“That’s Kristina,” volunteered our host as he nodded toward the portrait.
The picture was of a woman not young, not at all old; slender, mysterious, black hair shining smoothly back, deep blue eyes holding a far-off vision, as though they sensed the sufferings of the hidden places of the world and brooded on them; a keen, intelligent face of a clear pallor with small, straight nose, short upper lip and a mouth which would have been quite lovely had it not been so serious. She held a tiny kitten, a mere ball of white fluffiness, at her breast, and the hand supporting the small animal was the hand of one in whom the blood of ancient races ran, with long and slimly pointed fingers tipped with rosy nails. There was something to arrest attention in that face. The woman had the cold knowledge of death, ominous and ever present, on her.
“La pauvre!” de Grandin murmured as he gazed with interest at the portrait. “And what became of Monsieur Pettersen and his so highly unattractive wife?”
Friebergh laughed, almost delightedly. “History seems to parallel itself in this case,” he answered. “Perhaps you’ve heard how the feud resulting from the Salem persecutions was resolved when descendants of accusers and accused were married? Well … it seems that after Kristina drowned, executors of Oscar Friebergh’s will could not find clue or trace of the notes and mortgages which Pettersen had signed. Everybody had suspicions how they came to disappear, for Mistress Pettersen was among the most earnest searchers of Kristina’s private papers when they sought a copy of the compact she had signed with Satan, but—in any event, Karl Pettersen began to prosper from the moment that Kristina died. Every venture which he undertook met with success. His descendants prospered, too. Two years ago the last male member of his line met Greta at a Christmas dance, and”—he broke off with a chuckle—“and they’ve been that way about each other from the first. I’m thinking they’ll be standing side by side beneath a floral bell and saying ‘I do’ before the ink on their diplomas has had much chance to dry.”
“All of which brings us back three centuries, and down to date—and Greta,” I responded somewhat sharply. “If I remember, you’d begun to tell us something about her hysterical condition and the effect this house had on her, when you detoured to that ancient family romance.”
“Précisément, Monsieur, the house,” de Grandin prompted. “I think that I anticipate you, but I should like to hear your statement—” He paused with interrogatively raised brows.
“Just so,” our host returned. “Greta has never heard the story of Kristina, and Karl Pettersen, I’m sure, for I didn’t know it very well myself till I bought this house and started digging up the ancient records. She’d certainly never been in the house, nor even seen the plans, since the work of restoration was done while she was off to school; yet the moment she arrived she went directly to her room, as if she knew the way by heart. Incidentally, her room is the same one—”
“Occupied by Madame Kristina in the olden days!” supplied de Grandin.
“Good Lord! How’d you guess?”
“I did not guess, Monsieur,” the little Frenchman answered levelly; “I knew.”
“Humph. Well, the child has seemed to hate the place from the moment she first entered it. She’s been moody and distrait, complaining of a constant feeling of malaise and troubled sleep, and most of the time she’s been so irritable that there’s scarcely any living with her. D’ye suppose there’s something psychic in the place—something that the rest of us don’t feel, that’s worked upon her nerves until she had this fainting-fit tonight?”
“Not at all,” I answered positively. “The child’s been working hard at school, and—”
“Very likely,” Jules de Grandin interrupted, “Women are more finely attuned to such influences than men, and it is entirely possible that the tragedy these walls have witnessed has been felt subconsciously by your daughter, Monsieur Friebergh.”
“DOCTOR TROWBRIDGE, I DON’T like this place,” Greta Friebergh told me when we called on her next day. “It—there’s something about it that terrifies me; makes me feel as though I were somebody else.”
She raised her eyes to mine, half frightened, half wondering, and for a moment I had the eery sensation of being confronted with the suffering ghost of a girl in the flesh.
“Like someone else?” I echoed. “How d’ye mean, my dear?”
“I’m afraid I can’t quite say, sir. Something queer, a kind of feeling of vague uneasiness coupled with a sort of ‘I’ve been here before’ sensation came to me the moment I stepped across the threshold. Everything, the house, the furniture, the very atmosphere, seemed to combine to oppress me. It was as if something old and infinitely evil—like the wiped-over memory of some terrifying childhood nightmare—were trying to break through to my consciousness. I kept reaching for it mentally, as one reaches for a half-remembered tune or a forgotten name; yet I seemed to realize that if I ever drew aside the veil of memory my sanity would crack. Do you understand me, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, quite, child,” I answered. “You’ve had a trying time at school, and with your social program speeded up—”
Something like a grimace, the parody of a smile, froze upon de Grandin’s face as he leant toward the girl. “Tell us, Mademoiselle,” he begged, “was there something more, some tangibility, which matched this feeling of malaise?”
“Yes, there was!” responded Greta.
“And that—”
“Last night I came in rather late, all tired and out of sorts. Karl Pettersen and I had been playing tennis in the afternoon, and drove over to Keyport for dinner afterward. Karl’s a sweet lad, and the moonlight was simply divine on the homeward drive, but—” The quick blood stained her face and throat as she broke off her narrative.
“Yes, Mademoiselle, but?” de Grandin prompted.
She smiled, half bashfully, at him, and she was quite lovely when she smiled. It brightened the faintly sad expression of her mouth and raised her eyes, ever so little, at the corners. “It can’t have been so long since you were young, Doctor,” she returned. “What did you do on moonlight summer nights when you were alone with someone you loved terribly?”
“Morbleu,” the little Frenchman chuckled, “the same as you, petite, no more, I think, and certainly no less!”
She smiled again, a trifle sadly, this time. “That’s just the trouble,” she lamented. “I couldn’t.”
“Hein, how is it you say, Mademoiselle?”
“I wanted to, Lord knows my lips were hungry and my arms were aching for him, but something seemed to come between us. It was as if I’d had a dish of food before me and hadn’t eaten for a long, long time, then, just before I tasted it, a whisper came, ‘It’s poisoned!’
“Karl was hurt and puzzled, naturally, and I tried my best to overcome my feeling of aversion, but for a moment when his lips were pressed to mine I had a positive sensation of revulsion. I felt I couldn’t bear his touch, his kisses seemed to stifle me; if he hadn’t let me go I think that I’d have fainted.
“I ran right in the house when we got home, just flinging a good-night to Karl across my shoulder, and rushed up to my room. ‘Perhaps a shower will pull me out of it,’ I thought, and so I started to disrobe, when—” Once more she paused, and now there was no doubt of it: the girl was terrified.
“Yes, Mademoiselle, and then?” the Frenchman prompted softly.
“I’d slipped my jumper and culottes off, and let down my hair, preparatory to knotting it up to fit inside my shower cap, when I chanced to look into the mirror. I hadn’t turned the light on, but the moonlight slanted through the window and struck right on the glass; so I could see myself as a sort of silhouette, only”—again she paused, and her narrow nostrils dilated—“only it wasn’t I!”
“Sacré nom d’un fromage vert, what is it that you tell us, Mademoiselle?” asked Jules de Grandin.
“It wasn’t I reflected in that mirror. As I looked, the moonlight seemed to break and separate into a million little poin
ts of light, so that it was more like a mist powdered with diamond dust than a solid shaft of light; it seemed to be at once opaque yet startlingly translucent, with a sheen like that of flowing water, yet absorbing all reflections. Then suddenly, where I should have seen myself reflected in the mirror, I saw another form take shape, half veiled in the sparkling mist that seemed to fill the room, yet startlingly distinct. It was a woman, a girl, perhaps, a little older than I, but not much. She was tall and exquisitely slender, with full-blown, high-set breasts and skin as pale as ivory. Her hair was black and silken-fine and rippled down across her shoulders till it almost reached her knees, and her deep-blue eyes and lovely features held a look of such intense distress that I thought involuntarily of those horribly realistic mediæval pictures of the Crucifixion. Her shoulders were braced back, for she held her hands behind her as though they had been tied, and on her breast and throat and sides were numerous little wounds as though she had been stabbed repeatedly with something sharp and slender, and from every wound the fresh blood welled and trickled out upon the pale, smooth skin.”
“She was—” began de Grandin, but the girl anticipated him.
“Yes,” she told him, “she was nude. Nothing clothed her but her glorious hair and the bright blood streaming from her wounds.
“For a minute, maybe for an hour, we looked into each other’s eyes, this lovely, naked girl and I, and it seemed to me that she tried desperately to tell me something, but though I saw the veins and muscles stand out on her throat with the effort that she made, no sound came from her tortured lips. Somehow, as we stood there, I felt a queer, uncanny feeling creeping over me. I seemed in some way to be identified with this other girl, and with that feeling of a loss of personality, a bitter, blinding rage seemed surging up in me. Gradually, it seemed to take some sort of form, to bend itself against a certain object, and with a start I realized that I was consumed with hatred; dreadful, crushing, killing hatred toward someone named Karl Pettersen. Not my Karl, especially, but toward everybody in the world who chanced to bear that name. It was a sort of all-inclusive hatred, something like the hatred of the Germans which your generation had in the World War. ‘I can’t—I won’t hate Karl!’ I heard myself exclaiming, and turned to face the other girl. But she was not there.
“There I stood alone in the darkened, empty room with nothing but the moonlight—ordinary moonlight, now-slanting down across the floor.
“I turned the lights on right away and took a dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia, for my nerves were pretty badly shot. Finally I got calmed down and went into the bathroom for my shower.
“I was just about to step into the spray, when I heard a little plaintive mew outside the window. When I crossed the room, there was the sweetest little fluffy white kitten perched on the sill outside the screen, its green eyes blinking in the light which streamed down from the ceiling-lamp and the tip of its pink tongue sticking out like the little end of thin-sliced ham you sometimes see peeping from behind the rolls in railway station sandwiches. I unhooked the screen and let the little creature in, and it snuggled up against my breast and puffed and blinked its knowing eyes at me, and then put up a tiny, pink-toed paw and began to wash its face.
“‘Would you like to take a shower with me, pussy?’ I asked it, and it stopped its washing and looked up at me as if to ask, ‘What did you say?’ then stuck its little nose against my side and began to lick me. You can’t imagine how its little rough tongue tickled.”
“And then, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked as Greta broke off smilingly and lay back on her pillows.
“Then? Oh, there wasn’t any then, sir. Next thing I knew I was in bed, with you and Doctor Trowbridge bending over me and looking as solemn and learned as a pair of owls. But the funny part of it all was that I wasn’t ill at all; just too tired to answer when you spoke to me.”
“And what became of this small kitten, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked.
“Mother didn’t see it. I’m afraid the little thing was frightened when I fell, and jumped out of the bathroom window.”
“U’m?” Jules de Grandin teased the needle-points of his mustache between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger; then: “And this so mysterious lady without clothing whom you saw reflected in your mirror, Mademoiselle? Could you, by any chance, identify her?”
“Of course,” responded Greta, matter-of-factly as though he’d asked her if she had studied algebra at school, “she was the girl whose portrait’s in the living-room downstairs, Kristina Friebergh.”
“WILL YOU LEAVE ME in the village?” asked de Grandin as we left the Friebergh house. “I would supplement the so strange story which we heard last night by searching through the records at the church and court-house, too.”
Dinner was long overdue when he returned that evening, and, intent upon his dressing, he waved my questioning aside while he shaved and took a hasty shower. Finally, when he had done justice to the salad and meringue glacé, he leant his elbows on the table, lit a cigarette and faced me with a level, serious glance.
“I have found out many things today, my friend,” he told me solemnly. “Some supplement the story which Monsieur Friebergh related; some cast new light upon it; others are, I fear, disquieting.
“By example: There is a story of the little kitten of which Monsieur Friebergh told us, the kitten which refused to grow into a cat. When poor Madame Kristina was first haled before the magistrates for trial, a most careful search was made for it, but nowhere could the searchers find it; yet during the al fresco trial several persons saw it now here, now there, keeping just outside the range of stone-throw, but at all times present. Further, when the ban of witchcraft had apparently been lifted by Madame Kristina’s inability to float and her burial within the churchyard close had been permitted, this so little kitten was seen nightly at her grave, curled up like a patch of snow against the greenery of the growing grass. Small boys shied stones at it, and more than once the village men went to the graveyard and took shots at it, but stone and bullet both were ineffective; the small animal would raise its head and look at those who sought to harm it with a sadly thoughtful glance, then go back to its napping on the grave. Only when approached too closely would it rouse itself, and when the hunter had almost succeeded in tiptoeing close enough to strike it with a club or sword it would completely vanish, only to reappear upon the grave when, tired out with waiting, its assailant had withdrawn to a safe distance.
“Eventually the townsfolk became used to it, but no horse would pass the cemetery while it lay upon its mistress’ grave without shying violently, and the most courageous of the village dogs shunned the graveyard as a place accursed. Once, indeed, a citizen took out a pair of savage mastiffs, determined to exterminate the little haunting beast, but the giant dogs, which would attack a maddened bull without a moment’s hesitation, quailed and cowered from the tiny bit of fluffy fur, nor could their master’s kicks and blows and insults force them past the graveyard gateway.”
“Well, what’s disquieting in that?” I asked. “It seems to me that if there were any sort of supernatural intervention in the case, it was more divine than diabolical. Apparently the townsfolk tried to persecute the little harmless cat to death exactly as they had its mistress. The poor thing died eventually, I suppose?”
“One wonders,” he returned as he pursed his lips and blew a geometrically perfect smoke-ring.
“Wonders what?”
“Many things, parbleu. Especially concerning its death and its harmlessness. Attend me, if you please: For several years the small cat persisted in its nightly vigils at the grave. Then it disappeared, and people thought no more about it. One evening Sarah Spotswood, a young farmer’s daughter, was passing by the graveyard, when she was accosted by a small white cat. The little creature came out in the road near where it winds within a stone’s-throw of the grave of Kristina Friebergh. It was most friendly, and when she stooped to fondle it, it leaped into her arms.”
He paused and blew an
other smoke-ring.
“Yes?” I prompted as he watched the cloudy circle sail a lazy course across the table-candles.
“Quite yes,” he answered imperturbably. “Sarah Spotswood went insane within a fortnight. She died without regaining reason. Generally she was a harmless, docile imbecile, but occasionally she broke out raving in delirium. At such times she would shriek and writhe as though in torment, and bleeding wounds appeared upon her sides and breast and throat. The madhouse-keepers thought she had inflicted injury upon herself, and placed her in a straitjacket when they saw the signs of the seizure coming on. It made no difference: the wounds accompanied each spell of madness, as though they were stigmata. Also, I think it worth while mentioning, a small white kitten, unknown to anybody in the madhouse, was always observed somewhere about the place when Sarah’s periods of mania came.
“Her end came tragically, too. She escaped surveillance on a summer afternoon, fled to a little near-by stream and cast herself into it. Though the water was a scant six inches deep, she lay upon her face until she died by drowning.
“Two other similar cases are recorded. Since Sarah Spotswood died in 1750 there have been three young women similarly seized, the history of each case revealing that the maniac had taken a stray white kitten for pet shortly before the onset of incurable madness, and that in every instance the re-appearance of this kitten, or an animal just like it, had coincided with return of manic seizures. Like their predecessor, each of these unfortunate young women succeeded in drowning herself. In view of these things would you call this kitten either dead or harmless?”
“You have a theory?” I countered.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 67
