“Yes, parbleu,” he agreed, fairly dancing before us to toss back the covers of the camp bed and ease the girl upon it, “mad we are, of a surety, but who would own sanity if madness brings visions such as this?”
In another moment the blankets had been drawn about the girl’s shoulders, and with Bennett seated at her left, de Grandin at her right, and me standing at the bedstead’s foot, she held her little levee like some spoiled beauty of the Louis’ court at her salon.
“How comes it you speak English, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin demanded, putting in blunt words the question which burned in all our brains.
The girl turned her agate eyes on him with a puzzled little frown. “English?” she repeated. “What is English?”
“Nom d’un nom! What is”—de Grandin gasped, looking as if he were in momentary danger of exploding—“‘What is it?’ You do ask. It is the language we use. The barbarous tongue of the Saxon savages!”
“Why”—still her smooth brow wrinkled with non-comprehension—“is not the tongue we use that of the Empire? Are we not in Alexandria?”
“In Alexandria!” Again the little Frenchman seemed on the point of bursting; then, with a mighty effort, he restrained himself and demanded, “Parlez vous Français?”
She shook her head in silent negation.
“But—but,” he began; then he stopped short with a look of bewilderment, almost of dismay.
“I understand,” she broke in while he waited her explanation. “A moment ago I ceased to hold my lord’s hand, and the words you used seemed suddenly meaningless, though before I understood perfectly. See, while his hand is clasped in mine I talk as you do and understand your speech, but the moment I release his fingers my mind becomes a blank, and all about me seems strange. I know the answer to your question. He”—she cast another melting glance on the boy sitting beside her—“he is my love through all the ages, the man who waked me into life from death. While he touches me or I touch him I speak with his tongue and hear with his ears; the moment our contact is broken I am an alien and a stranger in a strange land and time.”
“Cordieu, yes, it is possible,” de Grandin agreed with a short nod. “I have known such cases where patients suffered with amentia, but—
“Scat!” The interruption came with dramatic suddenness as he chanced to glance toward the open door. Upon the threshold, one forefoot raised tentatively, its big, green eyes fixed on the reclining girl with a baleful gleam, stood a huge black cat.
“Out, beast of evil omen!” the little Frenchman cried, striding toward the brute with upraised hand.
“Ss-s-sh!” Venomous as the hiss of a poisonous reptile, the thing’s furious spit greeted his advance, and every sable hair along its spine reared upward belligerently.
“Out, I say!” de Grandin repeated, aiming a devastating kick at the brute.
It did not dodge. Rather, it seemed to writhe from under his foot, evading the blow with perfect ease. With a lithe, bounding spring it launched itself into the air, landed fairly on the covers protecting the girl’s bosom and bent forward savagely, worrying at her throat.
Bennett leaped to his feet, flailing at the thing with ineffectual blows, fearing to strike directly downward lest he hit the girl, and missing the writhing brute each time he swung his impotent fists at it.
Then, suddenly as it had appeared, the creature vanished. Snarling once, defiantly, it turned and leaped to the window-sill. As it paused for a final baleful glare at us, we, saw a tiny red fleck against its lips. Was it blood? I wondered. Had the beast fleshed its fangs in the girl’s throat? De Grandin had seized a piece of crockery from the dresser and raised his hand to hurl it at the beast, but the missile was never thrown. Abruptly, like a light snuffed out in a gust of wind, the thing was gone. None of us saw it leap from the sill; there was no sound of its feet against the heaped-up dry leaves outside. It was gone, nor could we say how or where.
On the bed, Peligia wept despairingly, drawing her breath with deep, laboring sobs and expelling it with low, quavering moans. “My lord,” she cried, seizing Bennett’s hand in hers that she might express herself, “I understand it all. That was no cat, but the ka of Kaku, the priest of Sebek. Long years ago he put me in a magic sleep with his unclean sorceries, but before he did so he told me that if ever I awakened and loved another man his double would pursue me from the dungeons of Amenti and ravish me from out my lover’s arms. And in token of his threat, he hung this about my neck”—she pointed hysterically to the chaplet of golden disks and ruddy beads—“and warned me that my life in the days to be would last only so long as the seven pendants of this jewel. One at a time, he vowed, his ka would take the stones from me, and as each one fell, so would my stay in the land of my new-found lover be shortened. Behold, my darling, already he has wrested one of the stones from me!”
Baring her breast of the shrouding blankets, she indicated the necklace.
One of the tiny carnelian pendants was gone. The jewel of seven stones retained but six.
4. The Accident
TWO MONTHS HAD PASSED. Peligia’s naive assumption that the man whose voice and touch wakened her from her sesqui-millennial trance was her foreordained mate found ready echo in Ellsworth Bennett’s heart. Three days after her release from the Alexandrian coffin he and she were wed at the sole Greek Catholic church our little city boasted, Bennett’s innate thoughtfulness dictating the choice, since the service and language of the liturgy employed by the modern papa were essentially the same as those to which his bride was accustomed in the days of the Patriarch Cyril.
De Grandin and I attended them at the ceremony and helped them procure their license, and the little Frenchman was near to bursting with laughter when the solemn-visaged clerk of court demanded of Bennett whether his bride was of full age. “Par la barbe de Saint Gris,” he chuckled delightedly in my ear, “Friend Trowbridge, I am half minded to tell him her true age!” and he stepped forward as though to carry out his threat.
“Come back, you little fool,” I admonished, seizing his elbow and dragging him away; “he’ll have us all committed to an asylum!” At which he laughed all the harder, to the very evident scandal of the serious-minded attachés of the clerk’s office.
The earthenware coffin in which the dead girl had lain, together with her splendidly barbaric ornaments, had been taken to the Museum as trophies of Bennett’s researches, and, backed by de Grandin’s statement, his story of the find was duly accredited. Of the manner of Peligia’s coming nothing had been said, and since Ellsworth was an orphan without near relatives, there was little curiosity shown in his charming wife’s antecedents. Their brief honeymoon had been a dream of happiness, and their life together in the cheerful little suburban villa bade fair to continue their joy uninterruptedly. Since the first sinister manifestation on the afternoon of her awakening, Peligia and her husband had received no further visitations, and I, for one, had become convinced that the black cat was really a feline rogue which happened into the cottage by uncanny coincidence, rather than a visitant from beyond the grave.
De Grandin and I faced each other across my study table. In the dining-room the candlelight gleamed on china and silver and cut glass, and from the kitchen emanated odors of gumbo soup, roast chicken and fresh-baked apple pies. Also imprecations as Nora McGinnis strode to and fro across her domain, breathing uncomplimentary remarks about “folks who kape a body’s dinner waitin’ an’ sp’ilin’ on th’ sthove half an hour afther ut’s due ter be served.”
The Frenchman consulted the silver dial of the tiny watch strapped to the under side of his wrist for the tenth time in as many minutes. “They are late, Trowbridge, my friend,” he announced unnecessarily. “I do not like it. It is not well.”
“Nonsense!” I scoffed. “Ellsworth’s probably had a blowout or something of the sort, and is holding us up while he puts on a new tire.”
“Perhaps possibly,” de Grandin admitted, “but I have the malaise, notwithstanding. Go to the telephone
, I beseech, and assure yourself they are on the way.”
“Stuff!” I retorted, but reached for the receiver as I spoke, for it was plain my friend’s apprehension was mounting like a thermometer’s mercury on an August afternoon.
“Give me—” I began, preparing to name Bennett’s number, but the voice of central cut me off.
“Here’s your party,” she announced, speaking to someone on the other end of the line.
“Is this Dr. Trowbridge?” the cool, impersonal voice of one used to discussing tragedies over the telephone demanded.
“Yes,” I admitted, “but I was just attempting to get another party on the wire—”
“I think this is important,” the other interrupted. “Do you know a Mr. Ellsworth Bennett?”
“Yes! What about him?”
“This is the Casualty Hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and their taxi-driver were brought here twenty minutes ago. He regained consciousness for only a moment, and begged us to call you, then fainted again, and—”
“I’ll be right over!” I shouted, clashing the receiver back into its hook and springing from my chair.
“Trowbridge, mon vieux—it is the bad news?” de Grandin asked, leaping to his feet and regarding me with a wide-eyed stare.
“They’ve just had an accident—motor collision—at the Casualty Hospital now—unconscious,” I jerked out as I ran through the dining-room, notified Nora of the cause of delay, and rushed into the hall for my hat and topcoat.
De Grandin was ahead of me, already seated in the car when I ran down the front steps. “Stand on it; hasten; fly!” he urged as I shot the self-starter and turned toward the hospital at furious speed. “Sang du diable, I knew it; in each bone of my body I felt it coming! Oh, hurry, hurry, my friend, or we may be too late!”
“Too late? For what?” I asked crossly. “The nurse didn’t say they were seriously hurt.”
“Haste, more haste!” was his only reply as he leaned forward like a jockey bending across the neck of his mount to urge it to greater speed.
Rounding corners on two wheels, even cutting across sidewalks in our effort to clip a few feet from our course, our siren shrilling continuously, we dashed through the winter night, finally drew up beneath the hospital’s porte-cochère, our motor panting like a winded polo pony after a furious chukker.
“Where are they—plumes d’un canard!—where are Monsieur and Madame Bennett, if you please?” cried de Grandin, fairly bouncing through the hospital door.
“Mrs. Bennett’s in the operating-room, now,” the night supervisor replied, not at all impressed with his urgency. “She was rather badly—”
“And that operating-room, it is where?” he demanded impatiently. “Be quick, if you please. It is of the importance, and I am Dr. de Grandin. ”
“The operating-room’s on the fourth floor, but no one is permitted there while the surgeons are—”
“Ah bah!” he interrupted, for once forgetting his customary courtesy, and starting down the corridor at a run. “Come with me, Friend Trowbridge!” He flung back over his shoulder, pressing his finger to the elevator bell button and continuing the pressure uninterruptedly. “We may not be too late, though I greatly fear—”
“Say, whatsa big idea!” demanded the elevator conductor, slamming-open his door and glowering at the little Frenchman.
“The idea, my friend, is that I shall give you one five-dollar bill in case you take us to the fourth floor immediately,” returned de Grandin, extracting a crisp green Treasury note from his wallet.
The car shot upward like a captive balloon suddenly released from its cable and came to a stop at the top floor with a suddenness which set the circuit breakers in the basement to clattering like a battery of field guns. “First door to your right at the end o’ the corridor,” directed the conductor with a wave of his left hand while with his right he stowed de Grandin’s gratuity in his trousers pocket.
WE RAN AT BREAKNECK speed down the wide, solemn hall, paused not a moment at the ominous green-painted door with its gold-lettered sign of “Silence” and “No Admission,” but rushed into the brilliantly lighted room where two nurses and a young and plainly worried surgeon stood above the sheeted form of Peligia Bennett.
“Ah—hèlas—it is as I thought!” de Grandin almost shrieked as he bounded forward. Even as we entered the room one of the nurses leaned over and grasped some shining object from the unconscious patient’s throat, detaching it with a quick jerk. It was the necklace from which a pendant had been lost the day we raised Peligia from the coffin.
“Quick, replace it—put it back! Barbe de Saint Pierre—PUT IT BACK!” the Frenchman cried, leaping across the white-tiled floor and snatching at the jewel dangling from the nurse’s fingers.
The girl turned on him with an exclamation of surprise, clutched frantically at the golden strand he reached for, and let it fall to the terrazzo floor.
There was a miniature explosion, like that of an electric light bulb bursting, only softer, and two of the carnelian pendants winked out like suddenly extinguished lights. Contact with the floor’s hard tiles had cracked them, and each seemed in need of only so slight a concussion to dissolve into a little pile of garnet dust which quickly turned to vapor and disappeared, leaving no trace.
Fairly shoving the nurse from his path, de Grandin seized the mutilated necklace and laid it against the unconscious girl’s throat.
“Sir, this is an outrage! What do you mean by forcing yourself in here?” demanded the astonished young surgeon. “This patient is in a desperate condition, and—”
“Desperate? You tell me that?” de Grandin rasped. “Parbleu, you know not how desperate her plight is, Monsieur!” As he spoke he flung aside his dinner coat and rolled back his cuffs.
“I am Dr. Jules de Grandin, of Paris,” he continued, reaching methodically for an operating-smock. “I hold degrees from Vienna and the Sorbonne, as my friend, Dr. Trowbridge, whom you doubtless know, can certify. With your permission—or without it—I shall assume charge here.” He turned imperiously to the nurses, motioning them to bring a pair of sterile rubber gloves.
“I’m afraid you’re too late,” the other responded coldly. “If you’ll trouble to look, you’ll see—”
“Grand ciel, I do!” the Frenchman gasped, staring with horrified eyes at the pallid form on the table.
Peligia Bennett’s face had gone a sickly, deathlike gray, her eyeballs seemed fallen in their sockets and her nostrils had the chilled, pinched look of one in extremity. From between her parted lips sounded the harsh irregularity of Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
“Mordieu, she is passing!” he exclaimed; then: “Ah? So?” Bending quickly, he retrieved the necklace from the floor, where it had fallen during his altercation with the surgeon, and placed it about Peligia’s throat. This done, he bent two of the tiny gold links together and fastened the strand where it had broken when the nurse snatched it from her bosom. As the jewel shone once more against the fainting girl’s white skin I noticed, with a start, that another of the garnet pendants was missing.
The replacement of the necklace acted like a powerful stimulant on the patient. Scarcely had gold and stone touched her flesh again than her respiration became more normal and the bluish, deathlike pallor gave way to the slight flush of strengthening circulation.
“Now, Mesdemoiselles, if you please, we shall begin,” de Grandin announced, signing to the nurses, and seizing scalpel and forceps he set to work with a speed and deftness which brought a gasp of admiring amazement from the offended young doctor and the attendants alike.
“Not again; not again for fifty thousand francs would I perform such an operation,” he murmured as he turned his gloves inside out and shrugged out of his gown. To the nurse he ordered: “Attend her constantly, Mademoiselle; on your life, see that the necklace is kept constantly in place. Already you have observed the effect of its loss on her; it is not necessary to say more, hein?”
“Yes, Sir,” responded the
nurse, gazing at him with mingled wonder and respect. Surgical nurses soon recognize a master craftsman, and the exhibition he had given that night would remain history forever in the operating-room of Casualty Hospital.
“I feared something like this,” he confided as we walked slowly down the corridor. “All evening I have been ill at ease; the moment I heard of the accident I made sure the hospital authorities in their ignorance would remove the jewel from Madame’s throat—grâce à Dieu we were in time to replace it before the worst occurred. As it is—” He broke off with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Come,” he added, “let us interview Monsieur Bennett. I doubt not he has something of interest to tell.”
5. The Shadow of Sebek
“MR. BENNETT IS STILL under the anesthetic,” the nurse informed us when we inquired at my friend’s room. “He had a Colles’ fracture of the lower right epiphysis, and Dr. Grosnal gave him a whiff of ether while he was repositioning the fragments.”
“U’m,” commented de Grandin. “The treatment was correct, Mademoiselle. The chauffeur who drove them, where is he? I am told he, also, was hurt.”
“Yes, you’ll find him in Ward D,” the girl replied. “He wasn’t hurt much, but he was taking on quite a bit when I came through.”
“U’m” de Grandin remarked again, and turned toward the room where the Bennetts’ taxi-driver lay.
“Mon vieux,” the Frenchman bent above the patient’s cot and laid a friendly hand on his shoulder, “we are come to interview you. You will please tell us what occurred?”
“If you’re from th’ insurance comp’ny,” the chauffeur answered, “I want you to git me, and git me right; I wasn’t drunk, no matter what these here folks tell you. I’m off’n that stuff, an’ have been ever since th’ kid wuz born.”
“But of course,” de Grandin agreed with a nod. “That much is understood, and you will please describe the accident.”
“Well you can take it or leave it,” the other replied truculently. “I wuz drivin’ south through Minot Avenoo, makin’ pretty good time, ’cause th’ young gentleman told me he had a dinner date, an’ just as I was turnin’ into Tecumseh Street I seen what I thought wuz a piece o’ timber or sumpin layin’ across th’ road, an’ turned out to avoid it. Blow me if th’ thing didn’t move right across th’ pa’ment ahead o’ me, keepin’ in me path all th’ time. You can believe me or not—I’m tellin’ you the gospel truth, though—it wuz a alligator. I know a alligator when I see one, too, for I drove a taxi down to Miami durin’ th’ boom, an’ I seen plenty o’ them animated satchels down there in th’ ’gator farms. Yes, sir, it was a ’gator an’ nothin’ else, an’ th’ biggest ’gator I ever seen, too. Must a’ been sixteen or eighteen foot long, if it wuz a inch, an’ a lot sprier on its feet than any ’gator I ever seen before, for I wuz goin’ at a right fair clip, as I told you, an’ Minot Avenoo ain’ more’n fifty foot wide from curb to curb, but fast as I wuz goin’, I couldn’t turn out fast enough to keep that cussed thing fr’m crawlin’ right smack in front o’ me. I ain’t partic’lar ’bout runnin’ over a lizard, d’ye see, an’ if this here thing hadn’t been th’ granddaddy of all th’ ’gators that ever got turned into suitcases an’ pocketbooks, I’d a’ run ’im down an’ gone on me way; but runnin’ over a thing like that wuz as much as me axles wuz worth—he wuzn’t a inch less’n three foot high fr’m belly to back, not countin’ th’ extra height o’ his legs—an’ me cab ain’t paid for yet, so I turns out like there wuz a ten-foot hole in th’ pa’ment ahead o’ me, an’ dam’ if that thing didn’t keep right ahead o’ me till I lost control o’ me wheel, an’ th’ nex’ thing I knowed—zowie! I wuz parked up agin a tree wid me radiator leakin’ like a cake o’ ice lef’ out in th’ sun on Fourt’ o’ July, an’ me wid me head half-way t’rough th’ windshield, an’ me two fares knocked right outa th’ cab where th’ door’d give way in th’ smash-up. That’s th’ Gawd’s truth, an’ you can take it or leave it.”
The Horror on the Links Page 55
