“While I was still half-climbing, half-crawling up the stairs, I beard a woman’s scream, ‘Howly Mither, ’tis th’ banshee!’ and recognized Maggie Gourlay, my uncle’s cook and housekeeper. She and her husband, Tom, were his only servants, and shared all the household duties between them.
“When I finally reached the landing above, Maggie stood at the far end of the hall, her teeth fairly chattering, her eyes bulging with terror.
“‘Ouch, Misther David, ’tis all over wid Misther Absalom, God rist ’im!’ she hailed me as I came up. ’Tis meself just seen the banshee woman lave ’is room. Don’t go nigh, Misther David; she may be waitin’ fer others o’ th’ family.’
“‘Nonsense,’ I panted. ‘Didn’t you hear my uncle call? Come here; we must see what he wants.’
“‘Wurra, wurra, ’tis nothin’ but a praste an’ an undertaker he’ll be nadin’ now, sor!’ she answered, without coming a step nearer.
“I couldn’t wait for the superstitious old fool to get over her hysteria, for my uncle might be seriously ill, I thought; so I rapped sharply on his door, then, receiving no answer, pushed my way into his room.
“Uncle Absalom lay on his bed, the covers thrown back, one foot hanging just off the floor, as though he had been in the act of rising. His arms were folded over his breast, his fingers locked together, clasping a pillow tightly against his chest and face.
“I switched on the light and removed the pillow; then I knew. I’d never seen a newly dead man before, but I needed no one to tell me my uncle was dead. I think we recognize death instinctively, just as a child recognizes and hates a snake without having been told reptiles are deadly. My uncle’s jaw had sagged and his tongue had fallen forward and outward, as though he were making an inane grimace, and there was a bright, transparent film over his still opened eyes.
“I turned back his pajama jacket to feel his heart, and then it was I noticed the mark. It was just to the right of his left breast, a sort of deep purple, like a discolored bruise or a St. Andrew’s birthmark, less than an inch high, and faintly raised, like the wale left by a whiplash. Here”—the young man leaned forward, took a slender gold pencil from his pocket and drew a design on the margin of his uncle’s will—“it was like this:”
“Mordieu, do you say it?” de Grandin exclaimed in a low, tense voice. “Barbe dun singe, c’est le plus étrange!”
“Something else I noticed, though at the time it made little impression on me,” Monteith continued: “There was a distinct odor of spice or incense—almost the odor you find in a Catholic church after services—in the room. It wasn’t till considerably later, when I began rearranging my recollections, that I recalled it.
“Once I’d made sure Uncle Absalom was dead, Maggie and Tom seemed to have no more fear. They came into the room, helped me arrange his body, then assisted me down the hall to find Louella. She’d slept through it all, and I had to hammer on her door to waken her.”
“You, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked. “Did not the servants knock?”
“Why”—the young man seemed to catch his breath as sudden recollection struck him—“why no; they didn’t.
“D’ye know, Dr. de Grandin,” he leaned toward the little Frenchman in his earnestness, “I believe they kept behind me purposely. At the time I thought nothing of it, but since you asked me about who knocked on Louella’s door, I distinctly remember Tom held me under one arm and Maggie under the other, but both walked a little behind me, and both stood back when we halted at my sister’s room.”
“U’m?” de Grandin murmured. “And then what, if you please?”
“When Louella finally woke and let us in, she seemed so sleepy I had to shake her to make her understand what had happened. At first she just looked uncomprehendingly at me and kept repeating whatever I said to her in a dreamy singsong voice.”
“U’m?” de Grandin murmured again. “And—”
“By George, yes! Now I think of it, there was that same scent of incense in her room, too. I’m positive it wasn’t in the hall or anywhere else; just in Uncle’s room and hers.”
“Tiens, at any rate, it was the odor of sanctity you smelled,” the Frenchman returned with a chuckle. “Now, concerning this so strange mark you found upon Monsieur your uncle’s breast. Was it—”
“I was coming to that,” Monteith interrupted. “As soon as we could we got in touch with the nearest physician, Dr. Canby. He came about an hour later, examined Uncle Absalom’s body, and gave a certificate of death by heart failure.
“I asked him about the mark and wanted to know if, in his opinion, it had any significance. He just looked at me and asked, ‘What mark?’
“We argued about it for a while, and both of us lost our tempers a little, I think. Finally, distasteful as it was, I went into Uncle’s room, unbuttoned his sleeping-jacket and pointed to his breast.”
“Yes, and then?” de Grandin demanded, leaning toward the narrator, his little eyes fairly aglow with anticipation.
“Nothing,” Monteith returned in dull, anticlimactic voice. “There was nothing there. The mark had disappeared.”
“A-a-ah?” de Grandin let his breath out slowly between his teeth as he leaned back in his chair.
“But, Dave, are you sure you saw that mark on Uncle’s flesh?” the girl asked gently. “In the excitement and the poor light, mightn’t you have imagined—”
“No,” the young man answered positively. “I’m certain it was there when I found Uncle Absalom, and just as certain it had disappeared when I looked the second time.”
“Mais oui, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin put in. “Monsieur your brother is undoubtlessly right. This business, it promises interest. Dr. Trowbridge and I shall do ourselves the honor of calling on you tomorrow or as soon thereafter as may be.”
WE SAT LONG BEFORE the fire after David and Louella Monteith had gone. The Frenchman smoked cigarette after cigarette in moody silence, staring at the leaping flames in the fireplace as fixedly as a crystal-gazer seeking inspiration from his globe. At length:
“Friend Trowbridge, it is most remarkable, is it not?” he demanded abruptly.
“What?” I answered.
“That sign, that stigma on Monsieur the Grave-Robber’s breast.”
“Why, yes,” I agreed. “It is odd it should have showed a few moments after death, then disappeared. I wonder, after all, if the girl was right. Young David might have imagined it, and—”
“Non,” he cut in. “The disappearance is the least mystifying phenomenon of all. It is of its form I speak. Did not you recognize it?”
“Why, no. It looked something like the conventionalized outline of a boot to me, but—”
“Ah bah,” he exclaimed, “that sign, my friend, was the ideograph standing for the Goddess Aset, or, as she is better known to us, Isis, whom the Egyptians of old knew as the All-Mother. She Who Was and Is and Is to Be. It was she whom the priest Sepa, who so violently cursed the despoilers of his tomb, served, you will remember.”
“Well—”
“Exactly, precisely, quite so; I damn think we shall see interesting things before he have done with this matter, friend.”
Early next morning he set off to visit the old priest in charge of the local Greek Orthodox Church. I stopped by the rectory something after four o’clock in the afternoon and together we set out to visit the Monteiths.
2
“JOURNEY’S END,” THE QUAINT old Georgian house where Absalom Barnstable had spent the closing uneventful decade of his adventurous life and finally met mysterious death, was three stories high, flat-roofed, not particularly beautiful, and unexpectedly comfortable. Built of time-mellowed red brick with slightly discolored facings of white stone, it stood a dozen yards or so back from the Albemarle Pike, in the sparsely settled country lying ten miles east of Harrisonville. An iron railing, ornamented with faces, javelins and twining garlands, after the fashion of the late eighties, divided the front yard from the road, and on each side of the door, wh
ich was approached by three white-stone steps, grew a small privet tree neatly clipped and trimmed into a pyramid of dull, rich green.
The entire ground floor, with the exception of kitchen, pantry and furnace room, was given over to a museum for housing the late owner’s antiquities. Partitions separating the big, high-ceiled rooms had been knocked out, and the major part of the story made into one great storehouse of curios—brightly painted mummy-cases, glass-fronted cabinets containing bits of ancient vertu, and tall, mahogany wardrobes, each furnished with secure locks, storing such relics as were not for open display.
The second story contained a large, old-fashioned formal drawing-room, a library with walls lined from baseboard to molding with book-laden shelves, and an open fireplace of almost baronial proportions, a dining-room vast as a banquet hall, and two guest-bedrooms, each with private bath. Sleeping-quarters for the family and servants and two large lumber rooms occupied the top floor.
Old Tom Gourlay, butler and majordomo of the establishment, met us at the gate and helped us with our luggage when we arrived at the house shortly before six in the evening. Behind him, in the lower entranceway, waited his wife, Maggie, looking very demure in her black bombazine dress and white apron, but an expression of lurking suspicion—a certain grimness about her lips and hardness in her eyes—made me glance sharply at her a second time as we followed her husband up the wide stairway to the library where our host and hostess waited.
The Frenchman noted the woman’s odd air of constraint, too, for he whispered as we ascended, “She will bear watching, that one, Friend Trowbridge.”
Dinner was served shortly after our arrival, and despite de Grandin’s efforts at small talk the meal proved a gloomy one, for we caught ourselves looking furtively at each other from under lowered lids, and though the old butler maintained his air of well-bred, stoical calm, on more than one occasion I caught a glimpse of Maggie Gourlay standing at the serving-pantry door, her queer, hard gaze fixed intently on Louella Monteith’s sleek, bowed head.
Shortly after coffee had been served in the library de Grandin excused himself and, motioning me to accompany him, stole silently down the stairs. “The surest defense lies in attack, my friend,” he explained as he led the way toward the kitchen. Then, as we entered the big, steamy room without preliminary knock, he demanded:
“Tell me, my friends, what was it you observed the night your unfortunate employer met his end?”
The servants started as though he had flung an accusation at them. Old Tom opened his lips, licked them lightly with the tip of his tongue, then closed them again and averted his eyes, like a sullen schoolboy chided by his teacher.
Not so his wife. An angry, challenging light shone in her Celtic blue eyes as she answered: “Why don’t ye ask her about it, sor? She’ll be better able ter tell ye than Tom or me, good Christians that we be.”
“Dites,” de Grandin pursed his lips, “is it an accusation that you make, my old one?”
“I’m making no accusations, an’ I’m sayin nothin’ agin nobody,” the woman returned sullenly, “leastwise, not widin hearin’ distance of ears as miss nothin’. See here, sor,”—she softened, as women always did when Jules de Grandin regarded them with that elfish, provocative smile of his—“ye’re from th’ other side; have ye ever been to Ireland—do ye know annything o’ her fairy lore?”
“Ah-ho,” de Grandin let his breath out with a half-chuckle, “the winds blows that way, hein? Yes, my excellent one, I have been to your so beautiful island, and I know much of her traditions. What is it you have seen which reminds you of the old sod?”
The woman hesitated, casting a half-defiant, half-fearful glance at the ceiling above her; then, confidentially:’ “What sort o’ folk is it as can’t call a name three times runnin’ or eat three helpin’s o’ food at wan meal, or drink three sups o’ drink?” she demanded with a sort of subdued ferocity.
The Frenchman met her earnest, searching stare with a level, unwinking look. “Fairy folk, and witches, and ghosts of the departed who masquerade as living men,” he answered glibly, as though reciting a lesson learned by rote. “Also those who have sold themselves to the Evil One, or they who have any manner of traffic with the Powers of Darkness—”
“True for ye, sor,” she interrupted with a satisfied nod. “Ye’re a gentleman, an’ non o’ these learned fools who laugh at th’ old-time truths an’ call ’em superstition. Then listen:
“When first they came here, th’ crippled Misther David an’ she who calls herself his sister, I wuz mightily afeared o’ th’ green eyes of her, an’ of her pale, bloodless face an’ her smilin’ red lips, so thin an’ cruel, wid th’ white teeth flashin’ so close behint ’em, so I sets a trap fer her. Whenever she wanted me, I pretended not to hear her call th’ first time, nor th’ second. Did she call twice? She did, sor. Did she call th’ charmed third time? Niver!
“An’, ‘Tom,’ sez I to me old man, ‘do you be watchin’ how she eats an’ drinks at the table while ye’re servin’ th’ dinners,’ an’ to make sure he wuzn’t fooled be th’ wicked, false beauty of her pale face, I climbs th’ stairs an’ watches her from th’ servin-panthry door myself. More than wanst I watched her, sor, but niver, as God an’ th’ blessed St. Patrick hear me spake, did I see her put th’ third piece o’ meat or bread in her mouth, nor did she ever take a third cup o’ wine, though Tom at me express orders would fill her glass no more than half full, so she’d have all th’ chanct a Christian woman needed ter ask for a third helpin’ o’ th’ crater.”
“U’m?” de Grandin tweaked the tightly waxed ends of his diminutive blond mustache. “And what else, if you please? The night your master died, by example—”
“Jest so, sor,” she broke in eagerly. “’Twas afther we’d heard old Misther Abs’lom cry out in mortal anguish an’ whilst Misther Davy—poor lad!—wuz clumpin’ an’ clompin’ up th’ stairs from th’ lib’ry below, we seen it come out from his room. All scairt an’ terror-shook as we wuz, I hollered out that ’twas th’ banshee that walked th’ house be night, but ’twarn’t, sor. ’Twuz her—or it—sor, as howly St. Bridget hears me say it, ’twas her!
“Sure, an’ I seen her come sneakin’ from out his door, wid her cruel, red lips parted in a divil’s laugh an’ her terrible green eyes shootin’ fire at me through th’ dark, freezin’ me where I stood.
“Down th’ hall she went, sor, so quiet-like ye’d have swore she floated, for niver mortal woman stepped so softly, an’ when she turned th’ corner o’ th’ corridor, I knew we’d seen an evil thing that night; a witch-woman from Kylenagranagh Hill, arrayed in th’ likeness o’ pore Misther Abs’lom’s blood-kin. Then it wuz me lips wuz loosened, an’ I called aloud ter Misther Davy to beware—fer who knew but that she looked fer more o’ th’ masther’s blood to destroy, havin’ already kilt th’ old man dead wid her magic power.”
“I DECLARE, I’M SO SLEEPY I can scarcely keep my eyelids up!” Louella Monteith told us a few minutes after we rejoined her and her brother in the library upstairs. “I’ve not stirred from the house today, but I haven’t been so drowsy since—” she broke off abruptly, her eyes widening with something like horror.
“Yes, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin prompted softly.
“Since the night Uncle Absalom died,” she answered. “I was terribly drowsy from right after dinner that evening, too, and slept like a log from the moment I went to bed—remember what trouble David had to waken me when he and the servants came to my room, to tell me—”
“Précisément,” de Grandin agreed. “By all means, Mademoiselle, do not let us keep you from your needed rest. Dr. Trowbridge and I are here to help, not to make nuisances of ourselves.”
“You won’t mind?” she asked gratefully as she rose to leave. “Good-night, gentlemen; good-night, Davy, dear; don’t sit up too late, please.”
Midnight sounded on the tall clock in the hall, still we talked and smoked in the library. David Monteith was widely read and widely
traveled, and his flow of conversation was as interesting as it was varied in subject-matter. We were discussing some comic idiosyncrasies of Parisian concierges and taxi-drivers when de Grandin halted the talk with upraised hand.
Quickly as a cat and as silently, he stole to the door, motioning over his shoulder for me to shut off the library lights. A moment he stood silent in the doorway of the darkened room, then crept down the hall toward the stairs leading to the museum below.
Ten minutes or so later he rejoined us with a shamefaced smile. “Jules de Grandin grows old and nervous, I fear,” he admitted with a humorous lift of his eyebrows. “He starts at shadows and hears ghostly footsteps in the creaking of old floor-boards. My friends, it is late. My vote is that we retire: Do you agree?”
“NON, MY FRIEND, IT may not be,” he denied as I prepared to disrobe shortly after we had bid our host good-night. “Remove the shoes, by all means; otherwise remain clothed. I fear we shall have small sleep this night.”
“But,” I protested, “I thought you were so sleepy. You said—”
“Assuredly,” he agreed with a nod as he replaced his evening shoes with a pair of soft-soled slippers, “and the mother who would still her little one’s fear declares she hears nothing when she is most certain she hears a burglar prying at the window-latch. Attend me, my friend:
“While you, Monsieur Monteith and I talked all pleasantly in the library I did descry the soft, so silent step of someone creeping down the stairs. At once I bid you shut off the light, that I might not stand out in silhouette against its glow and thus betray myself; then I did reconnoiter.
“All quietly down the stairway Mademoiselle Louella did steal, and to one of those great, fast-locked cabinets she went unerringly, though the museum was dark as Pluto’s own subcellar.
“Today she told me she knew not where the keys of those locked cases were—that her late uncle had them in a secret place and that she knew it not—but with a key she did unlock that cabinet door, and though that key was one of many on a ring, she made no difficulty finding it in the dark, or in fitting it to the lock. No.
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