“Tell me,” she added suddenly, “what’s become of Walter? I’ve been so weak and miserable all the while that I’ve scarcely noticed his absence; but I haven’t seen him once. Oh, Dr. Trowbridge, Dr. de Grandin, don’t tell me that awful creature—that horrible monster—hurt him—killed—oh, no! That would be too cruel! Don’t tell me, if it’s so!”
“It is not so, Madame,” de Grandin assured her gently. “Monsieur your husband has suffered severe shock also, though as yet we do not know what induced it; but we believe he will soon be himself again; then we shall bring him to you.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, sir,” she answered, the first smile showing on her pale, wasted face. “Oh, I’m so glad. My Walter, my beloved, is safe!” Clean, cleansing tears, overwrought woman’s best restorative, coursed down her cheeks.
“Be of good courage, Madame,” de Grandin bade. “You have suffered much, but you have youth and love, you have each other; you also have Jules de Grandin for ally. The odds are all in your favor. But of course.”
3
“WELL, WHAT D’YE MAKE of it?” I demanded as we descended the Winnicott front steps. “Sounds to me as if she fell asleep and suffered such a nightmare that it carried over into her conscious mind, and—”
“And Monsieur her husband, who has been no less profoundly affected—did he also suffer a realistic cauchemar at the same time, perhaps?” broke in the Frenchman. “Non, my friend, your theory is untenable. I would it were not; the explanation would provide an easy exit from our difficulties.”
I set my lips grimly. “D’ye know what I think?” I answered.
“Parbleu, do you?” his elfin grin took the sting from the sarcasm.
“I believe the poor girl was temporarily unbalanced by some dreadfully vivid dream, and when that worthless scoundrel she married realized it, he took her home—returned her like an unprincipled woman throwing back a piece of merchandise on a shopkeeper’s hands!”
“But this so strange malady he suffered—still suffers?” de Grandin protested.
“Is malingering, pure and simple, or his guilty conscience preying on his mind,” I returned.
“Oh, la, la; le bon Dieu preserve the little patience with which heaven has endowed Jules de Grandin!” he prayed. “My good Trowbridge, my excellent, practical one, ever seeing but so much oil and pigment in a painting, but so many hundredweight of stone in a statue. Mort d’un coq, but you annoy me, you vex me, you anger and enrage me—me, I could twist your so stupid neck! What lies behind all this I know no more than you, but may Satan serve me fried turnip with parsley if I traverse Monsieur Robin Hood’s barnyard seeking a conventional explanation for something which fairly reeks of the superphysical. No, a reason there is, there must be, but you are as far from seeing it as an Icelander is from hearing the blackbirds whistle in the horse-chestnuts of St. Cloud! Yes.”
“Well, where are you going to hunt this supernatural explanation?” I demanded.
“I did not say supernatural,” he answered acidly. “Everything is natural, though if we do not know, or if we misread nature’s laws, we falsely call it otherwise. Consider: Fifty years ago a man beholding the radio would have called it supernatural, yet the laws of physics governing the device were known as well then as now. But their application had not yet been learned. So in this case. Who—or what—it was Madame Whitney beheld upon her bridal night we do not know, nor do we in anywise know why she should have seen it; but that it was no figment of a dream Jules de Grandin is prepared to wager his far from empty head. Certainly.
“Now, first, we shall interrogate Monsieur Whitney; perhaps he can tell us that which will put us on the proper track. Failing that, we shall make discreet inquiries at the inn where the manifestation was seen. In that way we may acquire information. In any event, we shall not cease to seek until we have found. No, Jules de Grandin is not lightly to be thrown off the trail of ghost or human evildoer, Friend Trowbridge.”
“Humph!” I grunted. There seemed nothing else to say.
4
“DES BONNES NOUVELLES, MON ami!” de Grandin exclaimed. “But yes; certainly; assuredly we bring you great tidings of gladness: Madame your wife is most greatly improved, and if you show similar progress we shall take you to her within the week. Come, smile. Is it not wonderful?”
Walter Whitney raised a face which was like a death mask of joy, and the smile he essayed was sadder than any tears. “I can’t see her; I shall never see her again,” he answered tonelessly.
“What is it you say? But this is infamous—monstrous!” the Frenchman exploded. “Madame your wife, who has but emerged from the valley of death’s shadow, desires to see you; la pauvre, belle creature, she expected, she deserved happiness and love and tenderness; she has had only sorrow and suffering, and you sit there, Monsieur, like a bullfrog upon the marsh-bank, and say you can not see her! It is damnable, no less, cordieu!” He fairly sputtered in his fury.
“I know,” Whitney answered wearily. “I’m the cause of it all; she’ll suffer worse, though, if I see her again.”
“What, cochon!—you would threaten her, the wife of your bosom?” De Grandin’s strong, deceptively slender fingers worked spasmodically.
For an instant faint animation showed in young Whitney’s somber, brooding face. “It isn’t anything I’d do to her—I’d give my heart’s blood to save her an instant’s suffering!—but it’s through me, though without my intention, that she’s suffered as she has, and any attempt on my part to join her would only renew it I can’t see her, I mustn’t see her again—ever. That’s final.”
“May Jules de Grandin stew everlastingly in hell with Judas Iscariot on his left hand and he who first invented Prohibition on his right if it be so!” the Frenchman cried.
“Lache, coward, wife-deserter, attend me: From her parent’s arms and from her loving home you took that pure, sweet girl. Before the holy altar of your God and before all men you vowed to love and cherish her for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. Together, beneath the golden beams of the honeymoon, you set forth upon life’s pathway. Ha, it was most pretty, was it not?” He smiled sarcastically. “Then what? This, mordieu: At the inn Madame your wife experienced a shock, she became hysterical, temporarily deranged, we will say; it is often so when young girls leave the bridal altar for their husbands’ arms. And you, what of you? Ha, you, the man on whose lips still clung the lying words you mouthed before the altar, you saw her so piteous condition, and like the poltroon you are, you did return her to her home; yes, to her parent’s house; pardieu, you took her back as an unprincipled woman returns a damaged gown to the shopman! Ha, you decorate your sex, Monsieur; I do remove my hat in your so distinguished presence!” Seizing his wide-brimmed Panama, he clapped it on his head, then swept it nearly to the floor in an elaborate parody of a ceremonious bow.
White lines showed in Walter Whitney’s face, deep wrinkles of distress cut vertically, down his cheeks. “It’s not so!” he cried, struggling weakly to rise. “It’s a damned, infernal lie! You know it is! Damn you, you slanderous rascal, you wouldn’t dare talk so if I had my strength! I tell you, I’m responsible for Rosemary’s condition today, though it’s no fault of mine. I said I’d give my blood to spare her—good Lord, what do you think this renunciation is costing me? I—oh, you wouldn’t understand; you’d say I was crazy if I told you!”
“Your pardon, mon petit pauvre,” de Grandin answered quickly. “I did but hurt you to be kind, as the dentist tortures for a moment with his drill that the longer agony of toothache may be avoided. You have said what I wished; I shall not pronounce you crazy if you tell me all; on the contrary, I shall thank you greatly. Moreover, it is the only way that I can be rendered able to help you and Madame Whitney back to happiness. Come, begin at the beginning, and tell me what you can. I am all attention.”
Whitney looked at him speculatively a moment. “If you laugh at me I’ll wring your neck when I get well,” he threatened.
“I suppose you and Rosem
ary and everybody else were justified in thinking all you did of me when I took her home the other morning,” he continued, “but I did it only because I knew nowhere else to go, and I knew my brain was going to snap ’most any minute, so I had to get her to a place of safety.
“I don’t know whether you know it or not, Dr. Trowbridge,” he added, turning to me, “but none of the men in my family that I can remember have ever married.”
“Your father—” I began with a smile, but he waved the objection aside.
“I don’t mean that. You’ve known us all; think of my uncles, my cousins, my elder brothers. See what I mean?”
I nodded. It was true. His mother’s three brothers had died unmarried; had never, as far as I knew, even had sweethearts, though they were fine, sociable fellows, well provided for financially, and prime favorites with the ladies. Two of his cousins had perished in the World War, both bachelors; another was as confirmed in celibacy as I; the fourth had recently taken his vows as an Episcopal monk. His brothers, both many years his senior, were still single. No, the score was perfect. Walter was the first male of his blood to take a wife within living memory.
“Both your sisters married,” I reminded him.
“That’s just it; it doesn’t affect the women.”
“What in the world—” I began, but he turned from me to de Grandin.
“My parents were both past forty when I was born, sir,” he explained. “My brothers and sisters were all old enough to have had me for a child, and both the girls were married, with families of their own before I came. I used to wonder why all our men were bachelors, but when I mentioned it, nobody seemed to care to answer. Finally, when I was just through prep school and ready to go to Amherst, my Aunt Deborah took me aside and tried to make it plain.
“Poor old girl! I can see her now, almost ninety years of age, with a chin and nose that almost met and the shrewdest, most knowing eyes I’ve ever seen in a human face. I used to think the man who illustrated the fairy-tale books got his idea of the witches from looking at her when I was a little tad, and later I regarded her as a harmless old nut who’d rather find the hole than the doughnut any day. Well, she’s got the laugh on me from the grave, all right.
“‘You must never think of marrying, Wally,’ she told me. ‘None of our men can, for it means only woe and calamity, usually death or madness for the wives, if they do. Look at your brothers, your uncles and your cousins; they’ll never marry; neither must you.’
“Naturally, I asked why. I’d had one or two heavy love affairs during prep days, and was already thinking seriously of settling down and raising a mustache and a family as soon as I graduated from college. Her statement rather seemed to cramp my style.
“‘Because it’s a curse put on our family,’ she answered. ‘Way back, so far none of us know just how it happened, or why, one of our ancestors did something so utterly vile and wicked that his blood and his sons’ blood has been cursed forever. We’ve traced our genealogy through the female line for generations, for two generations of the family have never lived to bear the same surname.
“‘See here,’—she took me out into the hall where the old Quimper coat of arms hung framed upon the wall—‘that’s the crest of the ancestor who brought the curse upon us. The family—at least his direct male descendants—died out in England centuries ago and the arms were struck from the rolls of the College of Heralds for want of one to bear them, but the blood’s poisoned, and you’ve got it in your veins. Wally, you must never, never think of marrying. It would be kinder to kill the girl outright, instead!’
“She was so earnest about it that she gave me the creeps, and laughing at her didn’t better things.
“‘Once, long ago, so long that I can only remember hearing my parents talk of when I was a very little girl,’ she told me, ‘one of our men dared the curse and married. His wife went stark, raving mad on her bridal night, and he lived to be a broken, embittered old man. That’s the only instance I know of the rule being broken, but don’t you break it, Wally, or you’ll be sorry; you’ll never forgive yourself for what you did to the girl you loved when you married her!’
“Aunt Deborah was dead and in her grave at Shadow Lawns when I came back from college, and Mother had only the vaguest notions of the curse. Like me, she was inclined to regard it as one of the old lady’s crack-brained notions, and, though she never actually said so, I think she resented the influence the old girl had in keeping so many of our men single.
“Mother died two years ago, and I’ve lived here by myself since. Rosemary and I had known each other since the days when I used to scalp her every afternoon and hang her favorite doll in chains each morning, and while we’d never really been sweethearts in our younger days, we’d always been the best of friends and kept up the old intimacy. Last Decoration Day I was a little late getting out to Shadow Lawns, and when I reached the family plot I met Rosemary coming away. She’d been putting flowers on my parents’ graves.
“That really started it. We became engaged last fall, and, as you know, were married this month.
“Oh, Lord,” his face went pale and strained as though with bodily torture, “if I’d only known! If I’d only known!”
“Eh bien, Monsieur, we also desire to know,” de Grandin reminded.
“We’d planned everything,” Whitney continued. “The house was to be redecorated throughout, and Rosemary and I were going to spend our honeymoon away while the painters were at their work here.
“The night we married we drove to Carteret Inn and I waited in the garden while she unpacked and made her toilet for the night, The blood was pounding at my temples and my breath came so fast it almost smothered me while I strolled about that moonlit garden.
“D’ye remember how you felt sort o’ weak and trembly inside the first time you went up to ring a girl’s doorbell—the first time you called on your first sweetheart?” he asked, turning a wan smile in my direction.
I nodded.
“That’s how I felt that night. I’d been a clean-lived chap, Dr. Trowbridge. I’m not bragging; it just happened so; but that night I thanked God from the bottom of my heart that Rosemary could give me no more than I took to her—there’s consolation for all the ‘good times’ missed in that kind of thought, sir.”
Again I nodded, thoroughly ashamed of all the suspicions I’d voiced against the lad.
“I kept looking at my watch, and it seemed to me the thing must have stopped, but at last a half-hour crawled by—it seemed more like half a century. Then I went in.
“Just as I began to mount the stairs I thought I saw a shadow in the upper hall, but when I looked a second time it was gone; so I assumed it had been one of the hotel servants passing on his duties, and paid no more attention. The latch of our door seemed stuck somehow, or perhaps my nervous fingers were clumsy; at any rate, I had some trouble getting in. Then—”
He stopped so long I thought he had repented his decision to take us into his confidence, but at length he finished:
“Then I went in. My God! What a sight! Something like a man, but green all over, like a body that has lain in the river till it’s ready to drop apart was standing by the bed, holding Rosemary in its arms, and nuzzling at her bosom where her pajamas had been torn away with the most horrible, obscene mouth I’ve ever seen.
“I tried to rush the thing and beat it off, but my limbs were paralyzed; neither arm nor leg could I move. I couldn’t even cry out to curse the foul nightmare-goblin that held my wife against its nude, slimy breast and wheezed and snuffled at her as an old, asthmatic dog might sniff and slaver at a wounded bird.
“At last the horror seemed aware of my presence. Still holding Rosemary in its arms, it lifted its misshapen head and grinned hellishly at me. Its eyes were big as silver dollars, and bright as fox-fire glowing in the marsh at night.
“‘I’m come to claim my rights, Sir Guy,’ it told me, though why in God’s name it should address me so I’ve no idea. “Tis many a year si
nce last one of your gentle line gave in to me; they’ve cheated me right handsomely by staying womanless; but you’ve been good to me, and I thank ye right kindly for it.’
“I stood and stared, petrified with horror, weak with positive physical nausea at the very sight of the fetid thing which held my wife, and the monster seemed suddenly to notice me again. ‘What, still here?’ it croaked. ‘Be off, ye churl! Have ye no more manners than to stand by staring while your liege lord wages his right? Be off, I say, or there ye’ll stand till all is done, nor will ye lift a hand to stay me.’
“But I did lift a hand. The terror which had held me spellbound seemed to melt as I caught a glimpse of Rosemary’s white face; and as the awful creature’s flat, frog’s claw hands ripped another shred of her nightclothes away, I yelled and charged across the room to grapple with the thing.
“With a dreadful, tittering laugh it dropped Rosemary on the bed and turned to meet my onset, drawing a sort of short, wide-bladed sword from its girdle as it did so. I never had a chance. The slimy, naked monster was shorter by a foot than I, but for all its misshapen deformity it was quick as lightning and tremendously strong. Its arms, too, were half again as long as mine, and before I could land a single blow it hit me on the head with the flat of its sword and floored me. I tried to rise, but it was on me before I could struggle to my knees, beating at my head with its blade, and down I went like a beaten prizefighter.
“HOW LONG I LAY unconscious I do not know, but when I came to, the first faint streaks of morning were lighting the room, and I could see almost as plainly as by moonlight. The horrid apparition had vanished, but there was a strong, almost overpowering stench in the room—a stink like the smell of stagnant water that’s clogged with drowned and rotting things.
“Rosemary lay half in, half out of bed, her lips crushed and bruised and a darkened spot upon her nose, as though she had been struck in the face. Her nightclothes were ripped to tatters, the jacket hanging to her shoulders by shreds, the trousers almost ripped away, and there were stains of blood on them.
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