SEVEN EVENINGS LATER WE gathered in my study, de Grandin, Ned and I, and from the little Frenchman’s shining eyes I knew his quest had been productive of results.
“My friends,” he told us solemnly, “I am a clever person, and a lucky one, as well. The morning after my arrival at New Orleans I enjoyed three Ramos fizzes, then went to sit in City Park by the old Dueling-Oak and wished with all my heart that I had taken four. And while I sat in self-reproachful thought, sorrowing for the drink that I had missed, behold, one passed by whom I recognized. He was my old schoolfellow, Paul Dubois, now a priest in holy orders and attached to the Cathedral of Saint Louis.
“He took me to his quarters, that good, pious man, and gave me luncheon. It was Friday and a fast day, so we fasted. Mon Dieu, but we did fast! On créole gumbo and oysters à la Rockefeller, and baked pompano and little shrimp fried crisp in olive oil and chicory salad and seven different kinds of cheese and wine. When we were so filled with fasting that we could not eat another morsel my old friend took me to another priest, a native of New Orleans whose stock of local lore was second only to his marvelous capacity for fine champagne. Morbleu, how I admire that one! And now, attend me very carefully, my friends. What he disclosed to me makes many hidden mysteries all clear:
“In New Orleans there lived a wealthy family named d’Ayen. They possessed much gold and land, a thousand slaves or more, and one fair daughter by the name of Julie. When this country bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon and your army came to occupy the forts, this young girl fell in love with a young officer, a Lieutenant Philip Merriwell. Tenez, army love in those times was no different than it is today, it seems. This gay young lieutenant, he came, he wooed, he won, he rode away, and little Julie wept and sighed and finally died of heartbreak. In her lovesick illness she had for constant company a slave, an old mulatress known to most as Maman Dragonne, but to Julie simply as grand’tante, great-aunt. She had nursed our little Julie at the breast, and all her life she fostered and attended her. To her little white ‘mamselle’ she was all gentleness and kindness, but to others she was fierce and frightful, for she was a ‘conjon woman,’ adept at obeah, the black magic of the Congo, and among the blacks she ruled as queen by force of fear, while the whites were wont to treat her with respect and, it was more than merely whispered, retain her services upon occasion. She could sell protection to the duelist, and he who bore her charm would surely conquer on the field of honor; she brewed love-drafts which turned the hearts and heads of the most capricious coquettes or the most constant wives, as occasion warranted; by merely staring fixedly at someone she could cause him to take sick and die, and-here we commence to tread upon our own terrain—she was said to have the power of changing to a snake at will.
“Very good. You follow? When poor young Julie died of heartbreak it was old Maman Dragonne—the little white one’s grand’tante—who watched beside her bed. It is said she stood beside her mistress’ coffin and called a curse upon the fickle lover; swore he would come back and die beside the body of the sweetheart he deserted. She also made a prophecy. Julie should have many loves, but her body should not know corruption nor her spirit rest until she could find one to keep his promise and return to her with words of love upon his lips. Those who failed her should die horribly, but he who kept his pledge would bring her rest and peace. This augury she made while she stood beside her mistress’ coffin just before they sealed it in the tomb in old Saint Denis Cemetery. Then she disappeared.”
“You mean she ran away?” I asked.
“I mean she disappeared, vanished, evanesced, evaporated. She was never seen again, not even by the people who stood next to her when she pronounced her prophecy.”
“But—”
“No buts, my friend, if you will be so kind. Years later, when the British stormed New Orleans, Lieutenant Merriwell was there with General Andrew Jackson. He survived the battle like a man whose life is charmed, though all around him comrades fell and three horses were shot under him. Then, when the strife was done, he went to the grand banquet tendered to the victors. While gayety was at its height he abruptly left the table. Next morning he was found upon the grass before the tomb of Julie d’Ayen. He was dead. He died from snake-bite.
“The years marched on and stories spread about the town, stories of a strange and lovely belle dame sans merci, a modern Circe who lured young gallants to their doom. Time and again some gay young blade of New Orleans would boast a conquest. Passing late at night through Royal Street, he would have a flower dropped to him as he walked underneath a balcony. He would meet a lovely girl dressed in the early Empire style, and be surprised at the ease with which he pushed his suit; then—upon the trees in Chartres Street appeared his funeral notices. He was dead, invariably he was dead of snake-bite. Parbleu, it got to be a saying that he who died mysteriously must have met the Lady of the Moonlight as he walked through Royal Street!”
He paused and poured a thimbleful of brandy in his coffee. “You see?” he asked.
“No, I’m shot if I do!” I answered. “I can’t see the connection between—”
“Night and breaking dawn, perhaps?” he asked sarcastically. “If two and two make four, my friend, and even you will not deny they do, then these things I have told you give an explanation of our young friend’s trouble. This girl he met was most indubitably Julie, poor little Julie d’Ayen on whose tombstone it is carved: ‘Ici repose malheureusement—here lies unhappily.’ The so mysterious snake which menaces young Monsieur Minton is none other than the aged Maman Dragonne—grand’tante, as Julie called her.”
“But Ned’s already failed to keep his tryst,” I objected. “Why didn’t this snake-woman sting him in the hotel, or—”
“Do you recall what Julie said when first the snake appeared?” he interrupted. ‘Not this one, grand’tante.” And again, in the old cemetery when the serpent actually struck at him, she threw herself before him and received the blow. It could not permanently injure her; to earthly injuries the dead are proof, but the shock of it caused her to swoon, it seems. Monsieur,” he bowed to Ned, “you are more fortunate than any of those others. Several times you have been close to death, but each time you escaped. You have been given chance and chance again to keep your pledged word to the dead, a thing no other faithless lover of the little Julie ever had. It seems, monsieur, this dead girl truly loves you.”
“How horrible!” I muttered.
“You said it, Doctor Trowbridge!” Ned seconded. “It looks as if I’m in a spot, all right.”
“Mais non,” de Grandin contradicted. “Escape is obvious, my friend.”
“How, in heaven’s name?”
“Keep your promised word; go back to her.”
“Good Lord, I can’t do that! Go back to a corpse, take her in my arms—kiss her?”
“Certainement, why not?”
“Why—why, she’s dead!”
“Is she not beautiful?”
“She’s lovely. and alluring as a siren’s song. I think she’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen, but—” he rose and walked unsteadily across the room. If it weren’t for Nella,” he said slowly, “I might not find it hard to follow your advice. Julie’s sweet and beautiful, and artless and affectionate as a child; kind, too, the way she stood between me and that awful snake-thing, but—oh, it’s out of the question!”
“Then we must expand the question to accommodate it, my friend. For the safety of the living—for Mademoiselle Nella’s sake—and for the repose of the dead, you must keep the oath you swore to little Julie d’Ayen. You must go back to New Orleans and keep your rendezvous.”
THE DEAD OF OLD Saint Denis lay in dreamless sleep beneath the palely argent rays of the fast-waxing moon. The oven-like tombs were gay with hardly wilted flowers; for two days before was All Saints’ Day, and no grave in all New Orleans is so lowly, no dead so long interred, that pious hands do not bear blossoms of remembrance to them on that feast of memories.
De Grand
in had been busily engaged all afternoon, making mysterious trips to the old Negro quarter in company with a patriarchal scion of Indian and Negro ancestry who professed ability to guide him to the city’s foremost practitioner of voodoo; returning to the hotel only to dash out again to consult his friend at the Cathedral; coming back to stare with thoughtful eyes upon the changing panorama of Canal Street while Ned, nervous as a race-horse at the barrier, tramped up and down the room lighting cigarette from cigarette and drinking absinthe frappé alternating with sharp, bitter sazarac cocktails till I wondered that he did not fall in utter alcoholic collapse. By evening I had that eery feeling that the sane experience when alone with mad folk. I was ready to shriek at any unexpected noise or turn and run at sight of a strange shadow.
“My friend,” de Grandin ordered as we reached the grass-paved corridor of tombs where Ned had told us the d’Ayen vaults were, “I suggest that you drink this.” From an inner pocket he drew out a tiny flask of ruby glass and snapped its stopper loose. A strong and slightly acrid scent came to me, sweet and spicy, faintly reminiscent of the odor of the aromatic herbs one smells about a mummy’s wrappings.
“Thanks, I’ve had enough to drink already,” Ned said shortly.
“You are informing me, mon vieux?” the little Frenchman answered with a smile. “It is for that I brought this draft along. It will help you draw yourself together. You have need of all your faculties this time, believe me.”
Ned put the bottle to his lips, drained its contents, hiccuped lightly, then braced his shoulders. “That is a pick-up,” he complimented. “Too bad you didn’t let me have it sooner, sir. I think I can go through the ordeal now.”
“One is sure you can,” the Frenchman answered confidently. “Walk slowly toward the spot where you last saw Julie, if you please. We shall await you here, in easy call if we are needed.”
The aisle of tombs was empty as Ned left us. The turf had been fresh-mown for the day of visitation and was as smooth and short as a lawn tennis court. A field-mouse could not have run across the pathway without our seeing it. This much I noticed idly as Ned trudged away from us, walking more like a man on his way to the gallows than one who went to keep a lovers’ rendezvous . . . and suddenly he was not alone. There was another with him, a girl dressed in a clinging robe of sheer white muslin cut in the charming fashion of the First Empire, girdled high beneath the bosom with a sash of light-blue ribbon. A wreath of pale gardenias lay upon her bright, fair hair; her slender arms were pearl-white in the moonlight. As she stepped toward Ned I thought involuntarily of a line from Sir John Suckling:
Her feet . . . like little mice stole in and out.
“Édouard, chêri! O, coeur de mon coeur, c’est véritablement toi? Thou hast come willingly, unasked, petit amant?”
“I’m here,” Ned answered steadily, “but only—” He paused and drew a sudden gasping breath, as though a hand had been laid on his throat.
“Chèri,” the girl asked in a trembling voice, “you are cold to me; do not you love me, then—you are not here because your heart heard my heart calling? O heart of my heart’s heart, if you but knew how I have longed and waited! It has been triste, mon Édouard, lying in my narrow bed alone while winter rains and summer suns beat down, listening for your footfall. I could have gone out at my pleasure whenever moonlight made the nights all bright with silver; I could have sought for other lovers, but I would not. You held release for me within your hands, and if I might not have it from you I would forfeit it for ever. Do not you bring release for me, my Édouard? Say that it is so!”
An odd look came into the boy’s face. He might have seen her for the first time, and been dazzled by her beauty and the winsome sweetness of her voice.
“Julie!” he whispered softly. “Poor, patient, faithful little Julie!”
In a single stride he crossed the intervening turf and was on his knees before her, kissing her hands, the hem of her gown, her sandaled feet, and babbling half-coherent, broken words of love.
She put her hands upon his head as if in benediction, then turned them, holding them palm-forward to his lips, finally crooked her fingers underneath his chin and raised his face. “Nay, love, Sweet love, art thou a worshipper and I a saint that thou should kneel to me?” she asked him tenderly. “See, my lips are famishing for thine, and wilt thou waste thy kisses on my hands and feet and garment? Make haste, my heart, we have but little time, and I would know the kisses of redemption ere—”
They clung together in the moonlight, her white-robed, lissome form and his somberly clad body seemed to melt and merge in one while her hands reached up to clasp his cheeks and draw his face down to her yearning, scarlet mouth.
De Grandin was reciting something in a mumbling monotone; his words were scarcely audible, but I caught a phrase occasionally: “. . . rest eternal grant to her, O Lord . . . let light eternal shine upon her . . . from the gates of hell her soul deliver . . . Kyrie eleison. . .”
“Julie!” we heard Ned’s despairing cry, and:
“Ha, it comes, it has begun; it finishes!” de Grandin whispered gratingly.
The girl had sunk down to the grass as though she swooned; one arm had fallen limply from Ned’s shoulder, but the other still was clasped about his neck as we raced toward them. “Adieu, mon amoureux; adieu pour ce monde, adieu pour l’autre; adieu pour l’éternité!” we heard her sob. When we reached him, Ned knelt empty-armed before the tomb. Of Julie there was neither sign nor trace.
“So, assist him, if you will, my friend,” de Grandin bade, motioning me to take Ned’s elbow. “Help him to the gate. I follow quickly, but first I have a task to do.”
As I led Ned, staggering like a drunken man, toward the cemetery exit, I heard the clang of metal striking metal at the tomb behind us.
“WHAT DID YOU STOP behind to do?” I asked as we prepared for bed at the hotel.
He flashed his quick, infectious smile at me, and tweaked his mustache ends for all the world like a self-satisfied tom cat furbishing his whiskers after finishing a bowl of cream. “There was an alteration to that epitaph I had to make you recall it read, ‘Ici repose malheureusement—here lies unhappily Julie d’Ayen’? That is no longer true. I chiseled off the malheureusement. Thanks to Monsieur Édouard’s courage and my cleverness the old one’s prophecy was fulfilled tonight; and poor, small Julie has found rest at last. Tomorrow morning they celebrate the first of a series of masses I have arranged for her at the Cathedral.”
“What was that drink you gave Ned just before he left us?” I asked curiously. “It smelled like—”
“Le bon Dieu and the devil know—not I,” he answered with a grin. “It was a voodoo love-potion. I found the realization that she had been dead a century and more so greatly troubled our young friend that he swore he could not be affectionate to our poor Julie; so I went down to the Negro quarter in the afternoon and arranged to have a philtre brewed. Eh bien, that aged black one who concocted it assured me that she could inspire love for the image of a crocodile in the heart of anyone who looked upon it after taking but a drop of her decoction, and she charged me twenty dollars for it. But I think I had my money’s worth. Did it not work marvelously?”
“Then Julie’s really gone? Ned’s coming back released her from the spell—”
“Not wholly gone,” he corrected. “Her little body now is but a small handful of dust, her spirit is no longer earthbound, and the familiar demon who in life was old Maman Dragonne has left the earth with her, as well. No longer will she metamorphosize into a snake and kill the faithless ones who kiss her little mistress and then forswear their troth, but—non, my friend, Julie is not gone entirely, I think. In the years to come when Ned and Nella have long been joined in wedded bliss, there will be minutes when Julie’s face and Julie’s voice and the touch of Julie’s little hands will haunt his memory. There will always be one little corner of his heart which never will belong to Madame Nella Minton, for it will be for ever Julie’s. Yes, I think that it is
so.”
Slowly, deliberately, almost ritualistically, he poured a glass of wine and raised it. “To you, my little poor one,” he said softly as he looked across the sleeping city toward old Saint Denis Cemetery. “You quit earth with a kiss upon your lips; may you sleep serene in Paradise until another kiss shall waken you.”
Living Buddhess
THE HOT, EROTIC RHYTHM of the rumba beat upon our ears with the repercussive vibrance of a voodoo drum. White dinner coated men guided partners clad in sheerest of sheer crêpes or air-light muslin in the mazes of the Negroid dance across the umber tiles which floored the Graystone Towers Roof. Waiters hastened silent-footed with their trays of tall, iced drinks. The purple, star-gemmed sky seemed near enough to touch.
“Tired, old chap?” I asked de Grandin as he patted back a yawn and gazed disconsolately at his glass of Dubonnet. “Shall we be going?”
“Tiens, we might as well,” he answered with a slightly weary smile; “there is small pleasure in watching others—grand cochon vert, and what is that?”
“What’s what?” I asked, noting with surprise how his air of boredom dropped away and little wrinkles of intensive thought etched suddenly about the corners of his eyes.
“The illumination yonder,” he nodded toward the bunting-wrapped stanchions on the parapet between which swung the gently swaying festoons of electric lights, “surely that is not provided by the management. It looks like feu Saint-Elme.”
Following his glance I noticed that a globe of luminosity flickered from the tallest of the light-poles, wavering to and fro like a yellow candle-flame blown by the wind; but there was no wind; the night was absolutely stirless.
“H’m, it does look like St. Elmo’s fire, at that,” I acquiesced, “but how—”
“Ps-s-s-t!” he shut me off. “Observe him, if you please!”
Bobbing aimlessly, like a wasp that bounces on the ceiling of the room to which it has made inadvertent entrance, the pear-shaped globe of luminance had detached itself from the gilt ball at the top of the light standard, and was weaving an erratic pattern back and forth above the dancers. Almost at the center of the floor it paused uncertainly, as if it had been a balloon caught between two rival drafts, then suddenly dropped down, landing on the high-coiled copper-colored hair of a young woman.
A Rival from the Grave Page 54
