“Tell me, Madame,” he broke in, “was not your flight caused by a visitation from the dead?”
Her faded brown eyes—eyes that had been such a startling contrast to her pale-gold hair—widened. “How did you know?” she whispered.
“Tiens, one may make surmises. Will not you tell us just what happened? I think there is a way out of your difficulties.”
“No, no, there isn’t; there can’t be!” Her head drooped listlessly. “He planned his work too well; all that’s left for me is death—and damnation afterward.”
“But if there were a way—if I could show it to you?”
“Can you repeal the laws of God?”
“I am a very clever person, Madame. Perhaps I can accomplish an evasion, if not an absolute repeal. Now tell us, how and when did Monsieur your late but not at all lamented uncle come to you?”
“The night before—before I went away. I woke about midnight, thinking I heard a cry from Dennie’s nursery. When I reached the room where he was sleeping I saw my uncle’s face glaring at me through the window. It seemed to be illuminated by a sort of inward hellish light, for it stood out against the darkness like a jack-o’-lantern, and it smiled an awful smile at me. ‘Arabella,’ it said, and I could see its dun dead lips writhe back as if the teeth were burning-hot, ‘I’ve come to tell you that your marriage is a mockery and a lie. The man you married is your brother, and the child you bore is doubly illegitimate. You can’t continue living with them, Arabella. That would be an even greater sin. You must leave them right away, or’—Once more his lips crept back until his teeth were bare—’or I shall come to visit you each night, and when the baby has grown old enough to understand I’ll tell him who his parents really are. Take your choice, my daughter. Leave them and let me go back to the grave, or stay and see me every night and know that I will tell your son when he is old enough to understand. If I do it he will loathe and hate you; curse the day you bore him.’
“‘And you’ll promise never to come near Dennis or the baby if I go?’ I asked.
“He promised, and I staggered back to bed, where I fell fainting.
“Next morning when I wakened I was sure it had been a bad dream, but when I looked at Dennis and my own reflection in the glass I knew it was no dream, but a dreadful visitation from the dead.
“Then I went mad. I tried to kill my baby, and when Dennis stopped me I watched my chance to run away, came over to New York and took to this.” She looked significantly around the miserable room. “I knew they’d never look for Arabella Tantavul among the city’s whores; I was safer from pursuit right here than if I’d been in Europe or China.”
“But, Madame,” de Grandin’s voice was jubilant with shocked reproof, “that which you saw was nothing but a dream; a most unpleasant dream, I grant, but still a dream. Look in my eyes, if you please!”
She raised her eyes to his, and I saw his pupils widen as a cat’s do in the dark, saw a line of white outline the cornea, and, responsive to his piercing gaze, beheld her brown eyes set in a fixed stare, first as if in fright, then with a glaze almost like that of death.
“Attend me, Madame Arabella,” he commanded softly. “You are tired—grand Dieu, how tired you are! You have suffered greatly, but you are about to rest. Your memory of that night is gone; so is all memory of the things which have transpired since. You will move and eat and sleep as you are bidden, but of what takes place around you till I bid you wake you will retain no recollection. Do you hear me, Madame Arabella?”
“I hear,” she answered softly in a small tired voice.
“Très bon. Lie down, my little poor one. Lie down to rest and dreams of love. Sleep, rest, dream and forget.
“Will you be good enough to ’phone to Dr. Wyckoff?” he asked me. “We shall place her in his sanitarium, wash this sacré dye from her hair and nurse her back to health; then when all is ready we can bear her home and have her take up life and love where she left off. No one shall be the wiser. This chapter of her life is closed and sealed for ever.
“Each day I’ll call upon her and renew hypnotic treatments that she may simulate the mild but curable mental case which we shall tell the good Wyckoff she is. When finally I release her from hypnosis her mind will be entirely cleared of that bad dream that nearly wrecked her happiness.”
ARABELLA TANTAVUL LAY ON the sofa in her charming boudoir, an orchid negligee about her slender shoulders, an eiderdown rug tucked round her feet and knees. Her wedding ring was once more on her finger. Pale with a pallor not to be disguised by the most skillfully applied cosmetics, and with deep violet crescents underneath her amber eyes, she lay back listlessly, drinking in the cheerful warmth that emanated from the fire of apple-logs that snapped and crackled on the hearth. Two months of rest at Dr. Wyckoff’s sanitarium had cleansed the marks of dissipation from her face, and the ministrations of beauticians had restored the pale-gold luster to her hair, but the listlessness that followed her complete breakdown was still upon her like the weakness from a fever.
“I can’t remember anything about my illness, Dr. Trowbridge,” she told me with a weary little smile, “but vaguely I connect it with some dreadful dream I had. And”—she wrinkled her smooth forehead in an effort at remembering—“I think I had a rather dreadful dream last night, but—”
“Ah-ha?” de Grandin leant abruptly forward in his chair. “What was it that you dreamed, Madame?”
“I—don’t—know,” she answered slowly. “Odd, isn’t it, how you can remember that a dream was so unpleasant, yet not recall its details? Somehow, I connect it with Uncle Warburg; but—”
“Parbleu, do you say so? Has he returned? Ah hah, he makes me to be so mad, that one!”
“IT IS TIME WE went, my friend,” de Grandin told me as the tall clock in the hall beat out its tenth deliberate stroke; “we have important duties to perform.”
“For goodness’ sake,” I protested, “at this hour o’ night?”
“Precisely. At Monsieur Tantavul’s I shall expect a visitor tonight, and—we must be ready for him.
“Is Madame Arabella sleeping?” he asked Dennis as he answered our ring at the door.
“Like a baby,” answered the young husband. “I’ve been sitting by her all evening, and I don’t believe she even turned in bed.”
“And you did keep the window closed, as I requested?”
“Yes, sir; closed and latched.”
“Bien. Await us here, mon brave; we shall rejoin you presently.”
He led the way to Arabella’s bedroom, removed the wrappings from a bulky parcel he had lugged from our house, and displayed the object thus disclosed with an air of inordinate pride. “Behold him,” he commanded gleefully. “Is he not magnificent?”
“Why—what the devil?—it’s nothing but an ordinary window screen,” I answered.
“A window screen, I grant, my friend; but not an ordinary one. Can not you see it is of copper?”
“Well—”
“Parbleu, but I should say it is well,” he grinned. “Observe him, how he works.”
From his kit bag he produced a roll of insulated wire, an electrical transformer, and some tools. Working quickly he passe-partouted the screen’s wooden frame with electrician’s tape, then plugged a wire in a nearby lamp socket, connected it with the transformer, and from the latter led a double strand of cotton-wrapped wire to the screen. This he clipped firmly to the copper meshes and led a third strand to the metal grille of the heat register. Last of all he filled a bulb-syringe with water and sprayed the screen, repeating the performance till it sparkled like a cobweb in the morning sun. “And now, Monsieur le Revenant,” he chuckled as he finished, “I damn think all is ready for your warm reception!”
For something like an hour we waited, then he tiptoed to the bed and bent above Arabella.
“Madame!”
The girl stirred slightly, murmuring some half-audible response, and:
“In half an hour you will rise,” he told her. “You w
ill put your robe on and stand by the window, but on no account will you go near it or lay hands on it. Should anyone address you from outside you will reply, but you will not remember what you say or what is said to you.”
He motioned me to follow, and we left the room, taking station in the hallway just outside.
HOW LONG WE WAITED I have no accurate idea. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps less; at any rate the silent vigil seemed unending, and I raised my hand to stifle back a yawn when:
“Yes, Uncle Warburg, I can hear you,” we heard Arabella saying softly in the room beyond the door.
We tiptoed to the entry: Arabella stood before the window, and from beyond it glared the face of Warburg Tantavul.
It was dead, there was no doubt about that. In sunken cheek and pinched-in nose and yellowish-grey skin there showed the evidence of death and early putrefaction, but dead through it was, it was also animated with a dreadful sort of life. The eyes were glaring horribly, the lips were red as though they had been painted with fresh blood.
“You hear me, do you?” it demanded. “Then listen, girl; you broke your bargain with me, now I’m come to keep my threat: every time you kiss your husband”—a shriek of bitter laughter cut his words, and his staring eyes half closed with hellish merriment—“or the child you love so well, my shadow will be on you. You’ve kept me out thus far, but some night I’ll get in, and—”
The lean dead jaw dropped, then snapped up as if lifted by sheer will-power, and the whole expression of the corpse-face changed. Surprise, incredulous delight, anticipation as before a feast were pictured on it. “Why”—its cachinnating laughter sent a chill up my spine—“why your window’s open! You’ve changed the screen and I can enter!”
Slowly, like a child’s balloon stirred by a vagrant wind, the awful thing moved closer to the window. Closer to the screen it came, and Arabella gave ground before it and put up her hands to shield her eyes from the sight of its hellish grin of triumph.
“Sapristi,” swore de Grandin softly. “Come on, my old and evil one, come but a little nearer—”
The dead thing floated nearer. Now its mocking mouth and shriveled, pointed nose were almost pressed against the copper meshes of the screen; now they began to filter through the meshes like a wisp of fog—
There was a blinding flash of blue-white flame, the sputtering gush of fusing metal, a wild, despairing shriek that ended ere it fairly started in a sob of mortal torment, and the sharp and acrid odor of burned flesh!
“Arabella—darling—is she all right?” Dennis Tantavul came charging up the stairs. “I thought I heard a scream—”
“You did, my friend,” de Grandin answered, “but I do not think that you will hear its repetition unless you are unfortunate enough to go to hell when you have died.”
“What was it?”
“Eh bien, one who thought himself a clever jester pressed his jest too far. Meantime, look to Madame your wife. See how peacefully she lies upon her bed. Her time for evil dreams is past. Be kind to her, mon jeune. Do not forget, a woman loves to have a lover, even though he is her husband.” He bent and kissed the sleeping girl upon the brow. “Au ’voir, my little lovely one,” he murmured. Then, to me:
“Come, Trowbridge, my good friend. Our work is finished here. Let us leave them to their happiness.”
AN HOUR LATER IN the study he faced me across the fire. “Perhaps you’ll deign to tell me what it’s all about now?” I asked sarcastically.
“Perhaps I shall,” he answered with a grin. “You will recall that this annoying Monsieur Who Was Dead Yet Not Dead, appeared and grinned most horrifyingly through windows several times? Always from the outside, please remember. At the hospital, where he nearly caused the garde-malade to have a fit, he laughed and mouthed at her through the glass skylight. When he first appeared and threatened Madame Arabella he spoke to her through the window—”
“But her window was open,” I protested.
“Yes, but screened,” he answered with a smile. “Screened with iron wire, if you please.”
“What difference did that make? Tonight I saw him almost force his features through—”
“A copper screen,” he supplied. “Tonight the screen was copper; me, I saw to that.”
Then, seeing my bewilderment: “Iron is the most earthy of all metals,” he explained. “It and its derivative, steel, are so instinct with the earth’s essence that creatures of the spirit cannot stand its nearness. The legends tell us that when Solomon’s Temple was constructed no tool of iron was employed, because even the friendly jinn whose help he had enlisted could not perform their tasks in close proximity to iron. The witch can be detected by the pricking of an iron pin—never by a pin of brass.
“Very well. When first I thought about the evil dead one’s reappearances I noted that each time he stared outside the window. Glass, apparently, he could not pass—and glass contains a modicum of iron. Iron window-wire stopped him. ‘He are not a true ghost, then,’ I inform me. ‘They are things of spirit only, they are thoughts made manifest. This one is a thing of hate, but also of some physical material as well; he is composed in part of emanations from the body which lies putrefying in the grave. Voilà, if he have physical properties he can be destroyed by physical means.’
“And so I set my trap. I procured a screen of copper through which he could effect an entrance, but I charged it with electricity. I increased the potential of the current with a step-up transformer to make assurance doubly sure, and then I waited for him like the spider for the fly, waited for him to come through that charged screen and electrocute himself. Yes, certainly.”
“But is he really destroyed?” I asked dubiously.
“As the candle-flame when one has blown it out. He was—how do you say it?—short-circuited. No malefactor in the chair of execution ever died more thoroughly than that one, I assure you.”
“It seems queer, though, that he should come back from the grave to haunt those poor kids and break up their marriage when he really wanted it,” I murmured wonderingly.
“Wanted it? Yes, as the trapper wants the bird to step within his snare.”
“But he gave them such a handsome present when little Dennis was born—”
“La, la, my good, kind, trusting friend, you are naïf. The money I gave Madame Arabella was my own. I put it in that envelope.”
“Then what was the real message?”
“It was a dreadful thing, my friend; a dreadful, wicked thing. The night that Monsieur Dennis left that package with me I determined that the old one meant to do him in, so I steamed the cover open and read what lay within. It made plain the things which Dennis thought that he remembered.
“Long, long ago Monsieur Tantavul lived in San Francisco. His wife was twenty years his junior, and a pretty, joyous thing she was. She bore him two fine children, a boy and girl, and on them she bestowed the love which he could not appreciate. His surliness, his evil temper, his constant fault-finding drove her to distraction, and finally she sued for divorce.
“But he forestalled her. He spirited the children away, then told his wife the plan of his revenge. He would take them to some far off place and bring them up believing they were cousins. Then when they had attained full growth he would induce them to marry and keep the secret of their relationship until they had a child, then break the dreadful truth to them. Thereafter they would live on, bound together by their fear of censure, or perhaps of criminal prosecution, but their consciences would cause them endless torment, and the very love they had for each other would be like fetters forged of white-hot steel, holding them in odious bondage from which there was no escape. The sight of their children would be a reproach to them, the mere thought of love’s sweet communion would cause revulsion to the point of nausea.
“When he had told her this his wife went mad. He thrust her into an asylum and left her there to die while he came with his babies to New Jersey, where he reared them together, and by guile and craftiness nurtured their lov
e, knowing that when finally they married he would have his so vile revenge.”
“But, great heavens, man, they’re brother and sister!” I exclaimed in horror.
“Perfectly,” he answered coolly. “They are also man and woman, husband and wife, and father and mother.”
“But—but—” I stammered, utterly at loss for words.
“But me no buts, good friend. I know what you would say. Their child? Ah bah, did not the kings of ancient times repeatedly take their own sisters to wife, and were not their offspring sound and healthy? But certainly. Did not both Darwin and Wallace fail to find foundation for the doctrine that cross-breeding between healthy people with clean blood is productive of inferior progeny? Look at little Monsieur Dennis. Were you not blinded by your silly, unrealistic training and tradition—did you not know his parents’ near relationship—you would not hesitate to pronounce him an unusually fine, healthy child.
“Besides,” he added earnestly, “they love each other, not as brother and sister, but as man and woman. He is her happiness, she is his, and little Monsieur Dennis is the happiness of both. Why destroy this joy—le bon Dieu knows they earned it by a joyless childhood—when I can preserve it for them by simply keeping silent?”
Hands of the Dead
“IF THERE WERE SUCH a thing as a platinum blond tom-cat, I’m sure it would look like Doctor de Grandin.” My dinner partner, a long-eyed, sleek-haired brunette in a black-crêpe gown cut to the base of her throat in front and slashed in a V below the waist behind, gestured with her oddly oblique eyes across the table toward Jules de Grandin. “He’s a funny little fellow—rather a darling, though,” Miss Travers added. “Just see how he looks at Virginia Bushrod; wouldn’t you think she was a particularly luscious specimen of sparrow, and he—”
“Why should he watch Miss Bushrod, particularly?” I countered. “She’s very lovely, but—”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s interested in her face, pretty as it is,” Miss Travers laughed. “He’s watching her hands. Everybody does.”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 61
