“Well?” I asked wonderingly as I viewed the ancient weapon.
“Well?” he repeated mockingly, then: “Had you as many blessings on your head as this old bit of carved metal has received, you would be a very holy man indeed, Friend Trowbridge. This sword, it was once strapped to the thigh of a saint—it matters not which one—who fought the battles of France when France needed all the champions, saintly or otherwise, she could summon. For centuries it has reposed in a very ancient church at Rouen, not, indeed, as a relic, but as a souvenir scarcely less venerated. When I told the curé I proposed borrowing it for a day or more I thought he would die of the apoplexy forthwith, but”—he gave his diminutive mustache a complacent tweak—“such was my power of persuasion that you see before you the very sword.”
“But what under heaven will you do with the thing, now you’ve got it?” I demanded.
“Much—perhaps,” he responded, picking up the weapon, which must have weighed at least twenty pounds, and balancing it in both hands as a wood-chopper holds his ax before attacking a log.
“Nom d’un bouc!” he glanced suddenly at his wristwatch and replaced the sword on his bed. “I do forget myself. Run, my friend, fly, fly like the swallow to Mademoiselle Adrienne’s room and caution her to remain within—at all hazards. Bid her close her windows, too, for we know not what may be abroad or what can climb a wall this night. See that stubborn, pig-foolish maid of hers has instructions to lock her mistress’ door on the inside and, should Mademoiselle rise in the night and desire to leave, on no account permit her to pass. You understand?”
“No, I’ll be banged if I do,” I replied. “What … ?”
“Non, non!” he almost shrieked. “Waste not time nor words, my friend. I desire that you should do as I say. Hurry, I implore; it is of the importance, I do assure you.”
I DID AS HE REQUESTED, having less difficulty than I had expected concerning the windows, since Adrienne was already sunk in a heavy sleep and Roxanne possessed the French peasant’s inborn hatred of fresh air.
“Good, very, very good,” de Grandin commended when I rejoined him. “Now we shall wait until the second quarter of the night—then, ah, perhaps I show you something to think about in the after years, Friend Trowbridge.”
He paced the floor like a caged animal for a quarter-hour, smoking one cigarette after another, then: “Let us go,” he ordered curtly, picking up the giant sword and shouldering it as a soldier does his rifle. “Aller au feu!”
We tramped down the corridor toward the stairway, when he turned quickly, almost transfixing me with the sword blade, which projected two feet and more beyond his shoulder. “One more inspection, Friend Trowbridge,” he urged. “Let us see how it goes with Mademoiselle Adrienne. Eh bien, do we not carry her colors into battle this night?”
“Never mind that monkey-business!” we heard a throaty feminine voice command as we approached Adrienne’s room. “I’ve stood about all I intend to from you; tomorrow you pack your clothes, if you’ve any to pack, and get out of this house.”
“Eh, what is this?” de Grandin demanded as we reached the chamber door and beheld Roxanne weeping bitterly, while Mrs. Bixby towered over her like a Cochin hen bullying a half-starved sparrow.
“I’ll tell you what it is!” replied the irate mistress of the house. “I came to say goodnight to my daughter a few minutes ago and this—this hussy!—refused to open the door for me. I soon settled her, I can tell you. I told her to open that door and get out. When I went into the room I found every window locked tight—in this weather, too.
“Now I catch her hanging around the door after I’d ordered her to her room. Insubordination; rank insubordination, it is. She leaves this house bright and early tomorrow morning, I can tell you!”
“Oh, Monsieur Trow-breege, Monsieur de Grandin,” sobbed the trembling girl, “I did but attempt to obey your orders, and—and she drove me from my duty. Oh, I am so soree!”
De Grandin’s small teeth shut with a snap like a miniature steel trap. “And you forced this girl to unbar the door?” he asked, almost incredulously, gazing sternly at Mrs. Bixby.
“I certainly did,” she bridled, “and I’d like to know what business is it of yours. If …”
He brushed by her, leaping into the bedroom with a bound which carried him nearly two yards beyond the doorsill.
We looked past him toward the bed. It was empty. Adrienne Bixby was gone.
“Why—why, where can she be?” Mrs. Bixby asked, her domineering manner temporarily stripped from her by surprise.
“I’ll tell you where she is!” de Grandin, white to the lips, shouted at her. “She is where you have sent her, you meddling old ignoramus, you, you—oh, mon Dieu, if you were a man how I should enjoy cutting your heart out!”
“Say, see here …” she began, her bewilderment sunk in anger, but he cut her short with a roar.
“Silence, you! To your room, foolish, criminally foolish one, and pray le bon Dieu on your bare knees that the pig-ignorance of her mother shall not have cost your daughter her life this night! Come, Trowbridge, my friend, come away; the breath of this woman is a contamination, and we must hurry if we are to undo her fool’s work. Pray God we are not too late!”
WE RUSHED DOWNSTAIRS, TRAVERSED the corridors leading to the older wing of the house, wound our way down and down beneath the level of the ancient moat till we stood before the entrance of the chapel.
“Ah,” de Grandin breathed softly, lowering his sword point a moment as he dashed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, “no sound, Friend Trowbridge. Whatever happens, whatever you may see, do not cry out; ’tis death to one we seek to save if you waken her!”
Raising his hand, he signed himself quickly with the cross, muttering an indistinct in nomine, while I gaped in amazement to see the cynical, scoffing little man of science shedding his agnosticism and reverting to a simple act of his childhood’s faith.
Lifting the sword in both hands, he gave the chapel door a push with his foot, whispering to me, “Hold high the lanterns, Friend Trowbridge; we need light for our work.”
The rays from my lamp streamed across the dark, vaulted chapel and I nearly let the lantern crash to the floor at what I beheld.
Standing before the ancient, tumbledown altar, her nude, white body gleaming in the semi-darkness like a lovely, slender statue of sun-stained marble, was Adrienne Bixby. Her long rippling hair, which had always reminded me of molten gold in the assayer’s crucible, streamed over her shoulders to her waist; one arm was raised in a gesture of absolute abandon while her other hand caressed some object which swayed and undulated before her. Parted in a smile such as Circe, the enchantress, might have worn when she lured men to their ruin, her red lips were drawn back from her gleaming teeth, while she crooned a slow, sensuous melody the like of which I had never heard, nor wish to hear again.
My astounded eyes took this in at first glance, but it was my second look which sent the blood coursing through my arteries like river-water in zero weather. About her slender, virginal torso, ascending in a spiral from hips to shoulders, was the spotted body of a gigantic snake.
The monster’s horrid, wedge-shaped head swung and swayed a scant half-inch before her face, and its darting, lambent tongue licked lightly at her parted lips.
But it was no ordinary serpent which held her, a laughing prisoner, in its coils. Its body shone with alternate spots of green and gold, almost as if the colors were laid on in luminous paint; its flickering tongue was red and glowing as a flame of fire, and in its head were eyes as large and blue as those of human kind, but set and terrible in their expression as only the eyes of a snake can be.
Scarcely audible, so low his whisper was, de Grandin hissed a challenge as he hurled himself into the chapel with one of his lithe, catlike leaps: “Snake thou art, Raimond de Broussac, and snake thou shalt become! Garde à vous!”
With a slow, sliding motion, the great serpent turned its head, gradually released
its folds from the leering girl’s body and slipped to the floor, coiled its length quickly, like a giant spring, and launched itself like a flash of green-and-gold lightning at de Grandin!
But quick as the monster’s attack was, de Grandin was quicker. Like the shadow of a flying hawk, the little Frenchman slipped aside, and the reptile’s darting head crashed against the granite wall with an impact like a wave slapping a ship’s bow.
“One!” counted de Grandin in a mocking whisper, and swung his heavy sword, snipping a two-foot length from the serpent’s tail as neatly as a seamstress snips a thread with her scissors. “En garde, fils du diable!”
Writhing, twisting, turning like a spring from which the tension has been loosed, the serpent gathered itself for another onslaught, its malign, human-seeming eyes glaring implacable hatred at de Grandin.
Not this time did the giant reptile launch a battering-ram blow at its adversary. Instead, it reared itself six feet and more in the air and drove its wicked, scale armored head downward with a succession of quick, shifting jabs, seeking to take de Grandin off his guard and enfold him in its crushing coils.
But like a veritable chevaux-de-frise of points, de Grandin’s sword was right, left, and in between. Each time the monster’s head drove at the little man, the blade engraved with ancient battle-cry stood in its path, menacing the hateful blue eyes and flashing, backward-curving fangs with its sharp, tapering end.
“Ha, ha!” de Grandin mocked; “to fight a man is a greater task than to bewitch a woman, n’cest-ce-pas, M’sieur le Serpent?
“Ha! You have it!” Like a wheel of living flame, the sword circled through the air; there was a sharp, slapping impact, and the steel sheared clean and clear through the reptile’s body, six inches below the head.
“Sa, ha; sa, ha!” de Grandin’s face was set in a look of incomparable fury; his small mouth was squared beneath his bristling mustache like that of a snarling wildcat, and the sword rose and fell in a quick succession of strokes, separating the writhing body of the serpent into a dozen, twenty, half a hundred sections.
“S-s-h, no noise!” he cautioned as I opened my lips to speak. “First clothe the poor child’s nakedness; her gown lies yonder on the floor.”
I looked behind me and saw Adrienne’s silk nightrobe lying in a crumpled ring against the altar’s lowest step. Turning toward the girl, revulsion and curiosity fighting for mastery of my emotions, I saw she still retained the same fixed, carnal smile; her right hand still moved mechanically in the air as though caressing the head of the loathsome thing yet quivering in delayed death at her white feet.
“Why, de Grandin,” I exclaimed in wonder, “why, she’s asleep!”
“S-s-h, no sound!” he cautioned again, laying his finger on his lips. “Slip the robe over her head, my friend, and pick her up gently. She will not know.”
I draped the silken garment about the unconscious girl, noticing as I did so, that a long, spiral bruise was already taking form on her tender flesh.
“Careful! Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin commanded, picking up the lantern and sword and leading the way from the chapel. “Carry her tenderly, the poor, sinned-against one. Do not waken her, I beseech you. Pardieu, if that scolding mother of hers does but open her shrewish lips within this poor lamb’s hearing this night, I shall serve her as I did the serpent. Mordieu, may Satan burn me if I do not so!”
11
“TROWBRIDGE, TROWBRIDGE, MY FRIEND, come and see!” de Grandin’s voice sounded in my ear.
I sat up, sleepily staring about me. Daylight had just begun; the gray of early morning still mingled with the first faint rose of the new day, and outside my window the blackbirds were singing.
“Eh, what’s up?” I demanded, swinging my feet to the floor.
“Plenty, a very plenty, I do assure you,” he answered, tugging delightedly first at one end of his mustache, then the other. “Arise, my friend, arise and pack your bags; we must go immediately, at once, right away.”
He fairly pranced about the room while I shaved, washed, and made ready for the journey, meeting my bewildered demands for information only with renewed entreaties for haste. At last, as I accompanied him down the great stairway my kit bags banging against my knees:
“Behold!” he cried, pointing dramatically to the hall below. “Is it not superb?”
On a couch before the great empty fireplace of the château hall sat Adrienne Bixby, dressed and ready for a trip, her slender white hands securely held in a pair of bronzed ones, her fluffy golden head pillowed on a broad, homespun-clad shoulder.
“Monsieur Trowbridge,” de Grandin almost purred in his elation, “permit that I present to you Monsieur Ray Keefer, of Oklahoma, who is to make happy our so dear Mademoiselle Adrienne at once, right away, immediately. Come, mes enfants, we must go away,” he beamed on the pair of lovers. “The American consul at Rouen, he will unite you in the bonds of matrimony, then—away for that joyous wedding trip, and may your happiness never be less than it is this day. I have left a note of explanation for Monsieur your father, Mademoiselle; let us hope he gives you his blessing. However, be that as it may, you have already the blessing of happiness.”
A large motor was waiting outside, Roxanne seated beside the chauffeur, mounting guard over Adrienne’s baggage.
“I did meet Monsieur Keefer as he entered the park this morning,” de Grandin confided to me as the car gathered speed, “and I did compel him to wait while I rushed within and roused his sweetheart and Roxanne from their sleep. Ha, ha, what was it Madame the Scolding One did say to Roxanne last night, that she should pack her clothes and leave the house bright and early this morning? Eh bien, she has gone, n’est-ce-pas?”
Shepherded by de Grandin and me, the lovers entered the consulate, emerging a few minutes later with a certificate bearing the great seal of the United States of America and the information that they were man and wife.
De Grandin hunted feverishly in the gutters, finally discovered a tattered old boot, and shied it after them as, with the giggling Roxanne, they set out for Switzerland, Oklahoma and happiness.
“Name of a little green man!” he swore, furtively flicking a drop of moisture from his eyes. “I am so happy to see her safe in the care of the good young man who loves her that I could almost bring myself to kiss that so atrocious Madame Bixby!”
12
“NOW, DE GRANDIN,” I threatened, as we seated ourselves in a compartment of the Paris express, “tell me all about it, or I’ll choke the truth out of you!”
“La, la,” he exclaimed in mock terror, “he is a ferocious one, this Americain! Very well, then, cher ami, from the beginning:
“You will recall how I told you houses gather evil reputations, even as people do? They do more than that, my friend; they acquire character.
“Broussac is an old place; in it generations of men have been born and have lived, and met their deaths; and the record of their personalities—all they have dreamed and thought and loved and hated—is written fair upon the walls of the house for him who cares to read. These thoughts I had when first I went to Broussac to trace down the reason for these deaths which drove tenant after tenant from the château.
“But fortunately for me there was a more tangible record than the atmosphere of the house to read. There was the great library of the de Broussac family, with the records of those who were good, those who were not so good, and those who were not good at all written down. Among those records did I find this story:
“In the years before your America was discovered, there dwelt at Broussac one Sieur Raimond, a man beside whom the wickedest of the Roman emperors was a mild-mannered gentleman. What he desired he took, this one, and as most of his desires leaned toward his neighbors’ women folk, he was busy at robbery, murder and rapine most of the time.
“Eh bien, he was a mighty man, this Sieur Raimond, but the Bishop of Rouen and the Pope at Rome were mightier. At last, the wicked gentleman came face-to-face with the reckoning of his
sins, for where the civil authorities were fearful to act, the church stepped in and brought him to trial.
“Listen to this which I found among the chronicles at the château, my friend. Listen and marvel!” He drew a sheaf of papers from his portmanteau and began reading slowly, translating as he went along:
Now when the day for the wicked Sieur Raimond’s execution was come, a great procession issued from the church where the company of faithful people were gone to give thanks that Earth was to be ridded of a monster.
Francois and Henri, the de Broussac’s wicked accomplices in crime, had become reconciled to Mother Church, and so were accorded the mercy of strangling before burning, but the Sieur Raimond would have none of repentance, but walked to his place of execution with the smile of a devil on his false, well-favored face.
And as he marched between the men at arms toward the stake set up for his burning, behold, the Lady Abbess of the convent of Our Lady of Mercy, together with the gentlewomen who were her nuns, came forth to weep and pray for the souls of the condemned, even the soul of the unrepentant sinner, Raimond de Broussac.
And when the Sieur Raimond was come over against the place where the abbess stood with all her company, he halted between his guards and taunted her, saying, “What now, old hen, dost seek the chicks of thy brood who are missing?” (For it was a fact that three novices of the convent of Our Lady had been ravished away from their vows by this vile man and great was the scandal thereof everywhere.)
Then did the Lady Abbess pronounce these words to that wicked man, “Snake thou art, Raimond de Broussac, snake thou shalt become and snake thou must remain until some good man and true shall cleave thy foul body into as many pieces as the year hath weeks.”
And I, who beheld and heard all, do declare upon the rood that when the flames were kindled about that wicked man and his sinful body had been burned to ashes, a small snake of the colors of green and gold was seen by all to emerge from the fire and, maugre the efforts of the men at arms to slay it, did escape to the forest of the château of Broussac.
The Horror on the Links Page 7
