“What your case was I did not know, Monsieur, for you had wisely failed to set on paper that which, had it reached other eyes than ours, might have made you a laughing-stock; but that you had a problem of more than ordinary interest I suspected, so I said to me, ‘I shall bear in mind this lady of the six toes; she are undoubtlessly connected with the problem of this house.’
“Then you told me of apparently trifling thefts, and of the odd manner in which a young-man guest had been hurt. Then you show us the statue of Madame la Comtesse. I gaze upon her loveliness—and she was very lovely, too—and what is it I see? Six toes on both her feet, parbleu! This is most strange; it pulls the long arm of coincidence clear out of joint. Here are two women, one of flesh, one of stone, and each of them has two more toes than usual.
“You tell me that the young men of your party are intrigued by the statue; that one of them has kissed her on the lips, and that he is the same one who has sustained mysterious woundings in the night whereby he has lost blood.
“The olden legends are perhaps but fairy tales to frighten children, yet when great clouds of smoke arise we may look for at least a little fire, and old legends are but the embalmed remains of ancient fact. From earliest times we have stories of men who wrought their ruin by embracing images of evil association, or otherwise acting the lover toward them. These things I think about while I try in vain to decipher the meaning of the inscription on the base of the monument.
“When we go to Monsieur Yellen the antique dealer’s to ask about the statue’s antecedents we meet a young rabbi, who tells us of a tale he heard in Drôme concerning one known as ‘The Silver Countess.’ That is sufficient to prime my memory, for I remember hearing tales of that same lady, and I remember the cryptogram of the inscription, ‘Mal. iii, 1,’ concerning which Friend Trowbridge and I have argued. To test the soundness of my theory I procure a small Bible and have Friend Trowbridge write down the Scriptural inscription which I read. He writes exactly as I have anticipated, and in the Bible I find the first verse of the third chapter of the Book of Malachi begins, ‘Behold, I will send my messenger.—’ It is a small thing, but enough. I am on the right trail, though my memory of the Silver Countess is still hazy.
“At once I call my good friend Professor Jacoby by telephone, and what he tells me makes my blood to run like ice water. In the olden days when such things were there lived a woman called the Countess Eleanor, sometimes called the Silver One, or Silver Countess. Her beauty was so great that no man could look in her face without becoming subject to her will. Her skin was like new milk, her lips were like old wine, her hair was like the moonlight—hence her sobriquet—and her soul was blacker than a raven bathed in ink.
“At fourteen she was married to a prowessed knight and went to live with him in his château near Valence, and presently he went away to fight the Turks for the faith that was in him. The Countess did not go with him. She stayed at home, and when he carne back unexpectedly and rushed to greet her in her bower he found her in the embrace of an incubus—a demon lover with whom she had long consorted by stealth.
“Tiens, there is no fool like a strong man in love, my friends. Instead of killing her forthwith, he took her to his bosom and forgave her, then went away to fight the infidel again.
“Among the hangers-on at the château was a talented young sculptor to whom the Silver Countess sat for her funerary monument, and when it had been finished she placed the statue in the château chapel where the moon’s rays fell on it. There she would go to it, and lay her warm lips on its cold stone mouth, her pulsing, warm bosom against its chilly marble breast. It was not right, it was unholy; but she was lady and mistress of the castle. What could her servants do?
“All soon horror came to the castle. One by one her servants failed and pined away, though no man knew their malady, and when at last there were none to keep watch on her the Countess Eleanor made high holiday with imps and satyrs, incubi and devils, and all the mighty company not yet made fast in hell.
“It could not last. In those days the Church frowned on such practices, and made her frown effective. At a specially convened tribunal the Countess Eleanor was put upon her trial for witchcraft and diabolism, convicted and sentenced to be hanged and burned like any common witch.
“The night before her execution she interviewed the sculptor of her statue. Next morning, when her sinful body had been burned to ashes and the ashes cast into the Rhine the young sculptor could not be found, but nightly ghostly revels were observed in the château. One by one the holy relics vanished from the chapel, by degrees the other monuments—those duly blessed with bell and book and candle—were defaced; at last the only image perfect and unblemished was that of Countess Eleanor, keeping lonely vigil in the chapelle mortuaire.
“Upon a night a hideous thing with blazing eyes and long and matted hair, clothed in motley rags and howling like a beast, attacked a peasant ploughman at the fall of dusk hard by the castle. The peasant defended himself lustily, and his assailant, sorely smitten, made to run away, but the ploughman followed hard, and tracked him to the château chapel, where he and some companions who had joined the chase came on the vanished sculptor lying prone upon the statute of the wicked countess, his lips pressed to hers, and on his mouth and on her stone lips was a smear of blood. The wretch had opened his own veins, sucked forth his blood, then with his mouth all reeking pressed it to the image of the woman he adored in death.
“Eh bien, there were ways of making those who did not wish to speak tell all they knew in those old days, my friends. Under torment he confessed that he had made a compact with his leman to steal the blessèd objects from the chapel, since her sinful spirit could not abide their nearness; and thereafter to rend and slay those whom he met and bear their blood in his mouth to her cold, sculptured lips for her refreshment.
“In my country we have a proverb concerning history: ‘Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose—the more it changes the more it is the same.’ So it was with Countess Eleanor, it seems. In 1358 when the Jacques revolted, the castle was stormed and taken, but for some reason her tomb was left inviolate. Again, in 1793, when every vestige of kingcraft was swept from France, a guard of Republican soldiers was sent to the château to demolish it, but save to deface the epitaph upon the tomb the citoyens did no hurt to the beautiful and evil effigy.
“For years the ruins bore an evil name. No traveler who knew the road would venture near them after dark, but sometimes strange wayfarers took shelter there, and death or madness was their portion.
“The last known chapter of the tragic history was in the war of France’s betrayal in 1871. In autumn of that year a foraging party of Uhlans was benighted near the castle and took shelter in the ancient chapel, the only portion of the building still under even partial roof.
“Next morning a company of francs-tireurs found them—three dead, the other dying. The dying man related how at midnight he had wakened with the pain of a sword-cut in his side, and seen his corporal lapping flowing blood from the severed throat of a comrade, then, with his dripping mouth, kissing and caressing a statue which lay stark and white in the midnight moonlight. With his pistol he had shot his officer, and the attitude of the man’s body bore witness that his tale was true; for across the marble statue lay the dead, his bloody lips fast-hung to those of Countess Eleanor.
“When I had learned these things I knew why old Monsieur Pumphrey went mad directly he had bought that statue; I understood why the poor Jewish young man went crazy and stripped his master’s shop of every holy thing, and why thereafter he sought to break and enter the shop. He whom the Silver Countess enthrals she first makes mad, then criminal. He must commit abominations, then seal the contract of his iniquity with a bloody kiss.
“Then it occurs to me this six-toed young lady also has a part in all this business—she and the young Monsieur Rodman who has been seen kissing that abominable statue. I make a survey of the facts. It does not appear that the Countess Eleanor ever
partook of female blood; always it was that of a man which was put to her lips. Young Rodman has caressed her, it is possible—indeed, it are quite probable—that he is one of her conquests. But the nature of his woundings seems to negative his having taken his own blood to her. Who, then, has been the go-between, the messenger? Why not the six-toed girl? Is it not logical to think there is rapport between the six-toed living woman and the six-toed effigy of the beauteous witch? Why not, en vérité?
“Very well. Last night I set a trap. When I found Mademoiselle Hatchot’s footprints in the hall I knew young Rodman had been visited by her, and rushed into his room without ceremony. It was well I did so, for he was sorely wounded and bleeding much. I made repairs on him and hurried to the gallery below where I found fresh blood—the blood of the young Rodman, parbleu!—upon the statue’s lips. It are a sign and seal of evil service rendered by her helpless servant. ‘Behold, I will send my messenger,’ was her parting gibe at humanity, carved on her tomb by that poor one whose soul she later stole away with her so evil loveliness.
“‘Madame la Comtesse,’ I tell her, ‘I damn believe you have sent your last messenger. I, Jules de Grandin, have found you!’ Yes.
“Alors, to Mademoiselle Hatchot’s chamber I repair and on her little six-toed feet I find the marks of powder I have spread before young Rodman’s door; but more important, on her lips I find the trace of the new blood which she has carried to that naughty one who lies all still and cold below. ‘It is sufficient evidence,’ I tell me. ‘At once, immediately, right away, I shall do the needful.’ And so I did.
“Against Friend Trowbridge’s protests I smash that sacré statue like a potter’s vessel. Beneath the hammering of my mace she are completely smashed, abolished, ruined, pardieu!
“Immediately I call the hospital where the young Weitzer are confined, and find that at the moment of that statue’s smashing he regained his sanity. The final link was fitted into the chain. Your so strange case is settled, Monsieur Swearingen.”
“What about the Hatchot girl?” asked Swearingen.
“What about the telephone through which you send a message, whether good or bad? She is wholly innocent. By chance she wears twelve toes instead of ten, and by that chance she became servant to a creature of extreme wickedness. Her mental state while in the service of her evil mistress was like that of one in anaesthesia. She knew not what she did, she can remember nothing. Friend Trowbridge can vouch that she lay in a light coma when we inspected her—”
“D’ye expect me to believe this damn nonsense?” Swearingen scoffed.
De Grandin lifted his shoulders in the sort of shrug no one but a Frenchman who wishes to indicate complete dissociation from a matter can give. “What you believe or disbelieve is of no moment to me, Monsieur. Me, I have disposed of the case according to your request.
“Tomorrow, or the next day, or perhaps the next day after that, you will receive my bill for services.”
The House without a Mirror
MY FRIEND JULES DE Grandin was in one of his gayest moods. Reclining against the plank seat of the john-boat he gazed with twinkling, bright blue eyes at the cloudless Carolina sky, tweaked the tips of his diminutive blond mustache till the waxed hairs thrust out to right and left of his small, thin-lipped mouth as sharply as a pair of twin fish-hooks, and gave vent to his own private translation of a currently popular song:
“Oui, nous n’avons plus de bananes;
Nous n’avons plus de bananes aujourd’hui!”
he caroled merrily.
“Say, looka yere, boss,” protested our colored factotum from the boat’s stern, “does yo’ all want ter shoot enny o’ dem birds, youh’s best be cuttin’ out dat music. Dese yere reed-birds is pow’ful skittish, wid so many no’then gemmen comin’ dhown yere an’ bangin’ away all ober de place wid deir pump-guns, an—”
“Là, là, mon brave,” the little Frenchman interrupted, “of what importance is it whether we kill ten dozen or none at all of the small ones? Me, I had as soon return to Monsieur Gregory’s lodge with empty bag as stagger homeward with a load of little feathered corpses. Have not these, God’s little ones, a good right to live? Why should we slay them when our bellies are well filled with other things?”
The Negro boy regarded him in hang-jawed amazement. That anyone, especially a “gemman” from the fabulous “no’th,” should feel compunction at slaughtering the reed-birds swarming among the wild rice was something beyond his comprehension. With an inarticulate grunt he thrust his ten-foot pole into the black mud bottom of the swamp canal and drove the punt toward a low-lying island at the farther end of the lagoon-like opening in the waterway. “Does yo’ all crave ter eat now?” he asked. “Ef yuh does, dis yere lan’ is as dry as enny ’round yere, an—”
“But of course,” de Grandin assented, reaching for the well-filled luncheon hamper our host had provided. “I am well-nigh perished with hunger, and if Monsieur Gregory has furnished brandy as well as food—Mordieu, may the hairs of his head each become a waxen taper to light his way to glory when he dies!”
The hamper was quickly unpacked and we sat cross-legged on a slight eminence to discuss assorted sandwiches, steaming coffee from vacuum bottles and some fine old cognac from a generously proportioned flask.
A faint rustling in the short grass at de Grandin’s elbow drew my attention momentarily from my half-eaten sandwich. “Look out!” I cried sharply.
“Lawd Gawd, boss, don’ move!” the colored boy added in a horrified tone.
Creeping unnoticed through the short, sun-dried vegetation with which the island was covered, a huge brown moccasin had approached within a foot of the little Frenchman and paused, head uplifted, yellow, forked tongue flickering lambently from venom-filled mouth.
We sat in frozen stillness. A move from the Negro or me might easily have irritated the reptile into striking blindly; the slightest stirring by de Grandin would certainly have invited immediate disaster. I could hear the colored guide’s breath rasping fearfully through his flaring nostrils; the pounding of my own heart sounded in my ears. I ran my tongue lightly over suddenly parched lips, noting, with that strange ability for minute inventory we develop at such times, that the membrane seemed rough as sandpaper.
Actually, I suppose, we held our statue-still pose less than a minute. To me it seemed a century. I felt the pupils of my eyes narrowing and ceasing to function as if I had just emerged from a darkened room into brilliant sunlight, and the hand which half raised the sandwich to my lips was growing heavy as a leaden fist when sudden diversion came.
Like a beam of light shot through a moonless night something whizzed through the still afternoon air from a thicket of scrub trees some thirty feet behind us; there was a sharp, clipping sound, almost like a pair of scissors snipping shut, and the deadly reptile’s head struck the ground with a smacking impact. Next instant the foul creature’s blotched body writhed upward, coiling and wriggling about a three-foot shaft of slender, flexible wood like the serpent round Mercury’s caduceus. A feather-tipped arrow had cleft the snake through the neck an inch or less behind its ugly, wedged-shaped head, and pinned it to the earth.
“Thank you, friend,” de Grandin cried, turning toward the direction from which the rescuing shaft had sped. “I know not who you are, but I am most greatly in your debt, for—”
He broke off, his lips refusing to frame another word, his small, round eyes staring unbelievingly at the visage which peered at us between the leaves.
The Negro boy followed the Frenchman’s glance, emitted a single shrill, terrified yell, turned a half somersault backward, regaining his feet with the agility of a cat and scurrying down the mud-flat where our boat lay beached. “Lawdy Gawdy,” he moaned, “hit’s de ha’nt; hit’s de swamp ha’nt, sho’s yuh bo’n! Lawd Gawd, lemme git erway fr’m heah! Please, suh, Gawd, sabe me, sabe dis pore nigger fr’m de ha’nt!”
He reached our punt, clambered aboard and shoved off, thrusting his pole against the lagoon
bottom and driving the light craft across the water with a speed like that of a racing motorboat. Ere de Grandin or I could more than frame a furious shout he rounded the curve of a dense growth of wild rice and disappeared as completely as though dissolved into the atmosphere.
The Frenchman turned to me with a grimace. “Cordieu,” he remarked, “we would seem to be between the devil and the sea, Friend Trowbridge. Did you, by any chance, see what I saw a moment hence?”
“Ye-es; I think so,” I assented. “If you saw something so dreadful no nightmare ever equaled it—”
“Zut!” he laughed. “Let us not be ungrateful. Ugly the face is, I concede; but its owner did us at least one good turn.” He pointed to the still-writhing snake, pinned fast to the earth by the sharp-tipped arrow. “Come, let us seek the ugly one. Though he be the devil’s own twin for ugliness, he is no less deserving of our thanks. Perhaps he will show further amiability and point out an exit from this doubly damned morass of mud and serpents.”
Treading cautiously, lest we step upon another snake, we advanced to the clump of scrub trees whence the repulsive face had peered. Several times de Grandin hailed the unseen monster whose arrow had saved his life, but no answer came from the softly rustling bushes. At length we pushed our way among the shrubs, and reached the covert where our unknown friend had been concealed. Nothing rewarded our search, though we passed entirely through the coppice several times.
I was about ready to drop upon the nearest rotting log for a moment’s rest when de Grandin’s shrill cry hailed me. “Regardez-vous,” he commanded, pointing to the black, greasy mud which sloped into the stagnant water.
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