But as we paused to say good-night beside the stairs, Miss Kirsten laid her hand upon my arm.
“You and Doctor de Grandin drove down from Harrisonville, didn’t you, Doctor Trowbridge?” she asked, and again I saw that flicker of stark terror in her eyes.
“Yes,” I answered.
“How long are you staying?”<
br />
“Only to breakfast, unfortunately. I should have liked the opportunity of talking more with you, but—”
“Won’t you take me with you, please?” she broke in on my clumsy gallantry. “There isn’t any train till noon tomorrow, and I’ve been going utterly mad in this house all day. I must get away as quickly as I can. I must—I must!”
“Why, certainly,” I soothed. “Doctor de Grandin and I shall be pleased to have you with us on the homeward drive.”
“Oh”—her long, slim, delicately articulated fingers closed upon my arm with a grip of surprising strength—“thank you, Doctor!”
She made me the offer of a grateful, half-frightened smile, lit her candle from the lamp of hammered bronze which burned upon the table by the newel post, and turned to mount the stairs.
ARRAYED IN VIOLET-SILK PAJAMAS and mauve dressing-gown, de Grandin stood before the window of our bedroom, looking out upon the snow-flecked darkness of the winter night as if he sought to light it with something burning in his mind.
“What’s the matter, old fellow?” I asked, smothering a yawn as I made for the bathroom, tooth-brush in hand.
“I wonder,” he returned without taking his meditative gaze from the black square of the window, “I ponder, I cogitate; there is a black dog running through my brain.”
“Eh?” I shot back. “A black—”
“Précisément. An exceedingly troublesome and active small black poodle, my friend. Why?”
“I don’t think that I follow—”
“Ah bah, you are literal as a platter of boiled codfish! When I ask why, I mean why. Why, by example, does our friend Classon want to have the testimony of his guests that that ikon in his gunroom is but the pretty picture of some dancing children and some creeping babes who act as foils for an ascetic saint? Why is he relieved when they tell him what they see. Why—”
A Rival from the Grave Page 47
