“DR. DE GRANDIN, THIS is Dr. Wiltsie,” Aglinberry introduced as we descended to the hall. “Dr. Trowbridge, Dr. Wiltsie. Wiltsie is superintendent of a sanatarium for the feeble-minded over there”—he waved his arm in a vague gesture—“and when he heard Dr. de Grandin was in the neighborhood, he came over for a consultation. It seems—oh, you tell him your troubles, Wiltsie.”
Dr. Wiltsie was a pleasant-looking young man with a slightly bald head and large-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles. He smiled agreeably as he hastened to comply with Aglinberry’s suggestion. “Fact is, doctor,” he began as de Grandin piled his plate high with “flap-the-jacks,” “we’ve got a dam’ peculiar case over at Thornwood. It’s a young girl who’s been in our charge for the past twelve years—ever since she was ten years old. The poor child suffered a terrible fright when she was about six, according to the history we have of her case—horses of the carriage in which she and her mother were riding ran away, threw ’em both out, killed the mother and—well, when they picked the youngster up she was just one of God’s little ones. No more reason than a two-months-old baby.
“Her family’s rich enough, but she has no near relatives, so she’s been in our care at Thornwood, as I said, for the past twelve years. She’s always been good as gold, scarcely any trouble at all, sitting on the bed or the floor and playing with her fingers or toes, like an infant, most of the time; but lately she’s been acting up like the devil. Fact. Tried to brain the nurse with a cup three nights ago, and made a break at one of the matrons yesterday morning. From a simple, sweet-tempered little idiot she’s turned into a regular hell-cat. Now, if she’d been suffering from ordinary dementia, I’d—”
“Very good, very good, my friend,” de Grandin replied as he handed his plate to Aglinberry for further replenishment. “I shall be delighted to look at your patient this morning. Parbleu, a madhouse will be a pleasant contrast to this never enough to be execrated place!”
“He likes my house,” Aglinberry commented to Dr. Wiltsie with a sardonic grin as we rose and prepared to go to the sanatarium.
THORNWOOD SANATARIUM WAS A beautiful, remodeled private country home, and differed in no wise from the near-by estates except that the park about the house was enclosed in a high stone wall topped with a chevaux-de-frise of barbed wire.
“How’s Mary Ann, Miss Underwood?” Wiltsie asked as we entered the spacious central hall and paused at the door of the executive office.
“Worse, doctor,” replied the competent-looking young woman in nurse’s uniform at the desk. “I’ve sent Mattingly up to her twice this morning, but the dosage has to be increased each time, and the medicine doesn’t seem to hold as well.”
“H’m,” Wiltsie muttered noncommittally, then turned to us with an anxious look. “Will you come to see the patient, gentlemen? You, too, Aglinberry, if you wish. I imagine this’ll be a new experience for you.”
Upstairs, we peered through the small aperture in the door barring the demented girl’s room. If we had not been warned of her condition, I might easily have taken the young woman asleep on the neat, white cot for a person in perfect health. There was neither the emaciation nor the obesity commonly seen in cases of dementia, no drawing of the face, not even a flaccidity of the mouth as the girl lay asleep.
Her abundant dark hair had been clipped short as a discouragement to the vermin which seem naturally to gravitate to the insane in spite of their keepers’ greatest care, and she was clothed in a simple muslin nightdress, cut modestly at the neck and without sleeves. One cheek, pale from confinement, but otherwise flawless, lay pillowed on her bent arm, and it seemed to me the poor girl smiled in her sleep with the wistfulness of a tired and not entirely happy child. Long, curling lashes fringed the ivory lids which veiled her eyes, and the curving brows above them were as delicately pencilled and sharply defined as though drawn on her white skin with a camel’s hair brush.
“La pauvre enfant!” de Grandin murmured compassionately, and at the sound of his voice the girl awoke.
Gone instantly was the reposeful beauty from her face. Her lips stretched into a square like the mouth of one of those old Greek tragic masks, her large, brown eyes glared fiercely, and from her gaping red mouth issued such a torrent of abuse as might have brought a blush to the face of the foulest fishwife in Billingsgate.
Wiltsie’s face showed a dull flush as he turned to us. “I’m dashed if I can understand it,” he admitted “She goes on this way for hours on end, now.”
“Eh, is it so?” de Grandin responded. “And what, may I ask, have you been doing for this condition? It appears more like delirium than like dementia, my friend.”
“Well, we’ve been administering small doses of brandy and strychnine, but they don’t seem to have the desired effect, and the doses have to be increased constantly.”
“Ah!”—de Grandin’s smile was slightly satirical—“and has it never occurred to you to employ hypnotics? Hyoscine by example?”
“By George, it didn’t!” Wiltsie confessed. “Of course, hyoscine would act as a cerebral sedative, but we’d never thought of using it.”
“Very well, I suggest you employ a hypodermic injection of hyoscine hypobromide,” de Grandin dismissed the case with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders, but Aglinberry, moved by that curiosity which is akin to fascination felt by the normal person regarding the insane, looked past him at the raving girl inside the cell.
An instant change came over her. From a cursing, blaspheming maniac, the girl became a quiet, sorrowful-looking child, and on her suddenly calmed face was such a look of longing as I have seen children undergoing strict diet give some particularly toothsome and forbidden dainty.
Young Aglinberry suppressed a shudder with difficulty. “Poor, child,” he muttered, “poor, poor little girl, to be so lovely and so hopeless!”
“Oui, Monsieur,” de Grandin agreed moodily as we went down the stairs, “you do well to pity her, for the intelligence—the very soul of her—has been dead these many years; only her body remains alive, and—pitié de Dieu—what a life it is! Ah, if only some means could be found to graft the healthy intelligence animating a sick body into that so healthy body of hers, what an economy!” He lapsed into moody silence, which remained unbroken during our drive back to Redgables.
THE SUN HAD GONE down in a blaze of red against the western sky, and the pale new moon was swimming easily through a tumbling surf of a bank of foaming cirrus clouds when the deep-throated, belling bay of a hound came echoing to us from the grounds outside the old house. “Grand Dieu!” de Grandin leaped nervously from his chair. “What is that? Do they hunt in this country while the mating season is but blossoming into flower among the wild things?”
“No, they don’t,” Aglinberry answered testily. “Someone has let his dogs out on my land. Come on let’s chase ’em off. I won’t have ’em poaching on the game here like that.”
We trailed out of the hall and walked quickly toward the sound of the baying, which rose fuller and fuller from the region of the lake. As we neared the dogs, the sound of human voices became audible. “That you, Mr. Aglinberry?” a man called, and the flash of an electric torch showed briefly among the new-leafed thickets by the waterfront.
“Yes,” our host answered shortly. “Who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?”
“We’re from Thornwood, sir,” the man answered, and we saw the gleam of his white hospital uniform under his dark topcoat. “The crazy girl, Mary Ann, got away about an hour ago, and we’re trailing her with the hounds. She went completely off her head after you left this morning, and fought so they couldn’t give her the hypo without strapping her. After the injection she quieted down, but when the matron went to her room with dinner she suddenly woke up, threw the woman against the wall so hard she almost cracked her ribs, and got clean away. She can’t have gotten far, though, running over this broken country in her bare feet.”
“Oh, hell!” Aglinberry stormed, striking a bush beside the path
a vicious slash with his stick. “It’s bad enough to have my place overrun with gipsies and gossiped about by all the country yaps in the county, but when lunatics get to making a hangout of it, it’s too much!
“Hope you find her,” he flung back over his shoulder as he turned toward the house. “And for the Lord’s sake, if you do get her, keep her at Thornwood. I don’t want her chasing all over this place!”
“Monsieur—” de Grandin began, but Aglinberry cut him short.
“Yes, I know what you’ll say,” he broke in, “you want to tell me a ghost-woman will protect me from the lunatics, just as she did from the gipsy, don’t you?”
“No, my friend,” de Grandin began with surprising mildness, “I do not think you need protection from the poor mad one, but—” He broke off with his sentence half spoken as he stared intently at an object hurrying toward us across a small clearing.
“Good God!” Aglinberry exclaimed. “It’s she! The crazy girl!”
Seemingly gone mad himself, he rushed toward the white-robed figure in the clearing, brandishing his heavy stick. “I’ll handle her,” he called back, “I don’t care how violent she is; I’ll handle her!”
In another moment he was half-way across the cleared space, his thick walking stick poised for a blow which would render the maniac unconscious.
Any medical student with the most elementary knowledge of insanity could have told him a lunatic is not to be cowed by violence. As though the oaken cudgel had been a wisp of straw, the maniac rushed toward him, then stopped a scant dozen feet away and held out her tapering arms.
“John,” she called softly, a puzzling, exotic thickness in her pronunciation. “John, sahib, it is I!”
Aglinberry’s face was like that of a man suddenly roused from sound slumber. Astonishment, incredulity, joy like that of a culprit reprieved as the hangman knots the noose about his neck, shone on his features. The threatening club fell with a soft thud to the turf, and he gathered the madwoman’s slender body to his breast, covering her upturned face with kisses.
“Amari, my Amari; Amari, my beloved!” he crooned in a soft, sobbing voice. “Oh, my love, my precious, precious love. I have found you; I have found you at last!”
The girl laughed lightly, and in her laughter there was no hint or taint of madness, “Not Amari, Mary Ann in this life, John,” she told him, “but yours, John sahib, whether we stand beside the Ganges or the Hudson, beloved through all the ages.”
“Ah, got her, sir?” The hospital attendants, a pair of bloodhounds tugging at the leash before them, broke through the thicket at the clearing’s farther side. “That’s right, sir; hold her tight till we slip the straitjacket on her.”
Aglinberry thrust the girl behind him and faced the men. “You can’t have her,” he announced uncompromisingly. “She’s mine.”
“Wha—what?” the attendant stammered, then turned toward the underbrush and called to some invisible companion. “Hey, Bill, come ’ere; there’s two of ’em!”
“You can’t have her,” Aglinberry repeated as two more attendants reinforced the first pair. “She’s going to stay with me—always.”
“Now, look here, sir,” the leader of the party argued, “that girl’s a dangerous lunatic; she nearly killed a matron this evenin’, an’ she’s been regularly committed to Thornwood Sanatarium. We’ve tracked her here, an’ we’re goin’ to take her back.”
“Over the dead corpse of Jules de Grandin,” the Frenchman interrupted as he pressed forward. “Parbleu, me, I am in authority here. I shall be responsible for her conduct.”
The man hesitated a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s your funeral if anything happens on account o’ this,” he warned. “Tomorrow Dr. Wiltsie will start legal proceedings to get her back. You can’t win.”
“Ha, can I not?” the little Frenchman’s teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “My friend, you do not know Jules de Grandin. There is no lunacy commission in the world to which I can not prove her sanity. I do pronounce her cured, and the opinion of Jules de Grandin of the Sorbonne is not to be lightly sneezed upon, I do assure you!”
To Aglinberry he said: “Pick her up, my friend; pick her up and bear her to the house, lest the stones bruise her tender feet. Dr. Trowbridge and I will follow and protect you. Parbleu”—he glared defiantly about him—“me, I say nothing shall separate you again. Lead on!”
“FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, DE Grandin,” I besought as we followed Aglinberry and the girl toward the house, “what does this all mean?”
“Morbleu,” he nodded solemnly at me, “it means we have won ten thousand dollars, Friend Trowbridge. No more will the ghost of that so pitiful Hindoo woman haunt this house. We have earned our fee.”
“Yes, but—” I pointed mutely toward our host as he strode through the moonlight with the girl in his arms.
“Ah—that?” he laughed a silent, contented laugh. “That, my friend, is a demonstration that the ancient fires of love die not, no matter how much we heap them with the ashes of hate and death.
“The soul of Amari, the sacrificed Hindoo girl, has come to rest in the body of the lunatic, Mary Ann, just as the soul of John Aglinberry the elder was reborn into the body of his namesake and double, John Aglinberry the younger. Did not the deceased Indian girl promise that she would some day come back to her forbidden lover in another shape? Parbleu, but she has fulfilled her vow! Always have the other members of Aglinberry’s family been unable to live in this house, because they were of the clan who had helped separate the elder lovers.
“Now, this young man, knowing nothing of his uncle’s intimate affairs, but bearing in his veins the blood of the older Aglinberry, and on his face the likeness of the uncle, too, must have borne within his breast the soul of the disappointed man who ate out his heart in sorrow and loneliness in this house which he had builded in the American woods. And the spirit of Amari, the Hindoo, who has kept safe the house from alien blood and from the members of her soulmate’s family who would have robbed him of his inheritance, did find near at hand the healthy body of a lunatic whose soul—or intelligence, if you please—had long since sped, and entered thereinto to dwell on earth again. Did you not see sanity and longing looking out of her eyes when she beheld him in the madhouse this morning, my friend? Sanity? But yes, it was recognition, I tell you!
“Her violence? ’Twas but the clean spirit of the woman fighting for mastery of a body long untenanted by an intelligence. Were you to attempt to play a long-disused musical instrument, Trowbridge, my friend, you could make but poor work of it first, but eventually you would be able to produce harmony. So it is in this case. The spirit sought to use a long-disused brain, and at first, the music she could make was nothing but noise. Now, however, she has seen the mastery of her instrument, and henceforth the body of Mary Ann will function as that of a healthy young woman. I, Jules de Grandin, will demonstrate her sanity to the world, and you, my friend, shall help me. Together we shall win, together we shall make certain that these lovers thwarted in one life, shall complete this cycle in happiness.
“Eh bien,” he twisted the end of his blond mustache and set his hand at a rakish angle on the side of head, “it is possible that somewhere in space there waits for me the spirit of a woman whom I have loved and left in another life. I wonder, when she comes, if I, like the lucky young Aglinberry yonder, shall ‘wake, and remember, and understand’?”
The Great God Pan
“BUT OF COURSE, MY friend,” Jules de Grandin conceded as he hitched his pack higher on his shoulders and leaned forward against the grade of the wooded hill, “I grant you American roads are better than those of France; but look to what inconvenience these same good roads put us. Everything in America is arranged for the convenience of the motorist—the man who covers great distances swiftly. Your roads are the direct result of motorized transportation for the millions, and, consequently, you and I must tramp half the night and very likely sleep under the stars, because there is no inn to offer sh
elter.
“Now in France, where roads were laid out for stage-coaches hundreds of years before your Monsieur Ford was dreamed of, there is an abundance of resting places for the pedestrian. Here—” He spread his hands in an eloquent gesture of deprecation.
“Oh, well,” I comforted, “we started out on a hiking trip, you know, and we’ve had mighty fine weather so far. A night in the open won’t do us any harm. That cleared place at the top of the hill looks like a good spot to make camp.”
“Eh, yes, I suppose so,” he acquiesced as he breasted the crown of the hill and paused for breath. “Parbleu,” he gazed about him, “I fear we trespass, Friend Trowbridge! This is no natural glade, it has been cleared for human habitation. Behold!” He waved his arm in a commanding gesture.
“By George, you’re right!” I agreed in disappointment as I surveyed the clearing.
“The trees—beech, birch and poplar—had been cut away for the space of an acre or more, and the stumps removed, the cleared land afterward being sown with grass as smooth and well cared for as a private estate’s lawn. Twenty yards ahead a path of flat, smooth stones was laid in the sod, running from a dense thicket of dwarf pine and rhododendron across the sward to a clump of tall, symmetrical cedars standing almost in the center of the clearing. Through the dark, bearded boughs of the evergreens we caught the fitful gleam of lights as the soft summer-evening breeze swayed the branches.”
“Too bad,” I murmured; “guess we’ll have to push on a little farther for our bivouac.”
“Mille cochons, non!” de Grandin denied. “Not I. Parbleu, but my feet faint from exhaustion, and my knees cry out for the caress of Mother Earth with a piety they have not known these many years! Come, let us go to the proprietor of that mansion and say, ‘Monsieur, here are two worthy gentleman tramps who crave the boon of a night’s lodging and a meal, also a bath and a cup of wine, if that so entirely detestable Monsieur Volstead has allowed you to retain any.’ He will not refuse us, my friend. Morbleu, a man with the charity of a Senegalese idol would not turn us away in the circumstances! I shall ask him with tears in my voice—pardieu, I shall weep like a lady in the cinema; I shall wring my hands and entreat him! Never fear, my friend, we shall lodge in yonder house this night, or Jules de Grandin goes supperless to a bed of pine-needles.”
The Horror on the Links Page 21
