‘So you would be advised to bring another glass,’ de Grandin’s hail sounded from the surgery door. ‘My nerves have been on edge these many minutes, and in addition I am suffering from an all-consuming thirst, my friend.’
The young man gulped the liquor down in one tremendous swallow, seeing which de Grandin gave a shudder of disgust. Drinking fifty-year-old brandy was a rite with him, and to bolt it as if it had been common bootlegged stuff was grave impropriety, almost sacrilege.
‘Doctor, do you think that dog had hydrophobia?’ our patient asked half diffidently. ‘He seemed so savage——’
‘Hydrophobia is the illness human beings have when bitten by a rabid dog or other animal, Monsieur,’ de Grandin broke in with a smile. ‘The beast has rabies, the human victim develops hydrophobia. However, if you wish, we can arrange for you to go to Mercy Hospital early in the morning to take the Pasteur treatment; it is effective and protective if you are infected, quite harmless if you are not.’
‘Thanks,’ replied the youth. ‘I think we’d better, for——’
‘Monsieur,’ the Frenchman cut him short again, ‘is your name Maxwell, by any chance? Since I first saw you I have been puzzled by your face; now I remember, I saw your picture in le journal this morning.’
‘Yes,’ said our visitor, ‘I’m John Maxwell, and, since you saw my picture in the paper, you know that I’m to marry Sarah Leigh on Saturday; so you realize why I’m so anxious to make sure the dog didn’t have hydro—rabies, I mean. I don’t think Sallie’d want a husband she had to muzzle for fear he’d bite her on the ankle when she came to feed him.’
The little Frenchman smiled acknowledgment of the other’s pleasantry, but though his lips drew back in the mechanics of a smile, his little, round, blue eyes were fixed and studious.
‘Tell me, Monsieur,’ he asked abruptly, ‘how came this dog to set upon you in the fog tonight?’
Young Maxwell shivered at the recollection. ‘Hanged if I know,’ he answered. ‘Y’see, the boys gave me a farewell bachelor dinner at the Carteret this evening, and there was the usual amount of speech-making and toast-drinking, and by the time we broke up I was pretty well paralyzed—able to find my way about, but not very steadily, as you know. I said good night to the bunch at the hotel and started out alone, for I wanted to walk the liquor off. You see’—a flush suffused his blond, good-looking face—‘Sallie said she’d wait up for me to telephone her—just like old married folks!—and I didn’t want to talk to her while I was still thick-tongued. Ray Suffrige, the chap who—the one you saw later, sir—decided he’d walk home, too, and started off in the other direction, and the rest of ’em left in taxis.
‘I’d walked about four blocks, and was getting so I could navigate pretty well, when I bumped into you, then brought up against the railing of a house. While I was hanging onto it, trying to get steady on my legs again, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came that big police-dog and jumped on me. It didn’t bark or give any warning till it leaped at me; then it began growling. I flung my hands up, and it fastened on my sleeve, but luckily the cloth was thick enough to keep its teeth from tearing my arm.
‘I never saw such a beast. I’ve had a tussle or two with savage dogs before, and they always jumped away and rushed in again each time I beat ’em off, but this thing stood on its hind legs and fought me, like a man. When it shook its teeth loose from my coat-sleeve it clawed at my face and throat with its forepaws—that’s where I got most of my mauling—and kept snapping at me all the time; never backed away or even sank to all-fours once, sir.
‘I was still unsteady on my legs, and the brute was heavy as a man; so it wasn’t long before it had me down. Every time it bit at me I managed to get my arms in its way; so it did more damage to my clothes than it did to me with its teeth, but it surely clawed me up to the Queen’s taste, and I was beginning to tire when you came running up. It would have done me as it did poor Suffrige in a little while, I’m sure.’
He paused a moment, then, with a shaking hand, poured out another drink of brandy and tossed it off at a gulp. ‘I guess I must have been drunk,’ he admitted with a shamefaced grin, ‘for I could have sworn the thing talked to me as it growled.’
‘Eh? The Devil!’ Jules de Grandin sat forward suddenly, eyes wider and rounder than before, if possible, the needle-points of his tightly waxed wheat-blond mustache twitching like the whiskers of an irritated tom-cat. ‘What is it that you say?’
‘Hold on,’ the other countered, quick blood mounting to his cheeks. ‘I didn’t say it; I said it seemed as if its snarls were words.’
‘Précisement, exactement, quite so,’ returned the Frenchman sharply. ‘And what was it that he seemed to snarl at you, Monsieur? Quickly, if you please.’
‘Well, I was drunk, I admit, but——’
‘Ten thousand small blue devils! We bandy words. I have asked you a question; have the courtesy to reply, Monsieur.’
‘Well, it sounded—sort of—as if he kept repeating Sallie’s name, like this——’ He gave an imitation of a throaty, growling voice: ‘“Sarah Leigh, Sarah Leigh—you’ll never marry Sarah Leigh!”
‘Ever hear anything so nutty? I reckon I must have had Sallie in my mind, subconsciously, while I was having what I thought was my death-struggle.’
It was very quiet for a moment. John Maxwell looked half sullenly, half defiantly from de Grandin to me. De Grandin sat as though lost in contemplation, his small eyes wide and thoughtful, his hands twisting savagely at the waxed ends of his mustache, the tip of his patent-leather evening shoe beating a devil’s tattoo on the white-tiled floor. At length, abruptly:
‘Did you notice any smell, any peculiar odor, when we went to Monsieur Maxwell’s rescue this evening, Friend Trowbridge?’ he demanded.
‘Why——’ I bent my brows and wagged my head in an effort at remembrance. ‘Why, no, I didn’t——’ I stopped, while somewhere from the file-cases of my subconscious memory came a hint of recollection: Soldiers’ Park—a damp and drizzling day—the open-air dens of the menagerie. ‘Wait,’ I ordered, closing both eyes tightly while I bade my memory catalogue the vague, elusive scent; then: ‘Yes, there was an odor I’ve noticed at the zoo in Soldiers’ Park; it was the smell of the damp fur of a fox, or wolf!’
De Grandin beat his small, white hands together softly, as though applauding at a play. ‘Capital, perfect!’ he announced. ‘I smelt it too, when first we did approach, but our senses play strange tricks on us at times, and I needed the corroboration of your nose’s testimony, if it could be had. Now——’ he turned his fixed, unwinking stare upon me as he asked: ‘Have you ever seen a wolf’s eye—or a dog’s—at night?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I answered wonderingly.
‘Très bien. And they gleamed with a reflected greenness, something like Madame Pussy’s, only not so bright, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Très bon. Did you see the eyes of what attacked Monsieur Maxwell this evening? Did you observe them?’
‘I should say I did,’ I answered, for never would I forget those fiery, glaring orbs. ‘They were red, red as fire!’
‘Oh, excellent Friend Trowbridge; oh, prince of all the recollectors of the world!’ de Grandin cried delightedly. ‘Your memory serves you perfectly, and upholds my observations to the full. Before, I guessed; I said to me, “Jules de Grandin, you are generally right, but once in many times you may be wrong. See what Friend Trowbridge has to say.” And you, parbleu, you said the very thing I needed to confirm me in my diagnosis.
‘Monsieur,’ he turned to Maxwell with a smile, ‘you need not fear that you have hydrophobia. No. You were very near to death, a most unpleasant sort of death, but not to death by hydrophobia. Morbleu, that would be an added refinement which we need not take into consideration.’
‘Whatever are you talking about?’ I asked in sheer amazement. ‘You ask me if I noticed the smell that beast gave off, and if I saw its eyes, then tell Mr Maxwell he needn�
�t fear he’s been inoculated. Of all the hare-brained——’
He turned his shoulder squarely on me and smiled assuringly at Maxwell. ‘You said that you would call your amoureuse tonight, Monsieur; have you forgotten?’ he reminded, then nodded toward the ’phone.
The young man picked the instrument up, called a number, and waited for a moment; then: ‘John speaking, honey,’ he announced as we heard a subdued click sound from the monophone. Another pause, in which the buzzing of indistinguishable words came faintly to us through the quiet room; then Maxwell turned and motioned me to take up the extension ’phone.
‘——and please come right away, dear,’ I heard a woman’s voice plead as I clapped the instrument against my ear. ‘No, I can’t tell you over the ’phone, but I must see you right away, Johnny—I must! You’re sure you’re all right? Nothing happened to you?’
‘Well,’ Maxwell temporized, ‘I’m in pretty good shape, everything considered. I had a little tussle with a dog, but——’
‘A—dog?’ Stark, incredulous horror sounded in the woman’s fluttering voice. ‘What sort of dog?’
‘Oh, just a dog, you know; not very big and not very little, sort o’ betwixt and between, and——’
‘You’re sure it was a dog? Did it look like—a police-dog, for instance?’
‘Well, now you mention it, it did look something like a police-dog, or collie, or Airedale, or something, but——’
‘John, dear, don’t try to put me off that way. This is terribly, dreadfully important. Please hurry over—no, don’t come out at night—yes, come at once, but be sure not to come alone. Have you a sword, or some sort of steel or iron weapon you can carry for defense when you come?’
Young Maxwell’s face betrayed bewilderment. ‘A sword?’ he echoed. ‘What d’ye think I am, dear, a knight of old? No, I haven’t a sword to my name, not even a jack-knife, but—I say, there’s a gentleman I met tonight who has a bully little sword; may I bring him along?’
‘Oh, yes, please do, dear; and if you can get some one else, bring him too. I’m terribly afraid to have you venture out tonight, dearest, but I have to see you right away!’
‘All right,’ the young man answered. ‘I’ll pop right over, honey.’
As he replaced the instrument, he turned bewilderedly to me. ‘Wonder what the deuce got into Sally?’ he asked. ‘She seemed all broken up about something, and I thought she’d faint when I mentioned my set-to with that dog. What’s it mean?’
Jules de Grandin stepped through the doorway connecting surgery with consulting-room, where he had gone to listen to the conversation from the desk extension. His little eyes were serious, his small mouth grimly set. ‘Monsieur,’ he announced gravely, ‘it means that Mademoiselle Sarah knows more than any of us what this business of the Devil is about. Come, let us go to her without delay.’
As we prepared to leave the house he paused and rummaged in the hall coat-closet, emerging in a moment, balancing a pair of blackthorn walking-sticks in his hands.
‘What——’ I began, but he cut me short.
‘These may prove useful,’ he announced, handing one to me, the other to John Maxwell. ‘If what I damn suspect is so, he will not greatly relish a thwack from one of these upon the head. No, the thorn-bush is especially repugnant to him.’
‘Humph, I should think it would be particularly repugnant to any one,’ I answered, weighing the knotty bludgeon in my hand. ‘By the way, who is “he”?’
‘Mademoiselle Sarah will tell us that,’ he answered enigmatically. ‘Are we ready? Bon, let us be upon our way.’
The mist which had obscured the night an hour or so before had thinned to a light haze, and a drizzle of rain was commencing as we set out. The Leigh house was less than half a mile from my place, and we made good time as we marched through the damp, cold darkness.
I had known Joel Leigh only through having shared committee appointments with him in the local Republican organization and at the archdeaconry. He had entered the consular service after being retired from active duty with the Marine Corps following a surgeon’s certificate of disability, and at the time of his death two years before had been rated as one of the foremost authorities on Near East commercial conditions. Sarah, his daughter, whom I had never met, was, by all accounts, a charming young woman, equally endowed with brains, beauty, and money, and keeping up the family tradition in the big house in Tuscarora Avenue, where she lived with an elderly maiden aunt as duenna.
Leigh’s long residence in the East was evidenced in the furnishings of the long, old-fashioned hall, which was like a royal antechamber in miniature. In the softly diffused light from a brass-shaded Turkish lamp we caught gleaming reflections from heavily carved blackwood furniture and the highlights of a marvelously inlaid Indian screen. A carved table flanked by dragon-chairs stood against the wall, the floor was soft as new-mown turf with rugs from China, Turkey, and Kurdistan.
‘Mis’ Sarah’s in the library,’ announced the negro butler who answered our summons at the door, and led us through the hall to the big, high-ceilinged room where Sarah Leigh was waiting. Books lined the chamber’s walls from floor to ceiling on three sides; the fourth wall was devoted to a bulging bay-window which overlooked the garden. Before the fire of cedar logs was drawn a deeply padded divan, while flanking it were great armchairs upholstered in red leather. The light which sifted through the meshes of a brazen lamp-shade disclosed a tabouret of Indian mahogany on which a coffee service stood. Before the fire the mistress of the house stood waiting us. She was rather less than average height, but appeared taller because of her fine carriage. Her mannishly close-cropped hair was dark and inclined toward curliness, but as she moved toward us I saw it showed bronze glints in the lamplight. Her eyes were large, expressive, deep hazel, almost brown. But for the look of cynicism, almost hardness, around her mouth, she would have been something more than merely pretty.
Introductions over, Miss Leigh looked from one of us to the other with something like embarrassment in her eyes. ‘If——’ she began, but de Grandin divined her purpose, and broke in:
‘Mademoiselle, a short time since, we had the good fortune to rescue Monsieur your fiancé from a dog which I do not think was any dog at all. That same creature, I might add, destroyed a gentleman who had attended Monsieur Maxwell’s dinner within ten minutes of the time we drove it off. Furthermore, Monsieur Maxwell is under the impression that this dog-thing talked to him while it sought to slay him. From what we overheard of your message on the telephone, we think you hold the key to this mystery. You may speak freely in our presence, for I am Jules de Grandin, physician and occultist, and my friend, Doctor Trowbridge, has most commendable discretion.’
The young woman smiled, and the transformation in her taut, strained face was startling. ‘Thank you,’ she replied; ‘if you’re an occultist you will understand, and neither doubt me nor demand explanations of things I can’t explain.’
She dropped cross-legged to the hearth rug, as naturally as though she were more used to sitting that way than reclining in a chair, and we caught the gleam of a great square garnet on her forefinger as she extended her hand to Maxwell.
‘Hold my hand while I’m talking, John,’ she bade. ‘It may be for the last time.’ Then, as he made a gesture of dissent, abruptly:
‘I can not marry you—or any one,’ she announced.
Maxwell opened his lips to protest, but no sound came. I stared at her in wonder, trying futilely to reconcile the agitation she had shown when telephoning with her present deadly, apathetic calm.
Jules de Grandin yielded to his curiosity. ‘Why not, Mademoiselle?’ he asked. ‘Who has forbid the banns?’
She shook her head dejectedly and turned a sad-eyed look upon him as she answered: ‘It’s just the continuation of a story which I thought was a closed chapter in my life.’ For a moment she bent forward, nestling her cheek against young Maxwell’s hand; then:
‘It began when Father was attached to
the consulate in Smyrna,’ she continued. ‘France and Turkey were both playing for advantage, and Father had to find out what they planned, so he had to hire secret agents. The most successful of them was a young Greek named George Athanasakos, who came from Crete. Why he should have taken such employment was more than we could understand; for he was well educated, apparently a gentleman, and always well supplied with money. He told us he took the work because of his hatred of the Turks, and as he was always successful in getting information, Father didn’t ask questions.
‘When his work was finished he continued to call at our house as a guest, and I—I really didn’t love him, I couldn’t have, it was just infatuation, meeting him so far from home, and the water and that wonderful Smyrna moonlight, and——’
‘Perfectly, Mademoiselle, one fully understands,’ de Grandin supplied softly as she paused, breathless; ‘and then——’
‘Maybe you never succumbed to moonlight and water and strange, romantic poetry and music,’ she half whispered, her eyes grown wider at the recollection, ‘but I was only seventeen, and he was very handsome, and—and he swept me off my feet. He had the softest, most musical voice I’ve ever heard, and the things he said sounded like something written by Byron at his best. One moonlit night when we’d been rowing, he begged me to say I loved him, and—and I did. He held me in his arms and kissed my eyes and lips and throat. It was like being hypnotized and conscious at the same time. Then, just before we said good night he told me to meet him in an old garden on the outskirts of the city where we sometimes rested when we’d been out riding. The rendezvous was made for midnight, and though I thought it queer that he should want to meet me at that time in such a place—well, girls in love don’t ask questions, you know. At least, I didn’t.
‘There was a full moon the next night, and I was fairly breathless with the beauty of it all when I kept the tryst. I thought I’d come too early, for George was nowhere to be seen when I rode up, but as I jumped down from my horse and looked around I saw something moving in the laurels. It was George, and he’d thrown a cape or cloak of some sort of fur across his shoulders. He startled me dreadfully at first; for he looked like some sort of prowling beast with the animal’s head hanging half down across his face, like the beaver of an ancient helmet. It seemed to me, too, that his eyes had taken on a sort of sinister greenish tinge, but when he took me in his arms and kissed me I was reassured.
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