Phantom Perfumes and Other Mysteries
Date: 1908-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Ghosts; Weird Fiction
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

PHANTOM PERFUMES
AND OTHER MYSTERIES

ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD

MobileRead Edition
2023

Tales to tantalize with mysteries, of this world — and the next.

Ethel Watts Mumford (1876/1878 – 1940) was an American author from New York City. She was a heavy producer of plays, vaudeville sketches, novels, short stories, joke collections, songs, poems, and articles. She also painted and illustrated books.

The contents of this book were first published in various periodicals 1918 ~ 1927. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Pit That He Digged
- Siren Cottage
- “Funeral Frank”
- Ether
- The Masque of Tragedy
- Phantom Perfumes

The Pit That He Digged

Ken Paulson stared across the table. With a strange feeling of the irrevocable, he realized that this was the Other Woman. A sidelong glance at his wife revealed her, dainty and delicate in every line and in every shade of her pale coloring. He noted with annoyance the pout of her almost childish lips as they closed over the straw in her lemonade-glass. Then his eyes, under their heavy, unmoving lids, slid back to the vivid face of his vis-à-vis. Her gaze was fixed amusedly on his, as if she heard the pounding of his heart, sensed the biting tingle of his nerves and was mocking him.

The color mounted to his face, came creeping toward his tightly curled red hair. To hide his confusion, he lifted the highball glass and gulped its contents. Then he leaned forward on his elbows, contemplating his hands — hands at once nervous and unresponsive, their lines deeply etched and darkly red. Conscious of the observation of the woman opposite, he closed his fists, suddenly withdrew his arms and, leaning back in the bent-wood restaurant chair, thrust both hands protectingly into his pockets. He had the crafty man’s knowledge that his naked fingers spoke louder than his masklike countenance.

“Nickey!” It was his wife’s clear voice that spoke. “Leave Bobby and come over here by me. It’s an age since we were together, and I’m just hungry for gossip.”

Nicaise Morley rose, her tall, slim figure a gracious silhouette against the white woodwork of the wall, and crossed behind McMonigal’s chair to the vacant seat Doris Paulson had drawn over from an unoccupied table. There she subsided with an easy uncoiling movement. Immediately the two women became absorbed in low-voiced, intimate talk. Paulson, McMonigal and Marham were abandoned to the affairs of men — McMonigal and Markham, that is, for Paulson sat silent; he was usually silent.

Paulson’s curiously direct, uncompromising mind, faced the situation squarely. He intended to have this woman, his wife’s friend. He had no doubt at all of his ability to interest her, to hold her, to bind her to him. He had a way with women. As for his wife, he had no qualm or question. As long as she did not make trouble, she was free to go on existing. If she made herself a convenience, so much the better. Meanwhile, until he should have burned his passion into her brain and heart, Nicaise Morley must be kept within sight, within touching-distance. Doris should invite her to the house at once — at the close of the present visit that had brought this tempting danger from the South. Doris’ voice raised in high-pitched laughter grated on his nerves. It came over him with a sense of shock that she bored him — had, in fact, bored him for months.

He turned toward her, setting his huge shoulders sidewise against the back of the chair that creaked to his weight. He looked at her coldly, analytically. Why, he asked himself frankly, had he married her? First, the appeal of her almost nunlike, ethereal loveliness — he had desired to “humanize” it. Then too, he had wanted a wife, tractable, easily molded, weak — in short, one unlearned in the vices of his chosen world. He had wanted a wife with no immediate family ties to complicate his plan of life. Doris was an orphan, without brothers or sisters. Her fortune was unquestionably hers without let or hindrance. The aunt who had brought her up was no dependent but a shrewd New Englander who was rumored to be more than “well fixed.” Paulson admitted frankly to himself that all the obvious conditions had been fulfilled in his selection of Doris. He had wanted her not of his world, and she was not of his world; but therefore she bored him. That had been an oversight. He had broken her to his harness; she was bitted and trained. Yet it had needed only the sight of the unruly vitality, the unbroken pride, independent, attacking mind and the daring beauty of a stranger to breed hatred of colorless, obedient purity.

Yes, he decided, Doris would have to get out, even if she was as complacent as need be, as blind and deaf to his foibles as he had made her. He couldn’t be bothered having her around. Her presence in the future must inevitably annoy him. He must send her back to her aunt at once — no, he needed her for bait for the Other Woman, the real woman, to bring her within his grasp. Doris would have to be put up with until his desire had closed upon its object.

McMonigal’s heavy laugh broke in upon his concentration.

“Hey, Ken, can’t you stop gazing at your Frau? Lord, you’re a constant lover! There’s the waiter, and this round is on me.”

Paulson, having readjusted his point of view to suit the new twist of fate, turned back both physically and mentally to the table and became affable. With a word caught on the fly he deftly broke up the talk between the two women, and conversation became general. By a simple maneuver he placed Doris between the men and settled himself beside Nickey Morley. Without a word, without a glance, relying on the nameless emanation of personal magnetism, he set himself to attract her — and found her dynamic force the equal of his own. She seemed to be studying him, weighing him, as she talked, talked sense with consummate frankness.

The party broke up at the door of the roadhouse, where their cars drew up, and farewells were exchanged.

“Doris,” said Paulson as he tucked the robes about his wife’s feet, “why don’t you ask Miss Morley to come to you after she leaves the Hendersons? I may have to go to Chicago for a couple of weeks, and it would be nice for you to have someone, someone you like, with you.”

Doris beamed. “Nickey,” she called, crawling halfway over the back of the seat like an eager child, “call me up in the morning. I want to talk with you; and I want you to plan to come and stay with me. Ken’s going away.”

“I’d love to come,” the girl called back as the roar of the car drowned her voice.

Settling back in the seat, Doris began a rapid patter of reminiscences. Nickey and she had been to school together in New Orleans, years ago. After the yellow fever had orphaned her, and Aunt Ernestine, her mother’s sister, had sent for the child to come North, Nicaise — that was her real name, because she was born in Nice — had passed from her life until accident had brought them together in New York. Since then, whenever Nickey came to the city, they had renewed the friendship. Nickey was such a queer girl, so defiant and independent. She’d even gone to Europe quite alone, and traveled for a year. And there wasn’t anything she didn’t know. She was wonderful.

Doris talked in italics, with curious inflections and the ghost of a lisp. Even while he greedily listened to the matter of her monologue, Paulson loathed the mannerisms that clothed the information.

As the car drew up in front of the wide veranda of his country home, a strange sense of contentment, of physical well-being, invaded Ken. It was as if he saw in the doorway, not his wife’s girlish figure, but the vital, almost powerful body of the Other Woman, and her vivid, compelling face. Doris had never fitted the richness of the house; he felt it suddenly, just as he had realized in a flash that she bored him. Well, it would not be long.

Two weeks slipped by, punctuated by several gatherings, where the lovely Louisianian appeared only to deepen the impression she had made.

•   •   •   •   •   •

At last, amid a mighty clatter of childish glee from Doris, Nickey arrived for the promised visit. Two days before, Ken had announced that as the principals in the deal he had in view had decided to meet in New York, his trip to Chicago was indefinitely postponed. When the guest arrived, he apologized for his presence with a show of regret that was intended to lure an expression of pleasure. It elicited only a laugh.

That intrigued Paulson. He meant the girl to believe that for her he was prepared to wreck any plan, invent any lie; but he did not mean her to be amused. In point of fact, Nicaise Morley was unaware of the subterfuge, and had she realized it, would have packed her bag at once and departed in scorn. But this was beyond Paulson’s guessing. His power over women had never once met the buckler of indifference. His devotion she interpreted as the assiduities of a host. His veiled innuendos and his outspoken admiration she received frankly as an expression of kindliness toward his wife’s friend. Against his will, Paulson had deceived her as thoroughly as he had the large majority of those who thought they knew him, and believed him to be “a good-enough sort.”

The beginning of Paulson’s fortune, his marriage when almost a youth to an elderly and infatuated woman of wealth, had long ago been forgotten, particularly as the lady did not long survive; and the widower, having cashed in on all of his wife’s holdings, had left the Western city of his birth, traveled extensively in Europe and with a set of New York acquaintances acquired abroad returned to America to make the metropolis his home.

There was nothing in his heavy-set but athletic figure, or his handsome Napoleonic face, to indicate the cunning and cruelty of his nature — nothing but his hands, and few observed them.

Unaware of the passion that enveloped her like the burning garment of Nessus, — which in this case consumed him and not the wearer, — Nickey danced and laughed her way through the days with unconscious freedom. Even the evil of his touch, because she was unresponsive, left her unnoticing. As his familiarities increased, she met them with increasing gayety and friendliness.

Paulson was not used to such women. That she did not resent, meant to him that she knew and acquiesced. In all her freedom and frankness he read abandon. In the exaggeration of her speech, he read invitation. Yet brutal as he was, he toyed with his desire, enjoying what he imagined to be the electric understanding between them, unwilling to declare his passion in words, until he felt he had exasperated her by his silence, never for once guessing that he lived in a world of delusion of his own making.

During this period he almost tolerated his wife. She added piquancy to the situation. Her obvious blindness to the affair, her immediate response to any suggestion, amused him. Her enjoyment of the night-life he stage-managed for their guest’s entertainment was a new development; hitherto he had sedulously kept her away from cabarets, public dances, all-night “clubs” and the like. The limit of Doris’ dissipations had been tea or dinner at a roadhouse, supper after the theater at Sherry’s or Delmonico’s. But Paulson visualized Nicaise, the vital, the unconventional, queening it in the surroundings he himself reveled in.

Therefore for the first two weeks of Nicaise’s stay the Paulson motorcar stood till morning in front of plate-glass entrances, of pleasure-palaces where drawn blinds and closed doors hinted at closing-time, but from the upper windows of which strains of wild music met the chill air of dawn.

Then, though it was only mid-October, the Paulsons opened the city house to be nearer the center of gayety. Nickey enjoyed it all. Her indefatigable vitality kept pace with every tax placed upon it. She was as keen and brilliant at gray daybreak as the others had been at dinner-time. Before Doris, who drank quarts of lemonade every night as she stared in wonder at the passing show of Broadway all-nighters, Nicaise maintained a temperance diet as rigid as her hostess. But aside, she tasted strange drinks Paulson mixed for her, remarking at their variety and potency. She talked freely to him of the excellence of the fizzes of “the Stag,” the perfection of the New Orleans country-club juleps, the marvels of Antoine’s “pink ladies.” Before Doris she never mentioned having tasted one.

Paulson grinned to himself at this sign of duplicity.

As Nicaise’s visit drew to a close, she frankly lamented the necessity for departure and as frankly begged to be invited again and soon. It was arranged that when she journeyed on for her Christmas shopping she was to come directly to Doris. She said “Doris” — but Paulson fancied that she looked at him.

They had sat long that last night at “Pauline’s Little Club;” several of his friends had joined them. Doris was pale, — tired, she owned, — but unwilling to break up the party. It was Mrs. Henderson who ordered the waiter to pour a glass of champagne for her.

“I do believe I will,” said Doris. “Will it wake me up?”

“Wake you up?” said Mrs. Henderson. “Try it and see.”

Nicaise had been absorbed in conversation with her host when her attention was diverted to the other end of the table. Doris held the slender glass and sniffed the bubbles, wrinkling her pretty nose as they pricked and stung. Nicaise’s face turned suddenly white; even her crimson lips paled.

“No,” she gasped. “Doris, don’t take that!”

Doris set down the glass, her innocent eyes open wide. “Why?” she asked. “She said it would wake me up.”

“Wake you up!” Nickey’s voice trembled. “Come, you don’t want to wake up; you want to go to bed. And so do I; I’m all in. Ken, get our wraps, please.”

Paulson looked at her, hesitated — and obeyed. Doris put down the glass untouched, yawned like an unmannerly kitten and rose from the table. Mrs. Henderson looked puzzled, but said nothing, while the others bade the party adieu with an absent eye on tables where other acquaintances appeared not to waver in their terpsichorean allegiance until egg-and-bacon time.

Doris was so tired that with a mumbled excuse she cuddled in the corner of the limousine and fell asleep as instantly as a baby.

“What did you do that for?” Ken whispered, leaning so close to Nicaise that his lips were almost on her bare neck.

She drew a quick breath. “You saw? Don’t you understand?”

“No. Why did you act that way? Why did you turn as white as chalk? What’s the answer?”

“Don’t you know?” she asked, again in a tone of bewilderment.

“Know what?” he came back. “Why shouldn’t Doris have a glass of champagne if she wants it?”

She twisted toward him. In the gleam of the street-lights her face was sharply defined and lost again in flashes of darkness. She was very beautiful.

“Do you mean to tell me,” she murmured, “that you don’t know? Didn’t her aunt ever tell you? Doris, of course, has no idea. She thinks her father died of yellow fever; but her aunt, she should have warned you!”

“Warned me?” he repeated. “I don’t understand.”

Nicaise seemed stunned. There was a moment’s silence.

“Promise me, promise me,” — the girl’s voice was warm and intense, — “that you’ll never tell Doris, and swear to me you’ll never let her drink again — will you?”

“I’ll promise you anything,” he answered. The accent was on the “you,” but she did not notice.

She lowered her voice to an even more intimate whisper, drawing him toward her with strong, excited hands. “Her father died in the insane asylum from drink, her father’s father too, her uncle. All on that side of the house have gone that way — dipsomania, you understand, in the worst form. It’s in her blood. Never, never, on any pretext, even if the doctor should prescribe it, let her taste liquor. I suppose her aunt was ashamed to tell you, and she relied on the temperance bringing up she’d given her. But tonight — tonight, she would have drunk that champagne if I hadn’t stopped her. She’s seen everybody drink things of late, and she’s lost her aversion, and her idea that it’s a sin and that decent women never touch liquor. I — I thought, of course, that you knew the danger and were looking out for her. You saw how careful I was never to let her see me even sip a thing stronger than her own lemonade. … I hope, I hope,” she added after a little pause, “it’s all right that I told you. You understand, don’t you?” she pleaded.

Paulson’s brain was seething. He believed he understood. She was giving him the key to freedom — to freedom and herself. If this were the case! His ingrained cunning and love of the underhand gloated. This woman, this magnificent woman, saw too, as he would see — saw and placed the weapon in his hand as cunningly, as innocently, it seemed, as he himself would have managed it in her place. In the darkness his hand sought hers and held it. Her fingers closed over his in a quick clasp.

“You promise?” she whispered.

“I promise to see to it. Thank you for telling me. We understand each other.”

At parting, the following day, Nicaise found occasion to speak of the matter again. With meaning in his eyes, he again assured her that he understood. Above Doris’ schoolgirl kisses, Nicaise managed an appealing look at Ken, who gave back the look with one of promise.

•   •   •   •   •   •

With the going of the guest, the hectic life of the Paulsons did not slack. They still made part of every riotous party of their acquaintances. Three days after Nicaise had gone, Doris took her first glass of champagne from her husband’s hand. She sputtered and did not like the taste. He insisted, and she drained her glass. A week later Paulson took her home from supper at Pauline’s Little Club, drunk.

Horrified at herself, for a week Doris did not appear at the cabarets. Ken laughed at her, told her to forget it, and at home insisted on cocktails and champagne with his dinner, with highballs in the evening. At the Loughborros, Doris drank highballs, and played a bridge game that made the others laugh uproariously. From the quiet, demure child she became suddenly glittering, with unexpected flashes of wit and daring that merged soon into incoherence. Two or three friends, surprised and anxious over the change, spoke to Kenneth. He accepted their interference in good part, explained that he was annoyed but thought it best to remonstrate quietly rather than forbid her outright to touch stimulants.

So rapid was the progress of the disease that, like a tiger that had tasted blood, the craving leaped full grown in Doris’ predisposed system. Then with a great show of pain and reproval Kenneth forbade his wife to touch a drop. But he left temptation ever before her. The well-stocked cellaret was not locked. Then came a day when the cellaret was emptied and the supplies destroyed, and the servants received orders not to provide intoxicants.

In four short months Doris, the delicate and unsmirched, was a drunkard; and now, driven by the craving and no longer able to obtain it in her home, where she might lie unobserved, denying herself to her callers with the excuse of indisposition, she was forced to betray herself in the open. She had ample money of her own.

Paulson, apparently at his wits’ end, consulted everyone; and everybody was very sorry for Paulson. He employed a companion for Doris; but Doris, her passion thwarted, abused the woman so roundly that she left. A trained nurse fared no better after an attack almost of delirium had been mastered. A week at a sanitarium, and Doris escaped — and was gone ten days, to be found at last semiconscious in a cheap hotel-room that reeked of alcohol.

•   •   •   •   •   •

Ken forgave her and took her home. Everybody admired “poor old Ken.” Gradually a change came over the character of Doris’ excesses. As her system absorbed the poison more and more, and as her frantic mind strove to master the antics of her tongue and body, a sort of lucid madness resulted. Hours of which the following day she could remember nothing, could be passed in the open, and no one not intimately conversant with her nature and personality would have guessed her actual condition. The subconscious mind managed to put coherence in her sentences, to direct her movements. Her face no longer assumed a congested color; rather it was white, with a curious toxic whiteness. She could “get away with it.” Doris went down without a struggle. Her recoveries left her so dazed that she had no time between sprees to realize her danger.

Ken, who was very busy these days, saw comparatively little of his wife. At the various hotels she had been known to frequent he left orders that she was not to be served. His chauffeur had directions to keep away from such places. He knew perfectly well that the monster within her could be trusted to find a way to elude every effort at restraint.

In despair, so he informed his friends, he made application to have her committed, but failed to prove a sufficient case.

A week later he had the evidence that entitled him to a divorce. There could be no defense. There was none. He was free.

•   •   •   •   •   •

All this while the woman of his desire was in the Argentine, on a six-months trip. He could have written her had he so willed; the frequent postcards sent to Doris passed through his hands. But he did not. When she returned, he would meet her — he would meet her a free man, blameless, even admired for his forbearance, his kindness and long-suffering. That Doris’ physical needs might not prey upon the future, he had played the final card of magnanimity. He had secured her a trust-fund that would provide for her necessities and had legally tied up her own fortune so that she could not waste the principal. Her will left everything to him. In her condition it was more than doubtful if she could ever change it.

When he should meet Nicaise Morley, she would understand. All obstacles had been removed. They would be married. At thought of her Paulson’s passion gripped and wrung him like the hand of a giant.

But Doris, in a lucid interval, had cabled a frightened call for help; and Nicaise, filled with a nameless dread of what that twisted, incoherent message might portend, had begun her journey north just as the divorce proceedings had been instituted.

The reassuring cable from Havana, “I’m coming at once,” never reached Doris. It was delivered to Ken. It was he who met her on the pier. She grasped his hand eagerly, her face strained and questioning.

“What’s the trouble, Ken? Where’s Doris?”

His fingers shook as they closed over her gloved hands. This was the moment he had waited for — this of the telling. His eyes sought hers.

This time even her innocent blindness could not mistake their meaning. His voice was thick as he answered:

“There is no trouble — now. Doris is — out of it. Come, the car is here waiting for you, Nicaise.”

She was stunned, utterly confused. Her mind seemed full of scraps that formed no known thing — the confused fragments of a wreck after an explosion. A horrible sense of impending revelation gripped her. She must know, and quickly. She submitted to his care of her baggage, his calm assumption of protectorate, anxious only for the moment when, alone in the limousine, and headed toward her hotel, she might get at the truth of whatever disaster had befallen.

•   •   •   •   •   •

She had not long to wait; money expedites matters; and Paulson was as anxious as she for the slam of the car door that should shut them into seclusion. They faced each other at last, she chalk-white and tight-lipped, he controlled but quivering with emotion.

“What has happened to Doris?” Nicaise demanded. “I received a wild message from her, a threat to kill herself. I came at once. Where is she?”

He leaned close to her. “Doris is out of it, I told you — divorced.” He paused to let his words sink in, and was surprised at her shocked amazement.

“Divorced!” she exclaimed.

“What did you expect? It was inevitable, wasn’t it?” His voice was full of intimate suggestion.

“Inevitable?” Her tone was blank.

He laughed. “Well, it couldn’t go on, could it? And when a woman drinks like that, — all the time, never sober, you know, — sooner or later a pretty woman like Doris is bound to get into trouble, isn’t she?”

Still the girl remained blind to the implied inclusion of herself. “Doris — drink! How was it? You were warned — I told you. Couldn’t you prevent it somehow? Oh, poor Doris! Oh, poor, poor child!”

Something in the genuine horror and pity of her tone angered him. For the successful “woman in the case” she was carrying the game rather far.

“What did you expect?” he repeated.

“That you’d guard her, keep her, watch over her,” she flamed.

As usual he misinterpreted her agitation. “Well, nobody has anything against me,” he reassured her. “I did forbid it. I sent her to a cure. I had a companion for her. I took her back when she went off on a bat and was gone nearly two weeks — you can ask anyone. There’ll never be a word said against me. And when I marry again,” — he looked at her with devouring eyes, — “when we’re married, they’ll say: ‘God bless ’em!’” He laughed shakily.

“We? Marry!” The words stumbled from Nickey’s lips.

“Soon,” he whispered. “Ah, how I wish we were in your sitting-room at the hotel, instead of this infernal glass cage! I’d — kiss the color back to your face!”

The threatening wave of revelation broke over her; she knew.

“So you saw to it?” she demanded.

“Didn’t I promise you?” he questioned. “Didn’t you show me the way?” he continued.

“I? Oh, my God!”

His face purpled with anger. “What’s the big idea?” he demanded. “Why this play-acting now? We understand each other. We’re free.”

She wrenched from him. “You, you, what are you?” she gasped. “A devil, a blind devil! And you dare accuse me — me — of — of—” She could not finish her sentence, but shrank back in the corner, hating him with her eyes.

It was his turn to be stunned. That Nicaise warned him of Doris’ danger for the sole purpose of protecting Doris had never once entered his head.

“Don’t play innocence,” he snarled. “You wanted me to get rid of her, and you showed me the way to do it and keep us both clear. Deny it all you please; I knew, and you know that I knew. Why this pretense? There’s no danger. Investigation will only show that she was an hereditary dipsomaniac, and that I didn’t know it. Her aunt never breathed a word; she’ll have to own to that. Who’s to know you told me?”

Nicaise broke down completely. “I told you, good heavens! I told you — you, a scheming devil, wanting to get rid of her! It’s my fault! Somehow it’s my fault. What shall I do — what shall I do?”

The car had turned into the avenue at a familiar street and headed northward. Within a block or two loomed the hotel of her destination. She turned on him fiercely.

“I’ve got to find her — I’ve got to save her somehow. I brought this on her, through you. I’ll never rest till I find her. And you!” Her face seemed chiseled of marble, but her eyes blazed. “Let me tell you something. You may have worse yet on your soul. You don’t know all you’ve done. The Langfords, all of them, have homicidal mania when delirium gets them, and Doris’ father murdered her mother — yes, stabbed her to death. Now — you understand. I’ve got to find her; you have got to find her if you don’t want blood on your hands!”

The car had swung to the curb. The uniformed chasseur had his hand on the knob. She thrust past Paulson, motioned the servant to secure her hand-baggage and passed quickly into the hotel.

Paulson did not attempt to follow her. He needed to think, to readjust. In his luxurious sitting-room he paced the floor, all that afternoon, all that night. He did not even enter his bedroom or modify his dress. As always, he faced things squarely. He had made the one colossal blunder of his life. Not that he regretted Doris’ destruction. He was through with her anyhow, and therefore well rid of her by whatever means; even if in her madness she did become involved in some drunken brawl, no blame could be fastened on him. But on the other hand, his stripped pride, his vanity, smarted and cringed. The woman he desired above everything else was not his and never would be.

Worn out, he dozed in his chair, where his Japanese servant found him when he brought the morning paper. His first glance was for the Personal column. He was sure that through that medium Nicaise would try to reach Doris. It would be her first practical thought.

WILL DO. COMMUNICATE WITH NICKEY BACK FROM ARGENTINA, AT THE WALDORF.

Without a doubt his wife would answer the call, would go to her, and Nicaise would see the wreck of what once had been Doris. In spite of his cold-blooded indifference, he winced. There were memories of Doris — dainty, girlish, delicately beautiful Doris — when she had been an ugly sight to look upon; and he did not care to recall that débâcle. Repeatedly that day he tried to communicate with Nicaise — over the telephone, and she hung up the receiver; at the door of her suite, and it was slammed in his face; at last by letter, with a request for an answer. An answer did come. “If I get in touch with your wife,” — the last two words were savagely underscored, — “I shall let you know by telephone at your house. I will give you the opportunity to help her, if it becomes necessary, but if it can be avoided, I will see it through alone. In any event I will inform you as to Doris’ condition.”

With that he had to be content. But he waited for the sound of her voice, long hours alone.

At about six o’clock she called him. Her voice was agitated.

“I promised to let you know,” she said abruptly. “She called me at the hotel. I located her boarding-place, but she had already gone. I couldn’t get her to promise to come to me. She was” — the voice became more constrained — “not herself. But I shall follow and trace her—”

“You had better let me go with you,” he interrupted.

“If I need you, I shall not hesitate to make use of you,” — her voice was ice-edged, — “but I hardly think it necessary.”

“Where are you now?” he begged. The click of the hung-up receiver closed the message.

•   •   •   •   •   •

Already it was the third evening after Nicaise’s return. He realized it, as he ate his solitary dinner. Then he sought the window-seat of his own den, on the fourth floor of the house, from whence he looked down to the glittering, ice-covered pavements. He preferred this room; it held nothing of Doris. She had seldom dared intrude into his privacy. Presently he crossed to the massive center-table, drew a note-pad and pencil toward him and began jotting down notes. He must have Nicaise followed. A competent detective must be put on her trail. If it led him to Doris, no matter. He thought of the company whose services he had employed in securing the divorce, and decided it the part of wisdom to go elsewhere. Then, he decided, he would close the house and sell it, furnished, if possible. Nicaise must learn to know him as distinct from Doris’ environment.

The country-house must be disposed of also. He must be absolutely free to follow the quarry wherever she went. He cursed himself for his clumsiness. He should never have confessed his complicity in Doris’ downfall, not even when he was convinced of the hideous partnership he had believed to exist between himself and Nicaise. And as things had turned out, it was all but fatal to his future. If necessary, — he looked the situation over calmly, — if Nicaise insisted, he would even take Doris back temporarily and try to reform her. It couldn’t be done, but he might make Nicaise believe that he had repentantly attempted the impossible. It might keep her near; he might win her after the inevitable end. Doris couldn’t last. Already her frail physique was breaking.

He was very tired. He had not slept for two nights. He determined to calm his strained nerves and take a long rest. He poured himself a highball and returned to his place in the window. But his weariness caught him unawares, and he slept, his head resting against the closed-back inner shutter, his body twisted into the entrance of the narrow window-seat.

A gentle tittering, like the laughter of a playing child, woke Paulson. He opened his eyes with a start, but the room was silent, and he thought he had been dreaming. The clock on the mantel struck one. He was cramped; the room was hot and stuffy. He stretched his powerful body, threw up the window and breathed three long inhalations. It came again, that chuckling, twittering laugh. He started back into the room, and stopped with an oath. Before him stood Doris — her clothes just a little awry, her face a trifle whiter than its normal pallor; but her eyes were brilliant, hard and opaque as cabochon cat’s-eyes. In her hand she held a latchkey.

“I really didn’t know where to go, Ken,” she said, still with that insane giggle, “till I remembered I had my latchkey. Then I came right here. I thought I’d find you in the den. Say — do you know there’s somebody after me? Yes, there is,” she insisted, “and I’m tired of being followed. It makes me nervous.”

Paulson drew back from the woman who had been his wife. His mind worked coolly. What should he do? What was the best play for him to make, considering Nicaise? Call the Jap to take care of her, and leave her sole occupant of the house? Then he remembered that his servant had left after dinner not to return till the following afternoon. No, he decided; he would call Nicaise and beg her to come at once. He half rose from the seat. On the table was the telephone-switch. She seemed to divine his purpose.

“Oh, you want to tell them to come and get me!” she tittered. “Well, you shan’t!”

“Nicaise Morley’s here; she wants to see you,” he said placatingly.

“I know it,” she shrilled. “You got it framed to send me off somewhere. Oh, yes — I know. Everywhere I go, I hear she’s been after me, asking for me. Well, she’ll never think to come here.” She laughed her strange twittering giggle. “I got her fooled. Gee! I’m tired.” Her eye fell on the whiskey decanter and siphon on the table, and lighted with a look of infantile greediness. “Mind if I take a little drink?”

It was pitiful and ghastly. Even Paulson’s dead conscience turned in its grave as Doris, the once delicate and dainty, snatched up the decanter and ravenously upturned it to her lips.

“Stop,” he ejaculated.

For answer she launched the heavy glass bottle at his head. So sudden and violent was the movement that he failed to ward off the blow.

It struck him down, as an ox is felled. He rose, staggering, blood pouring into his eyes. What was it he had heard? “Homicidal mania!” He wiped away the blood and dizzily faced about.

By the table stood Doris, in her hand the sleek steel Japanese dagger he was wont to use as a paper-cutter. She seemed to have forgotten him, fascinated by the wavy, lustrous pear-skin grain of the metal. He could see its fine sparkle as the light caught the turning blade. Without warning panic seized him — unreasoning hot terror, that tore his vitals, stopped his heart and blinded his brain. Yet he strove for control.

A voice broke the silence. Someone was running in the hall. The door was flung open, and Nicaise stumbled gasping across the threshold.

“Doris! Doris! Come, come with me,” she panted. “I followed. Thank God, you didn’t fasten the hall door. Oh, thank God, I’ve found you!”

She came forward without hesitation. Only the table was between the two women. Doris raised her eyes from the contemplation of the knife.

“I’ll teach you to follow me!” she croaked in a dry whisper. She sprang around the corner of the table with the quickness of a cat.

Nicaise, with a sharp cry of terror, thrust a heavy chair before her.

But Paulson had instantly steadied. In a bound he was beside Doris, his heavy right hand closed over his wife’s slender wrist in a bone-breaking clasp, as with his left he wrung the dagger from her paralyzed fingers. Then came blackness. He staggered; his foot caught in the rug. The chair slid on the polished floor, and his heavy body pitched forward with the full momentum of his swift action, full on the sheathless blade.

In the breathless silence that followed, Doris tittered.

“Look at Ken; he’s dead drunk,” she said.

•   •   •   •   •   •

When Doris awoke, it was late in the afternoon. Her head was throbbing, her mind a blank. In utter amazement she gazed on the face of Nicaise Morley.

“Nickey,” she moaned feebly. “Nickey — when did you come?” She looked about her blankly.

“You’re at my hotel, with me,” said Nicaise, smiling. “I ran across you just outside Jo’s café last night, so I took you around the Park in a taxi to steady up and brought you here. You came as quietly as a lamb. No one would have guessed.”

Doris looked grateful. “Isn’t it awful, Nickey?” she pleaded childishly. “I don’t remember a thing. I don’t remember yesterday at all. Oh, Nickey, what’s going to become of me!”

Nicaise crossed to the bed; very gently but very firmly she took the hot, dry hand that twisted the counterpane.

“You are going to a sanitarium in the hills, Doris, and I’m going with you. I shan’t leave you, not until you are yourself again. You are to ask no more questions — just rest. We leave tonight. I’ll attend to everything. Go to sleep now, dear. There is nothing to worry about.”

Kenneth Paulson’s death remains today a mystery to all the world — save to one woman.

“Red Book”, Aug 1918

Siren Cottage

The bride gave a sudden exclamation as the automobile surmounted the crest of the hill, disclosing an embowered glimpse of the house and the riot of its neglected gardens. Only the wildly yawing wheel of the little car prevented her laying an arresting hand upon that of her husband.

“My goodness!” she gasped. “How could that ever have been a workhouse? Why, it’s a playhouse — a sublime, adorable playhouse! No wonder the town gave it up. It’s too ridiculous — everybody would want to be a pauper!”

The words were jerked from her spasmodically as their car bucked over the ruts that had once been a road.

“It’ll cost something to put this confounded boulevard into navigable shape,” said her husband, trying hard to be practical in the face of the allurement of the just-glimpsed residence.

“It’s only a short quarter-mile,” said the lady of his heart.

They halted before the entrance, and she jumped out. With clasped hands and shining eyes she stood admiring the gate — a wrought-iron delight, swinging invitingly ajar between two columns of brick surmounted by somewhat tipsy urns. To right and left the ornate fence swept gracefully, half lost in creepers, vines, and waves of pink climbing roses, which, unrestrained by the pruning-shears, inundated the road and paths with a spraying foam of petals. What had once been a brick walk was now a mottled bed of moss and hardy pinks. Larkspurs, with blue spikes five feet high, pushed back the advancing hollyhock armies. All the old-fashioned flowers of a hardy garden had made the lawns a battleground for floral supremacy, surging about the house, swarming at the windows, meeting the hosts of roses and honeysuckle that fell from roof and balcony.

The bride and the groom stood hand in hand, gazing wide-eyed at the scene before them. It was almost too wonderful, too perfect. A house of dreams — the painted backdrop of a fairy play that might at any moment roll up into the heavens and be lost to reality.

“I don’t care what it’s like inside,” she whispered, as if afraid to break the spell. “We’ve got to have it!”

A breeze swept through the garden. The flowers bent in unison, as if in obeisance to a new mistress.

“See!” she laughed. “They are bowing to me.”

“It’ll take two gardeners,” said her spouse dryly.

“Oh, well,” said the bride, “we’ll economize on cut flowers.”

“It isn’t always June,” he retorted.

They relapsed into silence as they walked on and paused before the front door. He fumbled in his pocket for the key that the selectman had given him; but the bride pressed a slender hand on the panels and it swung softly, almost gaily, open. The sunlight, running ahead of them, gold-flecked the dust that the incoming breeze tossed from the inlaid floor.

“They really ought to keep a caretaker here,” she said. “Just think, the house all open like that! Why, tramps might be living here and set the place on fire.”

He laughed.

“Nonsense! The place is too far out of the way. Why, we’d never have heard of it if it hadn’t been for the Follensbees losing their way and blundering over it.”

“I don’t care,” she repeated. “There ought to be a caretaker. It’s a shame to leave a house like this all alone. I’m sure all the hardware’s been stolen and the plumbing.”

“Knobs are on the doors, anyway,” he answered, and turned the nearest one.

Even with closed blinds and bare walls, the room they entered was merry. A great colonial fireplace still sheltered a pair of brass andirons, and the half-burned remains of a back-log suggested the glow of fire.

“It’s perfectly ducky!” cried the bride, dancing on happy feet across the polished floor. “Just think of this with dove-colored taffeta curtains with little yellow fringes, old settees between the windows, a pair of powder-blue Chinese vases on the mantel, a big chaise-longue in front, and a refectory table back—”

“Hold on there, girly!” objected the groom. “You didn’t marry a millionaire, you know.”

“Oh, well,” she pouted, “we’ll do it a little at a time. Of course, with the whole house to furnish, we couldn’t expect to go so fast; but with two gardeners, as you said, and a chauffeur who’d help generally, and a couple — Japanese, I think — a man and wife, and they’ll wear their own kimono clothes — they’ll look so picturesque, you know! And then we’ll put a truck body on Lizette de Fer Blanc, and use her for service, and get a new little car for just us two, and fix up the road for a half-mile or so as you suggested. Don’t you think we ought to be able to take possession in two or three weeks?”

She stopped, breathless. He was gravely considering.

“If the rent wasn’t so small, it would be out of the question; and we ought to take it on a long lease, anyhow, to make it worth our while. It isn’t of any use to the township. Somebody gave it to them for a workhouse, and they got into it before they saw how unpractical it was. They were awfully out of pocket trying to run it. The matron and the supervisor simply threw money away. But as a renting proposition it isn’t any good, either — too far from the station, and no neighbors. Lots of people don’t like that.”

“Ah, but we do!” said the bride, slipping her arm through his and rubbing her cheek on his shoulder.

He kissed her enthusiastically, then dutifully dug into his wallet for the typewritten description of the premises.

“Let’s see — six master’s bedrooms, three baths, three servants’ bedrooms and bath, chauffeur’s apartment over garage, room for three cars, two box-”

“Splendid!” she interrupted. “We can keep a couple of ponies, and ride.”

“Wouldn’t you like kennels, too?” he inquired scathingly.

“Oh, no,” she regretfully declined. “I’ll just bring my two Pekingese. We couldn’t afford a kennel-maid — yet.”

She had raised a window and was busy with the catch of the shutters. A moment later the casement framed a picture of garden beauty. The fresh morning light, as if glad of the chance, flashed into the long-darkened room, bringing out the details of moldings and pilasters, delicately carved with sumptuous simplicity.

“I don’t feel,” she cried rapturously, “that I ever want to go anywhere again! I want to stay here — right now. I don’t want to leave. I think I’ll take the cushions out of Lizette’s back and let you go to the village and sign the lease, and bring back a pound of coffee, a loaf of bread, one dozen eggs, some sugar — there’s pepper and salt and tea in the motor kit — and two pillows and a couple of blankets.”

“Let’s get the water turned on first, my dear,” he suggested; “and let’s look over the lighting system. The telephone is in, but it’s disconnected. And don’t you think that you, as the lady of the house, ought to investigate the kitchen?”

“This house couldn’t have just a kitchen — a mere kitchen!” exclaimed the bride. “A cooking parlor it shall be, with lovely copper and aluminum, all glass and enamel and tile, shiny and clean. Won’t it be fun? And I’ll put the cook out and get your early breakfast for you myself — oh, yes, I will,” she insisted, anticipating her husband’s refusal of such menial service.

He only smiled, but with undisconcerted ardor she continued:

“Dearest angel, do you realize that we’ve been standing here hours, and we’ve been in just one room? We’ve got to visit it all. Let’s see, the plan said, ‘A drawing-room, a dining-room, a music-room’—”

“I know this is the music-room. I can hear dance-music, and just feel this floor! Tra-la-la!” she trilled, and, thrusting her husband’s arm around her waist, she urged him off down the room.

She was right; the room responded to its appointed destiny. The whole house seemed to hum with music, as a shell holds the sound of the sea. The floor sent back a spring of living wood to the quick young tread of the lovers who glided over it. At the door she stopped.

“The dining-room now,” she whispered in his ear. “I’m sure we shall find a banquet. There’ll be the ghost of a sideboard — and cold chicken, stuffed mangoes, and a decanter of sherry; and there’ll be little biscuits and a big Virginia ham—”

“If you don’t stop,” said the groom, his mouth watering, “I shan’t be satisfied with your imaginary lunch, and we’ve only got tongue sandwiches, so let’s take in the sitting-room instead.”

They turned around, their arms still about each other, and faced the wraith of a little worn, gray man. He came noiselessly from the door opposite, and his wistful, washed-out eyes sought their faces with compassion, and yet with a certain glittering hardness.

II

The bride and the groom stood speechless, like children caught trespassing. Anything more out of key with the joyousness of the place it would be hard to imagine. If this was its familiar spirit, its manifestation was strangely at variance with the surroundings. No wreck of humanity stranded on a park bench in some livid dawn could be more worn, more hopeless-looking, more dreary-eyed.

Panic seized them both. The bride gripped her husband’s shoulder convulsively, and with a sense of protection totally uncalled for he swiftly drew her behind him. In a flash the instinctive fear passed. Of what had they been afraid? Of a little old man, diffident, deprecating, and compassionate?

“You came to see the house?”

The voice was broken and old, deprecating and diffident, the perfect expression of the dejected little figure. The intruders found footing on the instant, and the groom’s reply sounded loud and important in the echoing hall.

“Yes, Selectman Williams gave me the key and a plan of the house. We were talking of leasing it for a term of years. Who are you?” He added as an afterthought, “the caretaker?”

“I thought,” observed the bride wisely, thrusting back a copper-colored curl under her lavender motor-veil, “that they really couldn’t have left the place with no one in charge. My husband was just wondering about the water-supply — perhaps you could tell him about it?”

A grim smile drew up the corners of the old man’s withered mouth.

“I could, of course,” he replied. “There isn’t a thing about the place that I don’t know; but it isn’t worth while to go into all that. You aren’t going to take it.”

It was said with such finality that the young people stared at him, for the moment dumb. Then the husband flushed angrily.

“The caretaker’s job must be a soft one for you to be so high-handed,” he remarked with a sneer. “However, we needn’t involve you in our plans. Come, Trudy, we’ll investigate the rest of the house.”

“You will find it all charming, literally charming,” said the soft, gray voice. “There isn’t a room that won’t attract you; there isn’t an outlook that won’t appeal to you. But, just the same, you can’t stay here.”

The sheer impertinence shocked the home-seekers into silence. The groom reddened, but the bride went pale. Something like the distant warning tinkle of a spirit-bell thrilled through her sensitive being.

“You aren’t the caretaker!” she said suddenly. “Why do you say we mustn’t stay? Who are you?”

The derelict met her gaze with tragic earnestness.

“I’m Morton Ford, if that means anything to you.”

She looked blank, but her husband swung around, astonishment written large on his handsome face.

“Morton Ford! ” he exclaimed. “That’s the name of the donor. I saw it in the selectman’s office — the man who gave the town this property for a poorhouse.”

“Yes,” said Morton Ford quietly.

“Why,” the young man continued as one bewildered, “I thought, of course, you were dead! Who would give away such a place as this — and for such a purpose? It — it’s incredible!”

“In a sense, I am dead.” Ford addressed the bride directly, as if of the two she were the more likely to understand him. “And, as you say, I gave the house for a purpose. The town has not seen fit to continue to use the house as I intended. I did not give it to them to augment the town revenues; it is expressly stated so in my deed of gift. Therefore, if you make it necessary, I shall have to contest the lease.”

“But why be a dog in the manger?” the would-be tenant objected. “They can’t afford to run it as a workhouse. They told me so. The place involved the whole township in debt. If they can make something on it, why not let them? They’re badly in the hole as it is.”

“In the first place,” said the former owner grimly, “I intend to punish this house. I intend to cripple it utterly; but, beyond that, I will not expose you or any other honest people to its cunning. I tell you this house is a devil — a living devil. It’s a siren, a vampire, a blood-sucking, soul-destroying thing. Oh, I know her! She’s not a thing of stones and mortar, wood and plaster. She’s got a sort of evil life. She’d wreck you, as she wrecked me and my happiness, as she destroyed the man who made her.”

He was shaking with excitement. His pale face was streaked with sudden red, his bony hands were clenched.

“He’s mad,” thought the husband, and again sought to draw his wife behind him. He had not spoken, but his wife read his thoughts.

“No,” she said steadily, “he isn’t. Please, Mr. Ford, explain it, will you? We just don’t seem to understand. It’s strange, you see. We thought the house so lovely. It’s so sunny, so gay. Why, anyone should be happy here. It’s — it’s heavenly!”

“Will you come?” With a quivering finger Morton Ford pointed up the graceful stairway to the wide landing above. “Perhaps, if I show you the place, you will understand.”

He led the way to the floor above, and steadied himself for a moment with his palm against the yellow-paneled wall. Then, with a quick gesture of determination, he threw open the door of a large, cheerful bedroom. A long mirror was set in the bathroom door, and reflected the tracery of climbing roses at the unshuttered window. A heavy four-poster bed stood facing them. There was no other furniture.

“What a beautiful room!” ejaculated the bride.

“Of course you’d think so,” their guide muttered grimly; “but it was there, right in front of that looking-glass, that he shot himself.”

“Shot himself? Who shot himself?” demanded the groom.

“Madison, the man who built the house.”

“But why?” gasped the bride.

“He was a bank cashier,” Ford answered, his voice again colorless. “A bank cashier, and married to a dear little woman — it wasn’t her fault. She loved him, she’d have been happy with him anywhere; but he would come here, he would build. Someone — his bitterest enemy, I guess — had given him a set of plans. He had a little money. It seemed all right at first; but then the house developed its soul. It’s the soul of a courtesan. She is the three daughters of the horse-leech in one. She cries: ‘Give, give!’ Oh, you don’t know! Poor Madison! He became infatuated with the house — infatuated utterly, his wife told me. It was like a madness. He couldn’t resist its demands. Nothing was good enough for its beauty; nothing was rare enough. Everything that belonged to the house must be cared for and pampered — yes, pampered. Its gardens, its stables, everything — like a king’s mistress, groomed and perfumed and bedecked, bejeweled and garlanded. Oh, yes, I know; but it wasn’t until the malady had fallen upon me that I hunted her out — little Mrs. Madison — and found her stunned and prematurely old, living in poverty and under another name, because of her husband’s theft. For he stole — of course he stole — who wouldn’t? He robbed the bank for his mistress — this shameless, laughing, merry house — and then he shot himself before that mirror. And does the house care? Not at all! She was looking for her next victim before her lover’s body was cold. She drank his blood into her very self, and she gives no hint of tragedy. And so I found her.”

“You bought it — after that?” whispered the bride.

The old man nodded.

“Yes, and I thought I was lucky. I knew what had happened; but, like everybody else, I didn’t take it to myself. Somebody else’s martyrdom, somebody else’s tragedy — and for that reason I could buy it cheap, just as it stood, with all its furniture. Yes, I bought the trollop, with all her gauds and her trappings and her frills and laces. I bought it for the woman I loved — for my wife. She’d had so little in her life. I was older than she, and I loved her so much that I wanted to give her the best, the loveliest, the happiest things. The house laughed and made us welcome — oh, it knows how to welcome you and envelop you in a sense of well-being. Charm, charm — that’s the very corner-stone and roof-tree.

“And then the creature, that is this house, cried: ‘Give, give!’ and I gave and gave; but it wasn’t for me alone that she spread her net — oh, no! My wife was young, my wife was pretty, my wife was gay. She filled the house with music, and the house loved her. Come, I will show you her room, the lovely room that looks out on the water-garden — it is only a pond now, but it was a water-garden then. I’ll show you the little boudoir she had done in saffron and rose, like the inside of a shell. I had them put the most pestilential pauper of all in that room!”

Obediently the young people followed the halting steps. Something of the enchantment of the Ancient Mariner held them attentive and breathless.

III

Throwing open a double door a few paces farther down the hall, Morton Ford ushered them into a long, low-ceilinged apartment. The whole of one side was composed of casement windows that went clear to the floor. Beyond was a balcony of lacy wrought-iron, and below was the lily-covered surface of a pond. Irises bloomed beside it, and azaleas crowded toward it. A willow-tree hung above, and stroked its silver surface with long, silken fingers. On the ceiling of the room the reflection of the ripples ran in sequences of shadowy gold. A breath of perfume seemed still to cling to its rosy walls.

The bathroom beyond glittered. Small squares of inlaid glass made a diamond light above the creamy luster of the tiles. On the other side, the open door gave a glimpse of another room — doubtless the boudoir, “like a shell.”

There was silence. The three visitors stood motionless. The old man’s head was bent. He did not try to hide his pain; like a child he wept. The bride put out her hand and touched his sleeve.

“What happened?” she asked softly. “The house loved her, you say. Then it wouldn’t harm her, it wouldn’t let her destroy herself for it. What happened?”

“The house, the — why do I call it a house? It is not a house. It is an evil, living thing! It taught her all its cunning, all its ways to win, to cajole, to beg, to demand. Oh, she was an apt pupil! But I was to blame, for I should not have placed her where her soul could be poisoned, Yet how could I know?”

After a momentary pause he went on.

“Together they grew in extravagance. They must be matched in perfection. And I was blind. I thought my wife the wonder of the world. Who but she could make such marvels out of a bit of lace and a scrap of linen, and hang the windows with such curtains and such draperies? The house taught her. For nothing — so I thought — she picked up priceless things, and I was proud of her cleverness and her knowledge. And all the while the devilish house was teaching her luxury, extravagance, display, opulence. At last she outdid her teacher. She wanted to put her two hands into the world’s coffers and scatter its gold profligately.

“As the house increased in beauty, it made her more beautiful. As the house grew more charming, she learned the charm, of Satan himself. Now, as I look back, I seem to see them vie with each other — the beautiful house and the lovely woman. And then — the world of the house, my house, grew too small, and just as heartlessly, just as lightly as the house had slain, she deserted it — and me — for greater extravagance, greater luxury, greater display. In my hour of despair the house would have taken vengeance on me because she had deserted it. The house would have made me follow in the footsteps of poor Madison; but I was not to be deceived. It tried to make me go into that room and kill myself, as the other had. The house would have sucked my blood and cast me aside, and then it would have waited, treacherously smiling and welcoming, for the next victim; but I knew its devilish soul too well.

“I determined to be revenged; so I thought of the thing most likely to infuriate the house. Poverty, age, illness, all the things the house hated — these the house should have. You begin to understand now, don’t you, why I gave the property to the town for a poorhouse, for a workhouse, where day after day, year after year these walls would have to shelter the lame and the halt and the blind, the creatures of poverty, clad in ugliness, eating the mean fare of charity, lorded over by others little better than themselves? Oh, I can feel the loathing in every stick and stone, the repugnance in every minutest detail of refinement!

“Can’t you imagine the stairs creaking with shame at the lumbering and shuffling? Can’t you feel the paneling drawing away from such a company? Can’t you fancy how this room — this room, most of all — felt when they installed here old John Broad, the palsied, foul-mouthed drunkard? Can’t you imagine the immaculate kitchen blowing back the fumes of cabbage and cheap stews? Can’t you understand the hatred of the gardens as wheelchairs plowed through them, and the weeds invaded them without let or hindrance?

“Oh, I had my vengeance on the house; but she was too clever for me. I couldn’t be here to watch her, to checkmate her cunning. She even drove these cattle to extravagance — at least, to what was extravagance for them.

“A year, two, three, five, and the house expelled the inmates she loathed. She spewed them out at last, and then smoothed herself, and smiled and furbished up again each tarnished wile. She called to her charm, to her gaiety and her flowers, to the breezes and the sunlight, to the whispering, suggestive silence of her rooms, to the promise of her wide hearths, to the resonance of laughter and music that she holds in the hollow of her heart. She cast out the memories of the sounds and scents of the poor she hated, and she waited — waited for you. She would have welcomed you and infolded you and drawn you in, and you would have gone down her ruinous way of extravagance and luxury; but she reckoned without me.

“When I heard what had happened, I came back. When I caught the house smiling and beckoning through her desertion, I watched and waited, too. I wondered whether she was strong enough to draw fresh victims to her cruel embrace. And she is, for you came. And now you know. You think she’s nothing but a house; but I know she is a devil, a vampire, a destroyer of body and soul!”

The bride shuddered, and her husband looked down at her, amused. He felt it incumbent upon him to be amused, for he was shaken.

“Well,” he said, “that’s very interesting, and in a way I think you’re right. The house is far too large for us.”

The old man smiled. They did not speak again for many minutes.

On the veranda, as they took their leave, the groom condescended to speak more graciously to the old man.

“Of course, sir, I’m greatly obliged for your warning, but really, you know, there wasn’t any danger of our taking the place. It’s charming, as you say, but — well, quite beyond our means.”

The bride looked up gravely and held out her hand.

“Thank you ever so much,” she said simply. “You’re quite right, and I’m very grateful. We must be going. Can we give you a lift — take you anywhere?”

Ford shook his head.

“No, I thank you. I’m not the caretaker, you see, though I am a watchman. Good-bye, my dear. God keep you!”

•   •   •   •   •   •

The bride looked over her shoulder as they topped the hill. Below them lay the tangled garden, the shimmer of the pond, the inviting expanse of the house, cream-white in its setting of green. On the steps was a splotch of gray — the huddled figure of the watcher.

“Bughouse, poor old boy!” said the groom. “But, after all, there’s something in what he says about biting off more than one can chew. Considerable of a yarn, that. Wonder if there’s any basis of truth for it — all that about the suicide, and his wife eloping, I mean.”

The bride did not answer. For the first time since the all-important ceremony she was totally oblivious of the words of her lord and master. To her eyes the vision of home had suddenly shown itself a whited sepulcher, and more — a vampire, reaching out to seize her. And because she was a woman, and, therefore, subconsciously aware of many things, she shuddered as with cold and drew her veil more closely about her.

“Oh, what an escape!” she murmured, “what an escape!”

Her husband laughed. “You weren’t afraid of him, were you? Why, the poor old chap was perfectly harmless.”

“Munsey’s” magazine, Jan 1920

“Funeral Frank”

“Could I see Mr. Manning?”

The maid stared at the little old gentleman and at the drooping dog in his arms and opened her mouth several times before she could articulate. “Why, why, Mr. Manning’s dead, sir!”

The visitor stepped back. He seemed immeasurably shocked and grieved. “Dead — not Mr. Gerald Manning?”

“Yes, sir,” the girl answered, and tears gathered in her eyes. “Yesterday morning!”

“But, but wasn’t it very sudden? What could have happened? Dear, dear, this is dreadful! My old friend, Gerald Manning! Could I — could I, do you think, see one of the family — somebody, not Mrs. Manning, of course, but anyone who might tell me something of this bereavement?”

“I don’t know,” replied the servant, hesitatingly. “Step into the parlor, please, and I’ll see if Miss Elsie’ll see you.”

“Miss Elsie, of course, if she will, or, perhaps, her sister.”

“Mrs. Wallace isn’t here yet. She’s coming on from Denver.”

“Of course, of course. I haven’t a card. Will you tell her, Mr. Davis, an old friend of her father, wishes to see her?”

“I’ll ask her,” murmured the maid.

Mr. Davis tiptoed into the subdued twilight of the drawing-room and looked about him. Everything was costly and in good taste. This should be an easy graft. He waited, seated stiffly on the edge of a massive Empire chair, his face solemn and reflective, as he absently caressed the mongrel that nestled against his breast.

There was a step on the stairs, a stirring of the portières, and a girl dressed in black entered the room. Her eyes were red with weeping, but she was composed. “Mr. Davis, the maid tells me you asked to see me. You were” — she choked back a sob — “a friend of my father?”

“My dear Miss Manning,” the old man’s tones were vibrant with sympathy, “this is a shock to me, a great shock. I had no idea of what had happened. I — I was passing, and I hadn’t seen your dear father in years. I thought to stop in for a reminiscent chat, to exchange the news of old acquaintances — and — I — I can’t believe it! It’s a blow — a severe blow.”

The girl nodded, turning away he head. “Perhaps you didn’t know that father underwent an operation a week ago. We thought him on the way recovery, and then—”

“Poor Gerald!” Her visitor continued to fondle the little dog. “He was always so kind, so generous. Tell me, your mother is bearing up well?”

The girl shook her head. “No, she is quite prostrated.”

“And your sister — you are Elsie, of course. It was your sister who married. Ah, I remember, Wallace, that was the name your father told me. Is she coming on from the West?”

“We expect her tonight,” she replied. “We notified her when he began to fail.”

“I suppose,” said the old man humbly, “there is nothing I can do.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no, nothing. My brother and Doctor Ellis have done all that there is to do, thank you.”

“I wish there was, I wish there was something I could do for Gerald’s family in the hour of need. Your dear father was the first person one thought of in an emergency, so kind, so generous. In fact,” he smiled sadly, “it was that very trait in him that led me here today. I live in New Rochelle, you see, and I came into town to bring my little dog to the veterinary. Of course they won’t allow dogs on trains or on the surface lines. I had to hide him in my coat. It made me an easy prey for some pickpocket, and he picked me clean. ‘Oh, heavens,’ I said to myself, here’s a go!’ I was in Grand Central Station, you see, and then I thought of Gerald. I knew that I might find him at home, since he’d retired from active business. ‘I’ll go right up to Gerald Manning,’ I said to myself, ‘and borrow enough to do my little shopping and take Vicky to the vet and go home.’ I had no more idea that I’d come here and learn that he was dead! Why, I couldn’t believe the maid when she told me. She must have thought me daft, the way I looked at her, but it seemed incredible — incredible.”

The dog stirred uneasily and whined.

“Poor little thing,” said Elsie Manning, her eyes softening, “what’s the matter?”

“It’s his paw,” said the visitor, gently touching a quivering forefoot. “He was run over, oh, quite a while ago, but his shoulder dislocates, and he seems to have recurrent pain. I suppose it’s sort of rheumatic; I can’t reset the joint, but the vet can. I suppose I could on a pinch, but I’m so afraid of hurting the poor little beggar that I don’t trust myself.”

“Of course, Mr. Davis, you must let me lend you what you need. I’m sure father would wish it; and that poor creature should be looked after right away.”

The old man’s face brightened. “It’s awfully good of you, Miss Manning. I hate to ask it, but if you could let me have twenty-five dollars conveniently, I’ll mail you my check tonight from New Rochelle.”

She rose and left him, returning a moment later with a gold mesh bag, from which she produced two tens and a five. “Is that really all you will need?” she asked, handing him the bills. He looked at the bulging bag greedily, but decided to let well enough alone.

“Ample, thank you, and I am very grateful. I feel like a dreadful intruder, Miss Manning.” He patted the dog and held it toward the girl. “Thank the lady, Vicky, she’s helping you to be well again.” The little silky-haired cur turned melting eyes on his benefactress, tried to extend a quivering paw, yelped, and settled back again against his master’s coat. “Silly to love a little beast like that,” said the man, “but I can’t help it, never could. Animals somehow creep into my heart. Vicky, let’s go before Miss Manning thinks your master is quite the old fool he is.” He rose and tiptoed toward the door. “I’m infinitely obliged, Miss Elsie. Forgive me for the freedom of speech, but your dear father used to speak of you so often. I knew him very well in a business way, you see. In my younger and more prosperous days I was a stockbroker — met him first on the Exchange. Dear, dear, how time flies, and now Gerald Manning is gone, and a worthless old codger like me lives on. Strange, isn’t it? Thank you a thousand times, my dear young lady. Believe me, your sorrow is my sorrow.”

“I hope your little dog will be quite all right, Mr. Davis. Good-bye.”

Mr. Davis, alias “Funeral Frank,” drew a breath of relief, as he stood outside on the stoop. He wished now he’d told another story and made it fifty, or even a hundred. The tale about the pawned jewelry that had been his dear dead wife’s and must be redeemed that very day, or go under the hammer at a pawnbroker’s auction, had always taken well, but that game he always played with the corroborating tickets in his hand. It worked better, too, when the prospective victims were mourning for a woman, preferably a wife. The appeal was immediate in such cases, and Vicky was always “dear wife’s little dog,” treasured because of her love for him. The dog was always an actor in the lone man’s little dramas. The dog’s adoration of him inspired confidence, and his ability to play hurt and yelp when handled by a stranger was touching.

Funeral Frank hurried down the steps and walked rapidly toward Fifth Avenue, cradling the dog tenderly. Although Vicky’s four feet were perfectly good, he did not like to run, especially in crowds. If his master put him down he would stand on his hind legs and yap loudly until taken up. Mr. Davis never displayed him very conspicuously. There were too many people who had met him in times of distress and might remember to his great inconvenience. Mr. Davis had planned to drop in at the darkened home of Mrs. Elbert Peabody, whose son had just met with a fatal motor accident, but decided to be satisfied with the morning’s work and go home. He was already well ahead on his week, and there was an excellent lead in Hartford that should be worked the following day, and he must look up his fraternal-society button and tooth charm. He redeemed his dog basket, disguised as a black leather hand bag, at the parcel room at the railway station, settled Vicky comfortably and boarded an uptown subway. It would not be long now before he would be home.

II

An hour later he was contentedly seated in the big armchair by the grate fire of his snug little flat, with Vicky tucked into the folds of his dressing gown. On the table at his elbow lay heaps of obituary notices and death columns, while between the book ends of two butting elephants stood a row of society and business directories. Trade newspapers were piled on a chair, and the club list of every association in the city, for either men or women, lay on the second shelf of the whatnot. Mr. Davis worked at his despicable trade with scientific thoroughness.

He flattered himself that he had no heart. Tears and sorrow he could look on unmoved. They were signs of weakness to be taken advantage of by a clever man, People’s brains did not function accurately under the stress of emotion. Therefore bereavements netted him a weekly revenue that averaged a hundred and fifty, ample for his simple needs and requiring little outlay of either time or money on his part. Other crooks despised him, but he was as callous to the opinion of his fellow practitioners of dishonesty as he was to the world he preyed upon.

They might sneer at him and nickname him Funeral Frank and pass him up as the meanest con in Christendom! He cared not at all, and it let him out of collections for various funds that were continually being passed around. Aid for the families of men sent to stir, funds for lawyers to defend unlucky crooks, money to buy evidence for some worthy who needed an alibi, all the underworld charities passed him by. They didn’t want his dirty money. So much the better. His dirty money stayed, with him that much longer. Only Mr. Wellington, who threw the best imitation epileptic fit in the city and robbed the good Samaritan who came to his aid, had shown a disposition to chum him, but Funeral Frank gave him scant encouragement.

The bogus epileptic, who was professionally known as “Frothy Fred,” persisted, and Mr. Davis, after all, being a creature endowed with speech and vanity, found it agreeable occasionally to exchange the one and air the other with a fellow being. Therefore it was with a grunt of greeting that he bade Mr. Frederick Weitz enter, although he had hardly begun his researches for tomorrow’s prospect.

Frothy Fred was tall and lean. His appearance was a great asset in his profession. It was impossible to look upon his haggard face and gaunt figure without a feeling of pity, and, when wrestling in the throes of well-simulated agony, he presented a picture of human suffering not to be resisted. He could “froth,” too, as his nickname denoted, and not even a physician could detect the fake until he had made a thorough examination. Indeed it was Mr. Wellington’s proudest boast that he had collected from three doctors in the same evening, when the gentlemen were returning from a convention of a medical society. A grudging mutual admiration existed between the two men, for Mr. Wellington was forced to admit that Mr. Davis’ talents as an actor were but little short of genius. Therefore, on this occasion, in spite of the visitor’s interruption of his host’s study of the characteristics, family, and interests of the just departed Mr. Edgar Baines of Hartford, Mr. Davis waved a welcoming hand toward the sideboard. Mr. Wellington relieved the sideboard of some of the liquid weight that it upheld and, approaching his host, took the chair indicated and looked up lugubriously.

“Look here, Funeral,” even his voice had a tone of sickly pain, “you’ll have to quit the game and take a hide out.”

“Whatcha mean?” demanded Davis, setting down the Druggist Journal.

“I met up with ‘Whitey’ Welsh, the stool pigeon,” said Frothy, “and he tells me to put you wise that the complaints have been coming in thick. They’re out to get you, and they’re watchin’ the lists of deaths that you might be expected to think good pickin’s. When you get nabbed, believe me, it won’t be just one prosecution you’ll get. They’ll be a whole army of suckers will fall in line to get you, and, what’s worse for you, a charity organization is going to put an ad in all the papers, and they’re goin’ to make a Sunday story, all about the meanest crook, see? When they get through, you an’ your dawg is goin’ to be too all-fired famous for your own health. Get me?”

That Mr. Davis “got” him became obvious. Spilling the astonished Vicky from his lap, he jumped to his feet. “Whitey Welsh told you that?” he asked. “Now isn’t that the luck! I’ve got a prospect up the line for tomorrow, but I hate this running round, me and Vicky do!”

“Try Chi,” suggested Frothy.

“Chicago! Naw!” snorted Mr. Davis. He opened out his hands in a gesture that embraced all the simple, but comfortable, furnishings of his simple and comfortable flat. “Me, at my age, got to get out, go to another city, find another place? Say, that’s fierce, and me with a lifetime o’ study behind me?” He banged his hand down on the “Who’s Who In New York City” so violently that the heavy volume jumped. “Me, with prospects all mapped out, an’ everything. What do I nick ’em for, twenty-five here, fifty bones there. And look at the undertakers and the doctors gettin’ theirs by the thousand, and the florists and the nurses and everybody gettin’ theirs, and here they set up a holler about me and my little rake-off. Isn’t this burg big enough for them an’ me?”

Frothy watched him, a sad smile lifting the droop of his weary, lined face. “That’s about the size of it,” he said sympathetically. “You see, you and me are in the same boat.”

“No such thing!” Funeral came back, his face dark with anger. “What I get they give me, hand it out to me. What you get, you lift, go through the sucker’s pockets, while he’s helping you to your feet. That’s different, even the police’ll say that’s different.”

“Well, as between a dip and a con, believe me,” Frothy said, “the dip is the better class. Anyway, I came here outter friendship for you, Davis, and you’ve no call to ball me out. Take it from me, Whitey Welsh’s tip is good. Keep off it for a while. Was you out this morning?” he inquired shrewdly.

“I sure was! Name of Manning. A real nice little girl, Elsie was her name, contributed twenty-five bones in memory of her father.”

“Well, I told you,” condoled Frothy, “that the police will canvass that house. They’ll be too late, of course. You got there first. But they’ll get your Elsie girl to lodge a complaint as sure as you’re born. These easy marks are awful soreheads, and, when they’re not ashamed to be shown up as easy marks, they are the hardest on the smart guy that puts it over. If I was you, I’d take me and my educated hound and sell books up State for a month or so, that’s what!”

Davis relapsed into gloomy silence, from which he emerged into a string of curses that fell ill from his benevolent elderly mouth. “Anyway,” he said at length when he had eased his injured feelings, “I’ve got a good bit laid by. Guess I’ll lay off and take it easy. One thing I’ve always noted, suckers fall even quicker than most folks, and it’s a good, easy little act. I won’t queer it. Guess I’ll let this Hartford bunch alone, too,” he added after a moment’s further cogitation. “If this publicity thing starts they might catch on in the syndicated Sunday write-up.” Regretfully he crumpled the sheet of notes which he had been compiling and tossed it into the fire. Then, with another sigh, he dropped the fraternal tooth charm and button into the drawer of the table. “Nope, won’t do.”

Frothy crossed to the sideboard and composed two soothers, one of which he placed before his friend, and Mr. Davis, having no present use for his fatherly and respectable appearance, and Mr. Wellington, having no need for such in his business, the two meanest crooks in Christendom, spent a pleasant and unprofitable evening.

III

The events proved the value of ‘Whitey’ Welsh’s warning. Publicity stared Mr. Davis and his canine wonder in the face. He saw himself in the news, written large. The Sunday story was particularly annoying. It gave a detailed description of his appearance and manner, and that of Vicky, a sort of composite, derived from the reminiscences of a host of his victims. It began to look to Funeral that he would have to take Frothy’s unwelcome advice and begin operations in another city. Still Funeral Frank sat back and hoped for the best. None of the squealers had any idea of where he lived. If he did not appear on the scene at his chosen time he was safe. If he left Vicky behind he was even safer. There were thousands of men who answered the description, and the addition of a scrubby, almost white, mustache went far toward a complete disguise. To his landlady he explained that his doctor had advised a complete rest from all business and a strict diet. “Nothing much,” he explained, “a mere matter of blood pressure.”

Three weeks passed uneventfully Then a catastrophe occurred. Vicky was ill. In vain his master tried all the remedies he knew. In vain he walked the floor, cradling the whining dog. Vicky’s nose was burning, his tongue lolled, he could hardly unclose his feverish eyes, his silky coat was dry and brittle, and his pathetic whimper was only too genuine. Anxiety devoured the soul of the meanest crook. His love for the cur was the one real affection he owned.

Vicky was his friend and companion, his pal, his coworker. He could not bear to think of the animal’s suffering. He was filled with fright as the dog sickened more and more. The dog must go to a veterinary for examination, but he feared to take him; even if he carried the dog basket he must take him out when the doctor prescribed, and Vicky’s description had been even more detailed and exact than his own. He tried to reach Frothy, but that worthy was working and not to be located; besides he wanted to hear personally what the veterinary had to say and be sure that he had the directions for treatment. Vicky grew worse. He lay in his basket in a stupor, only protesting weakly when he was implored to take beef juice, or a scrap of chicken. Occasionally he rallied enough to wag a feeble tail and roll adoring eyes at his frantic nurse.

The strain was too great. Fear at last sapped fear. Funeral Frank decided he must take the dog and take him at once, before he was beyond help. Carefully he went about his planning. In the classified directory he located a veterinary with a name unknown to fame and an address in a remote part of the city. It would not do to risk an appeal to any of the well-known uptown animal hospitals. They were in districts where he had been active. People in these localities who had dogs, and he recalled from the remarks of his victims that many of them had, would be likely to patronize these hospitals, and undoubtedly Vicky and his prowess had been discovered. Besides there were the papers, with the damnable Sunday feature story! No, the obscure veterinary on the far East Side was the safest.

Funeral Frank donned his oldest suit and his most battered hat. He had seen himself delineated with some pride, be it confessed, as “a middle-aged man of gentlemanly appearance, always well and appropriately dressed and of pleasant and sympathetic approach.” The man who sallied forth might have been described as “an elderly man, of seedy appearance and furtive manner.” Vicky he laid tenderly on the little blanket in his basket, and he caressed the wrinkled forehead and fondled the hot ears, noting for the thousandth time the brittle feeling of the skin and hair.

“Don’t die,” he whispered brokenly. “Don’t die, Vicky, your old master couldn’t stand it, boy.”

Vicky looked up whining, and Funeral Frank’s heart, that had been leather and iron to the grief of others, was likely to burst with his own anxiety and sorrow. There wasn’t any danger, he told himself, and Vicky must have attention, Carrying the dog basket so as to avoid the slightest unnecessary jolting, Mr. Davis set out. He found himself surprisingly nervous, in spite of his new mustache and the unwonted slovenliness of his appearance. He caught himself looking furtively at every policeman; he hurried, a failing he had never allowed himself before. When he left the houses where he had plucked silver linings for himself from the darkest clouds of others, he had always walked away slowly, reverently, always in the picture, until, well out of sight. But worry over Vicky’s condition had broken his nerve. He hurried, he was furtive, and, worst of all, he knew it. He negotiated the elevated railroad in safety. No one observed the bent old man with the hand bag on his knees, once he had breathlessly eased himself to an inconspicuous seat. He let the other passengers off at his station and was the last to descend. He darted across Sixth Avenue and almost ran eastward. Over there, beyond Third Avenue, was the place. He had made sure of the doctor’s office hours by telephoning from a cigar store. As he neared the crowded corner debouching on Fifth Avenue he had a moment of sickening fear. Suppose his pocket should be picked, suppose he had no money to pay the doctor, or to get home with? Suppose the very thing that he had described so often with such convincing pathos should really happen? He grew hot with apprehension, like a spreading splash of boiling water on his diaphragm. It could happen, it might happen. He paused and leaned against a post of a decrepit brownstone house, afraid to enter the regulated, congested maelstrom of humanity that, regularly at the beckoning finger of the traffic cop, surged across the asphalt to the curb beyond. He felt Vicky’s uneasy weight shift in the basket. It drove him to action and gave him courage. Pulling himself together he scurried out and fell in with the jam that now carried him along.

It was an automobile that, under the direction of the policeman, swinging out to take the cross street, proved his undoing. He was so absorbed in watching for possible pickpockets that he darted forward. He did not see the approaching wheels, but the policeman did, and instinctively started toward him, waving his upraised hand. Funeral Frank naturally misinterpreted the movement, and his heart quailed — he had been recognized! They were after him! He stopped, ready to dart into the saving crowd. A mud guard caught him, and he fell sprawling. The handle of the dog basket broke, and, with its precious contents, the bag rolled from him.

He was stunned for an instant, as his head met the pavement, only for an instant, then he was scrambling to his feet, as the policeman and a half dozen men closed on him to give assistance. He would have run, but he was too dizzy.

“Hurt?” inquired the officer. Davis shook his head.

The chauffeur of the car that had struck him was escorting him to the sidewalk, talking all the while. “It was your fault. I blew my horn, and the cop had signed to me to go ahead!”

“Yes, yes,” agreed Davis. He brushed himself automatically, surrounded by a ring of interested and sympathetic faces. Then he screamed: “My dog — my dog!”

Nobody had seen a dog. The offending car had drawn up to the curb. The tide of traffic was going north and south in a steady stream.

“In a dog basket,” he wailed. “A basket that looked like a black traveling bag.”

There was no sign of such an object. Certainly it had not been crushed by the countless grinding wheels, that much could be seen. What then? Funeral Frank stared about him wildly. Someone had seized the bag, thinking it a traveling kit and had made away with it. What would happen when they discovered that it contained only a sick and terrified little dog. He wrung his hands, as his mind canvassed the possibilities. The would-be thief would throw bag and contents in some areaway. If nothing worse happened Vicky would find his way to the pound. Instinctively he looked toward the policeman and just as instinctively looked away.

The chauffeur, who evidently considered it the part of policy to conciliate, was still brushing him off and advising him: “I’d go over to the police station and leave a description of the dog and call up the pound.” He was aghast, he could do neither. “And advertise.” The chauffeur was trying to thrust a bill into his hand. “I’ll pay for it.”

Automatically his hand closed on the bill. Just then a movement in the crowd revealed another policeman making his way forward, already he was fumbling for his notebook. The chauffeur groaned, he foresaw endless procedures and appearances and a possible suit for damages; but he might have spared himself. The little old man ceased his lamentations abruptly and dove headlong into the press that swung onward toward the railroad station.

It was not until Funeral Frank was seated in the general waiting room and well hidden behind an unfolded newspaper that he was able to draw a breath that was not painful and constricted with fright. With difficulty he held the sheets before his face, for his hands were still quivering. Scalding, helpless tears started to his eyes and burned their slow course down his cheeks. Vicky, Vicky! He sat on the hard wooden bench for more than an hour, trying to think out some means to find his pet and not expose himself to arrest.

There seemed no way, Vicky was a sure clue to his identity, and Vicky’s size, appearance, and manners were exceedingly individual. On the other hand the dog was sick, perhaps he might die, alone and uncomforted, thrown out on some reeking pavement. His tears started anew, his imagination had been in a grip as of red-hot pincers. He rose and made a careful tour of all the adjoining cross streets, looking in every areaway, glancing in at open vestibules, any and everywhere, where either bag or dog might have been disgustedly thrown — nothing.

IV

Then he had an idea. Wellington, his friend, could make the necessary inquiries and advertise at his address. Dogs were in no way clues to his identity. Filled with new hope he hurried uptown and went directly to Frothy’s lodgings. He was home and in bed, somewhat exhausted after a particularly exacting impersonation. But from him Funeral Frank got no comfort.

“Are you crazy?” demanded Frothy. “Leave the mutt be! What, me advertise and trot around to the pound? Not on your life! Don’t you suppose, after all the talk there’s been, the police will recognize that dog if they ever lamp him? And they’ll hold him as bait to draw you in, see if they don’t? And, if they don’t find him, then the mutt’s dead, see? ’Tain’t as if he was some sort of a real dog that anyone would want to keep, but he’s got a pedigree like a cocktail and looks it. And, besides, you said yourself he’s sick. Who’s goin’s to want to keep him, huh? For another thing, you two together is a lot too conspicuous just now. You let well enough alone and count me out. Get me?”

Funeral Frank cursed ferociously and departed. There was unescapable truth in what Frothy had said. But some way must be devised, something must be done, or he would go to pieces. Mrs. Wales, his landlady, met him in the hallway. Mrs. Wales would be the solution of the difficulty. Stuttering with hope, his words tumbling over each other, he made his request.

She looked at him strangely. “And why don’t ye do it yerself?” she demanded suspiciously.

He hesitated and felt himself grow pale. He had been very careful never to allow her the least cause for suspicion of his real activities. To her he was a book agent, but it flashed through his mind, suppose she had read the newspapers, and had connected the descriptions of the “Meanest Crook in Christendom” and his dumb confederate with the star boarder of the first floor? His tongue withered, his heart sickened. He managed to stammer out a weak excuse that he might have a great deal of business to keep him away in the next few days.

She continued to stare at him with hostile eyes. “I’ll be telling yer, Mr. Davis,” she said sharply, “I never did like dogs in my house, and there’s them that complain that I do be lettin’ you have one, when I won’t let thim. Now the dog’s out, let him stay out, and ye’ll kindly bring no more in, either.”

He begged, he offered to pay her extra for staying in to await answers to the advertisement and proffered a generous fee for her journey to the pound. She remained adamant, and he dared not appear overanxious. As it was, he feared she was putting two and two together. As he felt the tears of despair again assail his eyes, he turned from her quickly and sought the refuge of his cozy rooms.

The first object that met his eyes was the basket with its cushion, dented from the form of its little occupant, drawn up close to the grate, and a tooth-marked rubber ball and a mauled doll lay beside it, Vicky’s playthings. Then he wept uncontrollably, hysterically. Everywhere he turned were reminders of his one and only friend and companion — the white enameled blue-bordered bowl that held water was on the floor beside his bed in the alcove; his tiny, bell-adorned harness and its thread of a leash lay on the dresser. On the kitchenette floor were bits of bones and the flowerlike print of his dainty feet and the feeding dish, Vicky’s last Christmas present, with “For a Good Dog,” lettered in gold on its incurved border. Funeral Frank was suffering bereavement, bereavement of which he had made a mock, and from which he had filched his undeserved ease. Heart-broken, rebellious at fate, determined somehow to cheat the arithmetic of the inevitable, he suffered the human torture of them that mourn. He was wholly oblivious to the irony of the situation. His sorrow was too real, too great to permit of consecutive thought. He only knew that he grieved and suffered, as he had never dreamed it possible that living man could grieve and suffer. He could not eat, he could not sleep. When night came he sat by the window in the easy-chair, aching with loneliness for the dog that once cuddled in the crook of his arm, protesting with a whimper if he moved, sighing with supreme content if he caressed. He had bragged that he had no heart. Alas, he had! A small heart, a narrow heart, only large enough to hold a little dog. The dog had been the only tenant of the red house of tears, and now the empty heart cried out unrelieved, uncomforted, for the only thing that it had ever loved.

Dawn found him hollow-eyed and spent. He made pot after pot of strong coffee; he must pull up, he must do something. At noon he went down to “The Dump,” a small back room of an apparently evacuated saloon, the rendezvous of the neighborhood crooks. There one could get anything done for money, a guy croaked or a little job of soup. He made known his wants to Julius Kahn, the proprietor, and wondered, as he saw the fat bartender distend with chuckles that broke into laughter and shook his jellylike contours.

“Hey, youse!” he exclaimed raucously to the thin assembly at the round tables before him. “Here iss Funeral Frank wantin’ some guys to find his dog! De dog iss gone, and Funeral Frank he hass found oud wat it iss, a funeral. He want someboty should an advertisement make and a reward.” He collapsed over his mahogany in his merriment, waving the dirty bar rag to emphasize the humor of the situation. “Please to redurn de chile’s playmate und receive a mudder’s blessing. Loog at him, der meanest crook alife, und he got de mourning crepes for dat dawg!” He turned his back on his delighted audience and shook with laughter.

Funeral Frank looked about him at the grinning faces, not one but jeered him with eyes and lips.

“Aw,” said a pallid youth at the far end of the room, as he inhaled a pinch of “snow” on his thumb nail, “who’s goin’ to get Funeral’s dawg fer him — not me! That guy’s got a graft that gets my goat. I may croak a guy, but I ain’t goin’ round to collect offen his grievin’ fambly — nothin’ doin’!”

“Look at the old geezer cryin’ over his dog!” hiccuped the bleary keeper of a fence garage. A cackle of amusement followed.

Again those shameful, dreadful tears were searing Funeral Frank’s eyes. He choked and turned away, fighting blindly toward the door to the alley.

Vicky, little sick, lost Vicky, and nobody would help! What must he think of the master whom he had served so long and faithfully? Somewhere he was whimpering his wheedling cry and holding up his pathetic paw, dying, perhaps; abused, neglected, wondering blindly, dumbly why his master did not come.

Davis made his way back to his flat. His face was ghastly, but his lips were firm, and his benign countenance was set in a look of bitter fury and firm resolve. He signed a check for the full amount of his bank balance. He would have to have money, cash money, where he could get it quickly. He cleaned up his rooms, destroyed anything that might be corroborative evidence against him.

All his cherished library of social registers and club memberships and business directories, his scrapbooks filled with clippings and notes, all he buried in a vacant lot. “Funeral Frank” Davis prepared for his own long departure. Suddenly he thought of Elsie Manning, her self-contained quietness, her strong young face, her kindly eyes. He recalled her look as she touched the hypocritically whining dog.

His notes had informed him that the late Gerald Manning had been an office holder in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Doubtless his daughter would see that the society looked out for Vicky. Well, he had no hope of escape for himself. If Vicky was to be saved, his master would have to take the medicine, bottled between dark stone walls. But she’d help a dog if she wouldn’t help a mean hound, That much he knew.

Resolutely Funeral Frank set his feet upon the road of retribution that would pause at the house of mourning and end in the house of law.

“Detective Story”, Oct 1921

Ether

Convalescence is so slow, so irritating! It’s a broken leg this time — a nasty, twisted break, where the bone is slit, not decently cracked through and through. Weeks and weeks, and now they tell me it will take five more weeks! This is the fourth cast I’ve had. They call it light, but it weighs a ton, and I feel insecure on my crutches, even if they have rubber tips.

Time — I never knew there was so much time in the world! A day has a thousand hours, and the nights have more. That’s one reason why I’m writing this — it’s something to do. There’s another reason — I keep thinking of the dream, and wondering what it means.

It comes whenever I take ether, and this is the third time. It’s always the same, and always just a little different; but it is more real than life. These dream people are so definitely impressed on my mind that I know I can write a far more accurate description of them than I could of my most intimate friends.

In the vision there are two doctors and two nurses. First, the nurse, who has her back turned to me, and is just going out of the room and shutting the door. I’ve never seen her face, but she is small, and has a nice figure. The hair below her cap is light brown, straight, and a bit oily. Her hand, resting on the door knob, is rather red, and she wears a wedding ring. She’s in white, of course, but there is a dark stain on the bottom of her skirt, like spilled iodine.

One doctor stands by a tall, white piece of furniture, which has innumerable little drawers in it, with glass button knobs. He is young. I think he must be a house physician — an interne. He, too, wears white, and it contrasts sharply with his very black hair, which has blue high lights. He is putting something away, rolling it very deftly. I can’t see what it is, because I’m in bed, and the angle is too great to permit me to satisfy my curiosity.

I don’t know what’s the matter with me on these occasions. I have never found out, but I think I must be a surgical case — as, of course, I am in reality. I know that sounds queer, but so is the situation. It’s a dream, which I dream every time I take ether. Never once has it come to me in my normal sleep.

I have the most difficulty in visualizing the nurse who stands close by my pillow, because she towers above me; but I know every wrinkle in her uniform where my eye can rest. I know she wears a silver watch on her breast, fastened there by a fleur-de-lis pin. Her face is so foreshortened that I don’t know the color of her eyes, but she has beautiful smooth skin, and a round young chin. Her hands are nice. I like the touch of the one that holds my wrist, taking my pulse.

The room is a hospital room, which has an unusually large window. There are three doors. The other nurse goes out by one of them — which leads to the hall, apparently, because the unimportant doctor leaves shortly by that same exit. I don’t know into what the other doors open — a bathroom, perhaps, or maybe a hanging closet.

A large framed photograph faces the bed. It’s the picture of a man I have never seen, photographed from an excellent painting, the handling of which suggests Sargent at his best. There is a bureau on the right, between my bed and the window. I can’t see the floor, but I think, from the sound they make in walking, that it is of tile. I know it is broad day outside, because the light is strong and very white, as if reflected from a sun-washed wall.

The dominant figure in the room is the Japanese doctor. He stands at the foot of the bed and looks straight at me. His brows are drawn, and he seems deeply troubled. He is short and stocky, unmistakably a Japanese. His face is pitted by smallpox — I have never seen a face so badly pitted. His hair stands straight up like a brush, and his very black, tilted eyes glitter as if they were made of glass.

He has a large mouth, a square jaw, and an exceptionally wide forehead. One side of his face seems to be more deeply scarred than the other. He stands there looking at me. I feel horribly frightened, not of him, but of something that I know he is going to say. He glances at the nurse, and nods. I feel her fingers move on my wrist.

“She’s coming out,” I hear her say. Her voice is soft, almost a whisper. “Do you want to tell her now?”

I lie still, wondering in my dream what it is he wants to tell me. Always it flashes through my mind that he will say that I cannot recover. I watch his face anxiously.

“She’s coming out very quickly, now,” the nurse informs him.

This is as far as I get on the first occasion. The room blurs, the figures waver, as things do when you see them through a heat haze. The unimportant doctor goes out. I grope for the nurse’s hand, which has been withdrawn from me. I hear voices, hushed but matter-of-fact little sounds, like the click of a spoon on a bottle, the scrape of a chair. The blurring increases, with a zooming of sounds. I feel a stab of pain, a wave of nausea. I struggle and struggle in my mind; then I begin to see clearly.

I am coming back — the nurse was right; but I come back to another bed, a different room, another nurse, a doctor that I know. I rock and swing in confusion between my two experiences. Then the real world solidifies around me, and I am myself.

II

The first time this happened was coincident with my first experience with an anesthetic. I wasn’t under long, for it was a very minor operation. I thought my dream must be quite an ordinary sort. I had heard of strange things that people said when under the influence, and of illusions that they sometimes carried far into their waking; but my nurse — who was a gray-haired, rather stout woman, not in the least resembling the nurse in my dream — told me that she had never heard of anything quite like it.

Now my real hospital room is nothing at all like my dream room. It has a normal, ordinary window and a white painted wardrobe, and the bath is next to the door going into the hall, making a little corridor of the entrance. There is a bureau between me and the window, and no pictures adorn the walls, which are painted a washed-out blue. The dream room and the real room were just as dissimilar as two hospital rooms well could be. There was nothing in the real room to suggest the other.

I told my story to Dr. Peck — our own middle-aged, lanky Yankee family physician. He squinted at me and remarked that the subconscious mind was a queer animal.

Then, after I had got over the wild desire to discuss my ailments, which seems to be the natural aftermath of all operations, I forgot all about it, until my horse enthusiastically threw me one fine day. When I came to, I was in bandages, and I had had my dream for the second time.

As my last recollection was of a slipping saddle, and the bunching muscles of a frightened horse beneath me, to find myself in a white room, with an atmosphere that smelled strangely familiar, was a bit disconcerting. I was on my way “out” before I knew anything at all. I was in the struggle period. There seemed to be three nurses — one going out of a door that wasn’t there; another, with cool, soft hands that held my pulse, who said over and over, “Do you want to tell her now?” and another, the real one, who kept getting out of focus, like the reflection one sees in a distorted mirror.

There were three doctors — one who left by the door that was not, my regular lanky Yankee, and, clearest of all, the pockmarked Japanese. His bright black eyes held me, and this time he spoke, with a penetrating voice and a queer accent. He was asking me something. I clung to his words desperately.

“Can you hear me?”

I heard him distinctly, but before I could answer, the vision faded — or, rather, it didn’t fade, but reality came down in front of it like a curtain, and blotted it out.

This time I didn’t speak to Dr. Peck about my dream. I felt reticent about it. I did ask my nurse whether her patients had ever told her that they had the same ether dream every time they went under. She was Scottish and matter-of-fact.

“No one ever heard of such a thing,” she said. “Delusions are delusions, and that’s all there is to it.”

And then, a day or so later, after they had X-rayed me thoroughly, they found this broken bone. The following day they set it, and put me in a cast, where I’ve been ever since.

When they informed me of my misfortune, I was disgusted. I felt that a collarbone was all that ride was worth, anyway; but since the ordeal was not to be avoided, I took what comfort I could from the thought, which amounted to conviction, that I should see the Japanese doctor again, and perhaps get the whole of his message.

Sure enough, the ether gave me back my dream, the same in every detail. The only thing that differed was the end, because I didn’t get it all. The real world came and pulled me back, just as it always does; but this time I fought to stay. I fought hard. When I heard the dream nurse say, “Do you want to tell her now?” I dragged myself together. I concentrated with all my might. I glued my eyes on the glittering eyes that looked at me from that pockmarked face.

As before, there seemed a wait, and then the nurse said:

“She’s coming out very quickly now.”

Again he spoke, leaning toward me with such earnestness that the vital importance of what he was to tell me made me shiver inwardly.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” I managed to answer.

I don’t know how I did it. I certainly did not speak. I felt a contraction in my eyelids, and perhaps I lowered them in answer.

“Quickly, quickly!” said the nurse. “She’s going out.”

He glanced at her as if annoyed by the interruption. Then his eyes sought mine; but already he had begun to blur. The nurse’s voice seemed to be repeating, like a strange buzzing:

“Quickly, quickly, quickly!”

The room tilted, the portrait on the wall tipped till it was nearly sidewise, the big window became a smear of white; but still I held to his eyes, which were now mere pin points of light. I would hear — I would!

“It is very important — do you understand that it is very important?” I heard him say.

Desperately I strove to keep my balance in that reeling room.

“I must, I must!”

I seemed to see pity in the distant gleam of his eyes, and I strove the more. He must have known that I was trying to reach him as violently as he was trying to hold me. I realized the awful speed of time — so little, a mere instant between the moment when consciousness accompanied me into this strange place and the moment when it dragged me out of it into the real; and in that tiny fragment of time so much to do!

“I know! I know!” I screamed, but I knew that I made no sound.

“Remember” — the word burned into my soul — “remember, when you go back—”

He was still speaking, still giving me the all-important message; but I was going — I was gone. Blackness, the tinkle of a spoon on a glass, the scrape of a chair, the rattle of stiffly starched skirts, a touch on my wrist, but no longer the soft fingers that I knew so well! Coming, coming out — out!

Daylight — my room — Dr. Peck smiling at me and saying:

“Why do you smash yourself up like this, young woman? What kind of a cut-up puzzle picture are you trying to give me? And you took your time coming out of it, I must say!”

He grinned, but I saw he looked relieved. I suppose my fight to stay in the other room had been evident here, where they awaited my return.

So there it is. I’ve written it down. That was five weeks ago.

I’ve told nobody except Billy. The thing was on my mind, and he has been so good about coming to see me, bringing me flowers and all that! He’s dear and sympathetic, and his hands are almost as nice as the hands of the dream nurse. He gently laughs at me.

“It’s just like a crazy girl — had to go and pull a new stunt in ether jags!”

That’s the way he takes it. Even he, who seems to understand me better than anyone else, has no conception of what that desperate effort to get the message really is. I feel that it is genuine, that it is important, that there is something more to this than just ether fumes, but I can’t make him see it. I don’t suppose anybody would really believe me. However, there it is, as I said before. I’ve written it, and if it ever happens again, this much is a matter of record.

I wonder if the pockmarked doctor’s warning — it is a warning, I am sure — is that sometime I shall not return? That can’t be, for his words told me to remember when I went back.

What am I dreaming? But that doesn’t matter. The point is that I dreamed again. Where am I when I dream? Shall I ever get the answer? I wonder — I wonder!

III

Well, it did come again. Something went wrong with my leg. They had to open it and scrape the bone. I’ll write this for my own satisfaction, since Billy will not take me seriously, and Dr. Peck continues to say that the subconscious mind is a queer animal.

This thing that I dream is true — I know it! Somewhere that room exists, those nurses are actual people. It’s all real, and the Japanese doctor is the most real of all. If I could only speak when I’m there! If I could only ask them who and what they are, and why they haunt me! But I can’t. I am more helpless there, in that dream place, than I have ever been in the waking world, even when very badly hurt. I’m tongue-tied, and my brain feels like a pebble in a sling about to be thrown away — away — far away.

My hand, between the fingers of my nurse, is my own hand — I know it. I feel her fingers, I am conscious of the flowing of my blood, but I have no control over myself whatever. I exercise my will — or, rather, I try to do so; I strive and strain, but all I can do is to fix my attention with all my might on what the Japanese doctor is telling me.

This time I did try to speak, but the feeling was just like my inability to control my hand. That part of my brain, or my will, or whatever it is that makes one’s body respond to a desire to move, simply wasn’t there. I lay inside myself, like a sword in its sheath — perfectly myself, but quite without ability to make myself a part of whatever might happen to the outside.

Next time, if the dream comes, I shall not fight. I will let all the preliminaries go by. They are always the same, and I know them by heart. The other nurse, the interne, the room itself — I won’t notice them. I’ll wait until the Japanese doctor begins speaking before I use my strength. Then perhaps I may be able to fight long enough to get all the message; for now I feel more than ever that it is something very important — important for all the world, not just for me alone. This time I stayed long enough to hear him say:

“Remember that the anesthetic—”

Otherwise everything, every little thing, had been just as it always is. The nurse had told the Japanese doctor that I was rushing quickly back to the other world. He had asked me if I heard, had impressed upon me that I must carry his words with me back to the flesh and blood world of men and women.

Now at last I know — “the anesthetic” — something that concerns ether. Perhaps something is wrong in the way it is administered; or are there other and better anodynes in that mysterious place to which I go? Perhaps the Japanese doctor wants to help us here with the knowledge of the world over there.

It seems to me as if now at last I had the real cue, as if I am very close to the answer; but oh, how Billy laughs at me! It’s the only thing I have against him. He ought to know better than to laugh, when he knows it means so much to me, even if his man’s logic won’t let him realize that there are all sorts of things, just as much fact as ourselves, that we don’t see unless some artificial means permits us to. You might just as well doubt Saturn’s rings, or the canals on Mars, and I told him so. As I explained it to him:

“Perhaps the ether sleep is a sort of telescope.”

Oh, well, anyone who understands radio ought to be able to believe something little and simple, like my dream.

I wonder if, when we’re married, he’ll always laugh at what I take most to heart? That would be rather awful. I wish he wouldn’t be so pig-headed just because it doesn’t concern him! If every time I took ether I had a vision of him holding out his arms to me, and uttering platitudes about love, he would say that it was a heavenly vision, and want to tell the world.

Dear Billy! I must learn to be patient with him. All wives have to study that, and one might as well get a running start before marriage. After all, it’s very little to forgive — just his inability to see something that he hasn’t seen and never will see; but he teased me until I had to come and add this last microscopic chapter to the story without an end.

I’m to “remember that the anesthetic” — all right, I will, and wait patiently for the next word. If I asked Dr. Peck to give me a real good dose of ether when there is nothing the matter with me, I wonder if he would let me have it, so that I could go back and get the rest of the message? No, of course he wouldn’t! He’d think I was crazy, and tell Billy it wasn’t safe to marry me, and go upsetting the family, and maybe sending me off to a sanitarium.

I think I’ll just have to laugh at it all, as Billy laughs at me, and forget it. When all is said and done, I have a lot of nicer things to think about. I’m going to be married — think of it! — married to Billy, my Billy, in a month and three days!

I shall be solid on my pins then. This surface cut will heal in no time, and they tell me I’m ready to learn to walk again, carefully. Dear, dear Billy! You miserably healthy thing, you’ve never had an ache or pain in your life; so what do you know about ether? You’ve been lucky — that’s all. Well, here’s where I drop the matter for the time being. I swear off speaking of Japanese doctors, strange nurses, Sargent portraits, and hospital rooms. If Billy brings them up, I swear to outlaugh him.

Just the same, I shall listen in for the end of the message; so, temporarily, “there’s an end on it.”

IV

I am frightened. I can hardly write. I don’t know what it means. It can’t be, and yet it is — it’s so! I have seen him! I have been face to face with the Japanese doctor! He was right before me, real, alive. There isn’t any mistake — there couldn’t be. Why, there is less chance of my being mistaken about him than: about anyone in the whole world, even Billy!

Haven’t I focused my every sense on him with all my might? Haven’t I held to his eyes like a drowning man to a plank? No photographic plate was ever more clearly stamped with a picture than is my mind.

Why should I be so terrified? Haven’t I always asserted that these people, whom I saw in the ether, were not shadows, but substance? Haven’t I been all along convinced that somewhere that room actually exists? Yet now, when I have ocular proof, I’m frightened.

Let me write down how and where I met him. It’s no use, I can’t tell Billy, I can’t tell anybody; but, for my own satisfaction, let me keep my record clear and complete.

It was in the car, for I have to use a cane when I walk, and I don’t get around easily even yet. Nothing was further from my thoughts than the Japanese doctor. I only expect to see him when I’m under ether. It was just at the rush hour — a little after five. At a cross street near the subway there was a dreadful crush, people struggling and fighting in the mass that seemed to be slowly sucked down into the ground, as if caught in a vortex. We were held up by the traffic regulations, and waited next to the curb. I was leaning forward, watching the jam. Aunt Lucia sat next to me, quite uninterested.

A taxi drew up just behind us, and a man got out. He had a leather secretary case, and he turned his back as he reached inside for it. Then he tossed his fare to the driver, and ran, as if in a great hurry, to the subway entrance. The crowd closed about him.

I sat there, leaning from our car window, so stiff with astonishment that I couldn’t speak or move; for the face that I had looked into was more familiar than my own in the mirror. He looked straight at me with his very black, very glittering eyes, and he did not recognize me!

I can tell myself a dozen times over that it isn’t true, that it’s merely a coincidence; but I know I’m trying to lie to myself. His square jaw, the set of his lips, his scarred and pitted face, more heavily scarred and pitted on one side than on the other! Why, I even recognized his hands. It was the man, alive and in the flesh.

I must have given some inarticulate cry, for my aunt thought I had hurt myself in some way, and anxiously pulled me back. He was gone. The crowd had closed around him, and the opening had sucked him down. The car gave a jerk. We had started once more. I could not speak, but I tried to open the door.

“What are you doing?” cried my aunt.

We turned the corner into the avenue. I saw the crowd milling about. Even if I got out and hobbled after him, how could I find him in that mob? And if I did, what could I say? I slumped back helplessly on the cushions.

My aunt was solicitous.

“Home at once!” she ordered, though I tried to reassure her. “You’re not strong yet, and you’ve tried to do too much. If I were your mother, I’d put off the wedding for at least a month — indeed I would!”

“You’re much nicer as an aunt,” I told her; but it was the old subconscious mind they make so much of that spoke, for I was too much upset to talk with her.

Home at last, and how glad I was to get here! As soon as I could I ran to my room, and looked up these papers. I’ve reread every word that I’ve written about what happens in the ether. I wanted to bring it all before me as clearly as possible, and to be sure, more than sure, that I have seen, with no possibility of error, the human counterpart of the man of my visions. Counterpart, did I say? No — the man I saw is the one. It is he and no other. What next, I wonder?

But why didn’t he know me, when I knew him? There was no glimpse of recognition in his eyes. He was going uptown. He wore a queerly cut overcoat, with a kind of grayish yellow fur on the collar. The leather case he carried was an old one, much battered.

I know what I’ll do. I’ll find out if there is a convention or conference of physicians and surgeons being held in the city. There must be. It can’t be difficult to sort out those who are Japanese. I must find this man, see him, tell him everything, and perhaps find out the meaning of our meetings — the meaning of the all-important message that I am to take back.

But why must I take it back, since he is here, in and of this world himself? Can it be that the warning he is trying to give is for me personally, and not something for the general good of mankind, as I had fancied?

Find him I must! Oh, if I only dared to go to Billy and get him to help me, how much simpler it would be! But what’s the use? He would only laugh, and would ask me if I wanted a Japanese clergyman to marry us.

I might as well own up — I feel haunted. I’m writing these sensible things like one who whistles to keep up his courage. At heart I am frightened half to death. The feeling I had when I saw him face to face was — how does Shakespeare say it? — “distilled almost to jelly by the act of fear.” It was as bad as that. My eyes kept telegraphing back to my brain:

“There — there, that is the man!”

“No, no!” my brain was screaming. “Don’t say such things! It can’t possibly be true!”

Something deeper — my soul, I guess — kept whispering:

“Be warned! Be warned!”

I wish I knew what it all means, and I am afraid to know. I wonder what I shall write here next? I pray it may not be something terrible!

V

The answer — I have the answer! Oh, Billy, Billy, my Billy! Let me get hold of myself — let me write it all down. Perhaps in after years I shall want to go over this from beginning to end.

It happened out on the road, near the little house that Billy had taken for our honeymoon. He had gone out there with a surprise for me — a big cake, for it was my birthday as well as our wedding day. He was reckless, of course. It was just his hurry to see me. He had promised to be at the house before five o’clock, and he was late. He was driving his racing runabout himself.

I was here at home when the message came. He was in a hospital — they had identified him by letters in his pockets. He was unconscious, and the doctors felt that they must operate at once.

The car was at the door, waiting for mother. I ran from the telephone. I didn’t wait for anybody. Just as I was, hatless and coatless, I ran out. I managed to make the chauffeur understand what had happened. He gave me one wild look, and jumped behind the wheel.

At last, at last, we got there. I saw an elderly physician and a big woman, a sort of head nurse.

“He’s just down from the operating room,” one of them said, and they looked at each other.

They seemed to know about me — from Billy’s letters, I suppose — but they hesitated. I don’t know what I said, but at last they seemed to come to some occult agreement.

They both came with me. They wouldn’t tell me anything, except that he had been badly injured, and they had had to go ahead and operate. He hadn’t come out of the ether, but I could see him for just a moment.

One of them opened a door, and I went in. I was in the room of my dreams. The big window, the doors, the portrait, all were there. To my right stood the little nurse. Now for the first time I saw her face as she passed behind me and left the room. Following her closely, a young, black-haired interne passed me, with something rolled up in cotton in his hand.

Facing me, across the bed, was the other nurse. I saw the little fleur-de-lis that held her watch. Her hand, which I knew so well, held another hand than mine. Her fingers were on his wrist. I saw her eyes — they were terrible with pity. I heard the voice of the Japanese doctor:

“The anesthetic—”

I looked wildly at the man — the short, stocky figure, the strong, pockmarked face, the glittering eyes. My head swam in the haze of ether; the smell of it seemed to grip me as if with hands. I heard, I saw, as I had seen and heard before; but where I had lain again and again in the mock sleep of dreams, lay my love — dead!

Then, flooding me with sudden force, I knew why I had dreamed! I knew what it was he had tried to tell me in my dreams!

Before they could stop me, I was on my knees beside the bed. I had Billy in my arms. I shook him, as if he were an infant stubbornly holding his breath.

Horrified, the nurse stooped to break my hold. All my heart and mind were concentrated on the still heart beneath mine; yet I saw the Japanese doctor thrust her away from my side. I felt his strong presence in a great, insistent urge. I cried out in a loud voice, which echoed in the room:

“Come — come — come! Come back — it isn’t too late! Trust me, Billy! Come back!”

Then I felt it — the beat of his heart, the throb of life returning. I screamed.

On my shoulder I felt the doctor’s calm hand. It steadied me. I looked up.

“He has come back,” I said, in a thin little voice that didn’t seem at all my own. “The dead heart may be energized by vibration,” I whispered. “That’s what you wanted to tell me!”

I looked up at him, but his eyes were fixed on Billy’s face. He did not seem to see me.

“A miracle!” he whispered. “This is a miracle!”

Then his bright oblique eyes sought mine.

“Don’t you remember?” I breathed. “Don’t you?”

He did not answer me at once. Then, as he lifted me to my feet and took my place beside Billy, he said in a tone of bewildered wonder:

“Beyond every miracle that science explains — is still another.”

Billy’s eyes opened — recognition — a twitch of the lips.

“It’s my turn now,” the doctor said softly. “You brought him back — I’ll keep him here!”

“Munsey’s” magazine, Sep 1923

The Masque of Tragedy

With a little sigh of satisfaction, Clinton Braithwait leaned back as far as he could without losing his precarious balance, and squinted happily at the study of the picturesque courtyard his last brush stroke had completed. Then his glance lifted from the picture and roved over the scene it portrayed — rose-tinted walls covered with fig vine, balconies, blue and green, now faded to exquisitely tender tones, butter-colored oil jars, dripping clusters of purple flowers, a banana tree and two oleanders, trenchantly green against the low, open patterned brick wall at the far end of the garden, where presided a gaudy Madonna in a niche above a gurgling fountain. Beautiful, peaceful, fragrant.

The peculiar, brooding charm that is New Orleans, the New Orleans of the vieux Carré — the old French and Spanish quarter — permeated this, the home of Mesdemoiselles Bébé and Roxanne Dumontel. The artist turned quickly at the sound of footsteps under the echoing arch behind him that opened on the street. There approached a handsome middle-aged citizen of New Orleans, slender, quick of movement, mobile of countenance.

“Hello,” said the newcomer, with hardly a trace of French accent. “How did you manage it?”

“Manage what, Thiery?” said Braithwait, grinning a welcome.

“To get Mlle. Bébé’s permission to paint this courtyard. She’s sicked the dog on more artists than you can count, for daring so much as to shoot a covetous glance at her pet banana tree. You must have hypnotized her. Roxanne, she is amiable, but Bébé — oh, la, la!”

Braithwait removed the canvas, set it against the wall and proceeded to unlimber the collapsible easel.

“Vamped the dog first, and then an extraordinary lady, whether she is Bébé or Roxanne I haven’t the honor of knowing. But she’s sixty and dresses in sprigged muslin.”

“That’s Bébé, right enough. Roxanne is the elder, but she looks ten years younger — fact is, poor Mlle. Bébé isn’t more than thirty-five, if she’s that. Hers is a queer story and a sad one.”

Gaston Thiery started guiltily as the creaking of a board and the sweep of a raised Venetian blind warned them of the approach of the subject of their talk.

“Bon jour, mam’selle,” called Thiery, advancing quickly into the center of the garden. “I see you have raised the embargo in favor of my friend, Monsieur Braithwait. Be careful, mademoiselle, he is a dangerous charmer.”

The woman, a miniature creature, smiled down upon her visitors and leaned her crossed arms on the balcony rail. “What would you?” she asked with the tiniest of tiny shrugs. “He comes in, your friend, he implores, he cajoles. I am not of stone. If it were not for my fiancé, I might be foolish — but as it is, I feel safe enough to give him the permission.” She had the dried look of a withered rosebud; her small features were finely wrinkled, as if a cobweb had been laid over them; her large, heavily pouched black eyes were feverishly bright; her voice, drawling in her soft Creole speech, had withal a curious sharpness, the pitch of strained nerves.

Braithwait joined his friend under the balcony. “I am very grateful, I assure you, mademoiselle, and I shall avail myself often of the privilege you were so gracious to give. There are a dozen angles of your charming garden, every one an inspiration.”

“Of a surety, come when you wish — Ah, Roxanne is calling me. Bon jour, messieurs.” She waved a blue-veined band and hurried into the house.

“My compliments — a complete conquest,” laughed Thiery. “Are your labors ended? Then come with me to the Guiries’, and we will lunch.”

Braithwait nodded agreement, gathered his paraphernalia and followed his friend out into the sun-drenched street.

“Her fiancé?” he said in a puzzled tone. “Is that dear little old thing engaged?”

“That’s part of the story,” said Thiery. “Wait till we are settled with a table between us and I’ll tell you the whole thing. It’s worth listening to. You’d never guess, for instance, that that piece of Dresden China had been in jail, now would you?”

“I wouldn’t and I don’t,” said Braithwait flatly. “I’ve been a detective long enough to know criminal earmarks when I see them. That woman is as innocent as a child — I’d bet on it.”

“And keep your money,” Gaston agreed. “She is innocent and a child, but — here we are. I’ll order because I know what and how, and then I’ll relieve your curiosity.” He summoned a waiter, held a confidential conversation, and having arranged things to his satisfaction, slumped into his chair and leaned across the table.

“This all happened about fifteen years ago. At the time it made a tremendous stir, for Mlle. Bébé was the prettiest thing in ten counties then, all eyes and enameled skin, and a mouth as red as a chili pepper. She certainly was a belle, beaux in rows, but she wouldn’t look at one of ’em until along comes a rank outsider, an added starter, a dark horse in the race. A quiet spoken, slim, good-looking chap he was. Nobody knew anything about him. He said he came from New York, and his name was Jack Creel. He seemed to have plenty of money, and he was stopping at the St. Charles Hotel. Well, as it came about, Mlle. Bébé and Roxanne and a dozen or so escorts go to the races one fine day, and from her box Bébé looks down and sees this Creel, and he looks up and sees Bébé. Bang! — they’re off! How they managed to meet Bébé never would tell. You know how carefully guarded are our girls of the old French families, but love will find the way, and they found theirs. First we began hearing rumors that they were seen together at strange places and stranger hours. In the dusk of the Cathedral at twilight, they were stumbled on by one of the devout gossips. Stepping out of the dining-room at Antoines’ they were marked by the bon vivants. Driving in mysterious barouches, by any and all who cared to look — that sort of thing. I was a bit hurt myself — a little bit sentimental about Bébé, to tell the truth. How my sisters ‘Oh’d’ and ‘Ah’d’ and gossiped. However, it ended by Bébé’s announcing that she is engaged. And, of course, that’s a terrible breech of etiquette, and the whole Dumontel connection fall upon this Creel and demanded his pedigree, and any excuse he may have for being alive.

“He’s got a pretty good bank balance, it seems, and is very vague as to ancestry. All the Dumontels and the Chaberts and the Dequenes are wild. But Bébé just beams. They’re going to be married, and then to Paris to live. The nine days’ wonder passes by, and then he goes North to settle up his affairs. What happened next, of course, didn’t come out until afterward. But it was like this: He writes her from New York that he has a surprise in store for her. She is to tell no one, but he will be in New Orleans just one night. It’s Carnival time. If a masquer climbs her wall at twelve o’clock of a certain night, she is not to be frightened. It will be — ‘guess who?’ All very romantic.

“Sure enough, she’s in the garden — I don’t mean the courtyard where you were painting, but the garden that makes the corner of Esplanade, and is shut off from it by a good seven foot high brick wall, with a little green door on the side street. There she waits, palpitating. In comes the masked lover, and well — one can imagine it. Moonlight, distant music, tin horns, confetti, Carnival. He puts into her hands a pearl necklace — an astounding thing, the sort that wraps three or four times around the throat and then hangs to the waist. They are big, evenly matched pearls, a wonder string. He tells her it is an heirloom, his one great treasure. When they are in Paris he will sell it and they will have a fortune. She is to tell no one, not even sister Roxanne, not a word. It is their secret.

“Her family have treated him shabbily he explained, had more than hinted that he was a fortune-hunting pauper. He didn’t choose to pander to their greed. Let them think what they chose. It was his little vengeance. Let her hide his treasure and keep it very, very carefully, unsuspected of anyone. He would leave for the North in the morning, and make his official appearance a week or ten days later, for the wedding. And poor Bébé is such an innocent little love-sick ninny that ever} word is gospel, and her Jack the most marvelous poetic figure. And, of course, girl-like, she can’t stand having those divine pearls in her possession and not showing them. So what does she do but wear them to the Carnival Ball.

“At first everyone takes it for granted that they are just Mardi Gras paste, so she gets annoyed at that, and acts so mysteriously that pretty soon the story goes from lip to lip that this is the gift of the groom-to-be. And from that, the few people at the ball who really are experts and can tell the real from the imitation however good, spot that necklace as being something priceless. The length of it, the unusual size of the pearls, perfectly matched, make it something quite unique — and presto! the fat’s in the fire.

“A few days, nearly a week later, a detective arrives from the North. Mr. Jack Creel has been located and arrested. The pearls answer to the description given by Mrs. Charling Bullard, of Washington, of her stolen jewels. Mr. Creel, it turns out, is wanted for a whole series of robberies.

“With her world crumbling about her ears, Mlle. Bébé refuses to believe. She refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the necklace. She repeats his statement to her, that the pearls are his, an heirloom. Nothing can move her. She changes her story a dozen times — she’s given the pearls to a messenger; she doesn’t know where they are, the string she wore to Carnival ball was only a lot of cheap beads she had bought, and strung herself. She believes absolutely in her fiancé. He is a persecuted angel. She will stand by him forever. And stand by him she did.

“She is searched, the house is searched. She is called an accessory after the fact, and in spite of the whole Dumontel clan, they put Bébé in jail. She goes quite cheerfully, with her poodle and her negro maid, and her little portable altar and her special chocolate pot. And the pearls never were found from that day to this. They’ve never been seen. But her devotion and faith couldn’t save Creel. There was too much against him. They couldn’t prove the Bullard robbery on him, but they didn’t need that one. Bébé was in jail when his trial came on. They brought her up North and faced her with him in hopes she’d break down, but she didn’t, merely said, as she always had, that she loved him and believed in him; insisting that all the accusations against him were lies. She even accused her revered aunts and uncles — she and Roxanne were orphans — of committing perjury and joining in a conspiracy to break up her marriage. She was the despair of everyone, friend, foe and family. He was given a long sentence. There was a terrible scene in court. She had literally to be torn from him, they say, and he broke down and cried like a child.

“From then on, poor Mlle. Bébé began to fail. At first it was melancholia. When he died of pneumonia a year later in prison, they tried to keep it from her. But she found out. A convict, who had made friends with Creel in prison, wrote her about it, presumably at the dying man’s request. She nearly died, too, but she pulled through, and then — suddenly she became cheerful and happy. She was waiting for him to come. She thought that he had just gone North to settle his affairs and was coming in a few days, and then they’d be married. She’s perfectly sane on all other matters, but in this she’s just gone back and stayed as matters were before the catastrophe. But she’s grown old in jumps, as you might say, just withering away, but happy always, looking forward to her wedding day. Her gown has been hanging in her closet, they tell me, for fifteen years, and she is always ordering orange blossoms from the florists. They all know her and respectfully take her orders and fail to fill them. But Roxanne gave her a wax wreath under glass, and she’s quite content with that. Poor little Mlle. Bébé! The sight of her always goes to my heart. Why couldn’t she have lavished all that faith and love on somebody worthy of it? Irony of fate. Poor little soul!

“Ah, there comes our quail roasted in vine leaves, see if you don’t like them.”

But Braithwait hardly glanced at the succulent birds, as they were ceremoniously presented to his attention. “Of course, she’s got the pearls cached somewhere,” he said thoughtfully, “with this delusion that he is coming and that she is to be married, she would obey his instructions. She is holding them for him. It is their nest egg for the future. But where could she have put them so securely that not in all this searching and overhauling they have never come to light?” He grinned ruefully. “I almost wish, my good Thiery, that you hadn’t told me the tale of Mlle. Bébé’s love tragedy. I’m on my vacation, and when I’m vacationing I make it a point to be my artist self, pure and simple. I’m supposed to be a painter now, and here you’re rousing my sleeping sleuth instinct. Hang it all! I wanted to leave my profession behind me when I came back here. I wanted to be an artist and a gourmet. Let me compliment you, by the way, in your choice in quail in grape leaves; it’s a new one on me, but I’ll say it’s a little bit of all right.”

The subject of Mlle. Bébé and the vanishing pearls would not so easily be set aside. As they sipped the last taste of the heavy black Louisiana after luncheon coffee, Braithwait came out of a prolonged reverie.

“Are they sure that the sister Roxanne knows nothing of the whereabouts of the pearls?” he asked.

The white-haired, olive-skinned Thiery opened wide black eyes. His own mind had been traveling back into the past. “Not she. A simple creature, Roxanne. If she had known anything the priest would have learned of it before now. No, she doesn’t know — and there is another point of tragedy. Bébé was always devout; when she was a very young girl, she had a notion of taking the veil, but this love affair estranged her from the church. What it must have cost her — la pauvre! She still has her plaster saints all over the house, and as I told you, she took her little portable altar to jail with her. However, she seems to have worked out a plan of doing without, as you might say, the middle man. She deals direct with her saints. Of course, in her twisted mind she has the idea of pursuit. She does not dare confide in anything human. Alas, I must confess, my friend, it is my tragedy, too. I have never married.” Thiery rose nervously and reached for his hat. “Allons! If you are painting this afternoon, you had best install yourself before the light begins to change. Since you have forgotten that you are a detective, remember that you are a painter.”

“You’re right,” agreed Braithwait. “I have an appointment this afternoon with the northeast corner of the Cabildo. Good-bye, and thank you for all your forms of entertainment. That story and quails in vine leaves, what more could an artist Sherlock want?”

They parted before the door of the little restaurant, and Braithwait took his leisurely way to Jackson Square and the ancient Cabildo.

•   •   •   •   •   •

But in spite of the lure of warm color, architectural felicities and linear perfections, his mind would travel back to the vision of the tiny dried rosebud woman, leaning with crossed arms on the gallery rail, looking down with feverishly bright black eyes, at the faithful lover while she talked of a fiancé, dead long ago, of whose passing she had only the message written by a fellow convict. Perhaps heaven in its mercy had blanked out the sorrows, leaving her the happy illusion of expectancy forever.

When he left the quiet of the interior court of the old prison, it was to meet the blast of playing bands. The streets were full of hurrying people, men and women in tinsel and rainbow colors, crowded taxis from which fluttered the Carnival colors of purple, yellow and green. Dusk was hovering in the sky, and the myriad electric lights swung above across the wide thoroughfare, made a golden haze in the misty atmosphere. The contrast of the stillness of the prison yard and the gathering festivity of the street was startling. Why not play truant himself? The next day would bring the finale, the mad climax. The license of Mardi Gras made every man and woman abroad in the jostling throng a possible acquaintance, a friend and companion, maybe for an hour or the night long, or a lifetime — who knew? Braithwait ducked out of the crowd and into a costumer’s. There was little left for choice, but he bought a cheap suit of the black and white of Pierrot, a black skull cap and a supply of grease paint and powder.

For that night and half the next day Braithwait disappeared from the earth, and another Pierrot had joined the black and white army that danced in and out of house, club and café. Dawn found him and a motley crew of bedraggled merry-makers on the shores of the lake. A breakfast at the Bungalow, topped off by a taxi race into town that avoided disaster by a miracle. It was nearly noon, and Rex had taken the city keys in his keeping, when the thought of his room, a bath and a shave loomed up as the three things most to be desired in a topsy-turvy world. Without the formality of a leave-taking, Braithwait abandoned the remains of the party and sought his hotel. The streets were littered with serpentine and confetti, sodden and mired with the tramplings of the mob. The wires across the streets and the crisscrossed lines of light bulbs, were dripping with colored ribbon, like Spanish moss of a live oak. The streets were nearly deserted of masquers now. The idea of rest and recuperation against the festivities to be renewed with the afternoon had penetrated to the weary minds and tired feet of the quondam revelers.

Braithwait glanced up the marble flight of stairs leading into the hotel, as he paid his cab fare, and stopped open-mouthed. By the center pillar stood Gaston Thiery. His skin was ashen, his face drawn in hard lines of anxiety and pain, his eyes deep sunken and filled as if with a film of withheld tears. The man was a wreck! Forgetting his disguise, Braithwait rushed up to his friend, seizing his shoulder almost roughly.

“In heaven’s name, what’s wrong with you, man?” he demanded.

“Braithwait!” Thiery gasped. “Thank God! I’ve been waiting for you since seven o’clock. Been to your room — asked everywhere. Quick; quick, come with me — at once.”

The detective became suddenly aware of his bedraggled finery. “Let me get this confounded stuff off. What’s happened?”

“Never mind, come as you are. Here, taxi!” Thiery gripped the detective’s arm with nervous fingers that dug into the flesh as he thrust his reluctant companion into the vehicle, and gave the Dumontel address to the driver.

Braithwait started. “Where? The Dumontels? What’s wrong there?”

The car had started. Thiery leaned forward, covering his face with his hand. He was crying. Great scalding tears slipped between his fingers. Shocked and puzzled, Braithwait laid a sympathetic hand on the other’s shoulder.

“What is it, mon vieux? How can I help? Come, come, get a grip on yourself.”

The Frenchman pulled himself together with a tearing effort. “It’s Mademoiselle Bébé,” he whispered hoarsely. “She’s dead — murdered!”

“What!” exclaimed Braithwait. “Murdered! Why? What for? Are you sure?”

“You shall see,” said Thiery. “I have held them all off. I made Roxanne insist. The Chief of Police knows of you. I explained who you are. She has not been moved, nothing has been touched — and she so gentle. It is this cursed story of the pearls, I feel sure of it, and yet — but you shall see, you shall see.” The little man placed a snaking hand on the limp, soiled folds of the Pierrot ruff. “I trust to you, my friend, to see that this devil is punished. He must be found. The most dastardly, the most cowardly—” he choked.

“I’ll do everything I can, you may be sure of that.” Braithwait’s face was grim beneath its streaked coat of powder and smeared rouge. The cab rattled to the curb. Already a knot of curious neighbors were gathered at the wide entrance under the fan arch where they were held back by a policeman. At a word from Thiery the guardian permitted them to enter the familiar courtyard. All was as sunny calm and softly gay as ever — the red bird in its cage warbled sleepily, the vivid green banana leaves rustled together, whispering.

Thiery led the way up the stairs to the first gallery and knocked on the double doors. Roxanne, a tall, slender woman, who bore herself with dignity in spite of the ravages of shock and grief, admitted them.

Gaston clasped both her hands in his.“I have brought him. He will give us our one consolation, Roxanne. He will not let her murderer go unpunished. He, of all the world, is the one man I could trust — and he is here.”

Miss Dumontel looked at the tattered masquerader without surprise. “They have waited, monsieur,” she said gravely. “The coroner is here, and the police. They all knew her — she was the friend of everybody, my poor Bébé.” She turned toward a door leading from the salon, which, when opened, revealed a corridor that at its further end, terminated in an iron, festooned balcony that overlooked the garden. Right and left were doors, and a transverse hall ran the entire depth of the old mansion. Before the door to the left of the hall window, sat a blue-coated officer.

“There,” said Roxanne, giving a sudden racking sob. “Was it not enough that her life was ruined, that her beautiful mind was broken? And now, mon Dieu — this!” She controlled herself. “He will show you, monsieur. I — I cannot. It was I, who found her,” she added simply, as she turned away.

The policeman rose, received Thiery’s explanation as if expecting it, looked at Braithwait curiously, and, unlocking the door, preceded them into the room. The tall windows stood open, their blue painted shutters folded back. The broad green, varnished leaves of a magnolia tree thrust themselves over the wrought iron balcony railing. The floor was of red tile, the furniture, huge polished mahogany pieces, an immense canopied bed, an armoire of gigantic proportions, a rosewood prie dieu drawn up beside the bed. In the middle of the western wall was a small open fireplace, whose shelf was ornamented by a Sevres clock, and two plaster statues of St. Joseph and St. Anthony. On a stand between the windows stood what the investigator recognized as the portable altar, mentioned by Thiery. It was of gilded wood, with painted panels, but the figure that should have stood before it, on the little Gothic pedestal, was not in its place.

Braithwait took in the details of the room before he permitted himself to look at the almost doll-like figure that lay outflung before the opened casements. Then he went close and knelt down beside it. Mlle. Bébé was miraculously young in death. She looked a girl again, the fine web of wrinkles that had covered her face like a veil, blurring her features, was gone, wiped away, leaving them chiseled and cameo-like. She was dressed in an elaborate negligée, such as a Creole bride of fifteen years ago would inevitably have selected for her trousseau. Her almost white hair fell in soft curls about the still brow. She looked, not old, not even her years, but like some powdered-haired belle of the eighteenth century. The black lashes that swept her cheeks and the dark arches of her brows enhanced the illusion.

Carefully, after closely examining the corpse, the detective lifted it in his arms. The cause of death was instantly apparent. The neck was broken. She had fallen, or been thrown with great violence, her head striking on the stone lintel of the French window. The two brass sunken sockets that received the old-fashioned closing rods operated by the turning of the door-like knob, were directly at the base of the skull. Death had been instantaneous. He laid her gently back, and rose from her side. His gaze traveled out to the stone-floored balcony with its hand-wrought delicate iron railings. He stepped over the dead hands that seemed to bar his passage. The balcony, as he had surmised, ran the entire length of the house, overhanging the garden. A trellis covered with vines came up nearly to its base, forming an iron pergola. Through the crowding leaves he could make out the forms of green-painted benches and seats below, evidently a little arbor for hot weather relaxation. The high wall that shut the garden from the street was pierced almost directly opposite by a small green door. Once inside the enclosure any agile person could easily climb the trellis, pull himself up and over the railing, and enter the room. If Mlle. Bébé had been murdered, this was certainly the way her assailant had come. There was proof of it in plain sight — broken tendrils, freshly scraped paint, the heavy imprint of a foot in the moist soil.

Braithwait turned back into the room. Both Thiery and the officer were regarding him expectantly as if they believed him capable of unraveling the mystery at once. Standing still in the middle of the room, he studied all the surroundings once more in detail. There had been no struggle, evidently. Only two things attracted attention in the orderly chamber — the door of the great armoire stood open, revealing a white satin wedding dress, turned ivory with age. Other dresses, sheer embroidered trifles of lawn and mull. Evidently in this wardrobe the bereft bride had stored her trousseau. One hook was empty, evidently the gorgeous wrapper that now clothed the stiffened form, had hung there. Why had she, if frightened in the night by an intruder, put on this treasured, locked away, garment, instead of slipping at once into the handy familiar bathrobe which was by her bed? Little pale blue silken mules were on the waxen feet, the square-toed black kid bedroom slippers stood undisturbed on the wooly knitted mat. But most puzzling clue of all, the only object in the room that was out of place or damaged, was a colored plaster figure of St. Rita. It lay on the floor, broken in three pieces. Braithwait picked up the base and tried it on the empty pedestal of the altar. It fitted exactly. This, then, was the occupant of the little shrine. The statue was hollow. He examined each piece carefully. It had been stuffed with cotton. Here and there on the rough contours of the casting, shreds adhered. He looked at the base once more. It had been crudely sealed with wax, yellow wax, such as votive candles are made of.

He replaced the shards and again made the tour of the room, once more bent above the body and studied its expression, the attitude of the hands, the manner of its position.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “she kept the pearls in that statue. Of course, they couldn’t find them. She had them with her. I think you told me, Thiery, that even in jail she took her little altar. Do you see,” he held a fragment toward him, “the bits of cotton wool clinging there? She packed the inside with it, so the contents wouldn’t rattle. She sealed the base with wax candles she bought at the Cathedral and brought home with her instead of burning on the altar. There would be nothing to account for that wax. Thus far I think I’m right; but who in the world could know or guess that, after all these years? Who came here to compel her to give them up? And how could he force the secret she had kept against all odds for years. The only person who possibly could have made her tell, the man she loved and who gave the pearls into her keeping — is dead. I confess I don’t get it; but someone was here, and someone killed her, though I doubt if that was intentional. She fell, or was thrown. It was the way her head hit the stone lintel and the brass cups.”

Thiery’s eyes were bitter, hard. “But he killed her, just the same. To kill her was like killing a child. Look how little she is, how helpless!” The tears sprang again to his eyes. “You’ve got to find the brute. Think, think hard. Things don’t just happen. There is a reason for everything. Somebody knew, somebody must have known.”

“He came in,” Braithwait continued, “either over the wall, or through that green door — but that’s a detail. He climbed to the balcony by way of the arbor. He knew which were her windows, for his tracks land over the railing directly in front of them, not further down, which would have been an easier climb, if you look and see. We have to deal with someone who knew. And why is she dressed in that lace negligee? As I read the signs, she wanted to look her best. Could she have expected someone?”

Thiery blanched, his fists clenched. “How dare you?” he snarled. “Were you not my friend — !”

The detective held up a restraining hand. “Remember that we have to deal with a defective reason,” he cautioned. “She lived emotionally, as you told me, in the past. You are not to take offense at what I say. You are to try and help me. It is for you to think.”

Thiery sobered. “Perhaps Roxanne,” he ventured, “but no. I knew as much and more of my poor dear little friend than her sister, and I tell you there is no one. If anyone who was capable of committing this crime had known, then this would have been done long ago—”

“Unless,” interrupted the policeman shrewdly, “that person had only just found out — something that mademoiselle herself may have said may have informed this person.”

“This person may have signaled to her, given her time to throw on that lace gown. It isn’t conceivable that she, a modest, shrinking creature, would have dressed herself before someone already in the room. She must have realized he was there outside, for look, there is a brooch fastened at her neck. She took time to put it on, hurriedly, no doubt — but she dressed. I don’t understand it at all.” Braithwait thrust his hands deep into the wide pockets of the black and white trousers, hunching up the long blouse from which half of the huge black buttons had been torn away. Pierrot’s black skull cap was awry and his own tawny hair escaped in a yellow halo. Black, white and red had mingled in indescribable confusion on his face. As he raised his eyes, he caught sight of his reflection in the long mirror hung on the inside of the wardrobe door. He started, shrugged and grinned, and then stiffened like a bird dog at point. He stared and his eyes widened. He seemed hypnotized by his own double in the glass. “By God!” he exclaimed. “By God! that’s it. I’ve got it! I know!”

He dashed past his amazed companions, through the salon, where the startled Roxanne rose to meet him, down the steps to the courtyard and out to the street, breaking through the curious crowd and thrusting aside the policeman on watch. Down the avenue, now beginning to fill again with the gaudy costumes of the fête, he ran like one possessed. Waving aside all delay and interference, he made his way directly to the Chief of Police. That functionary, at first angry and disbelieving, became excitedly convinced, anxiously coöperative. To Braithwait’s reiterated demands for immediate action he responded with efficient zeal.

“Are you sure you can pick up his trail?” the detective inquired. “It’s not so easy, but he can’t have left the city yet, unless he got aboard of some tramp freighter sailing this morning. Have everyone that leaves the mouth of the river overhauled. Send a police boat down immediately.”

Orders flew.

Unmindful of his appearance, Braithwait paced the floor.

“How long has he been out? Got long distance? Has he had time to grow a mustache or beard? Are there any distinguishing marks? Has anything happened of recent years that might serve as further means of identification?”

There were delays inevitable, but fretting. At last the required information was forthcoming. Eric Johns had been released on the 18th of January — time off for good behavior. Followed a chart of measurements; a notation as to where fingerprints and photographs were available. There was a white scar in his hair over the left ear. He was known to have gone to friends in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Trail him from there,” ordered Braithwait. “They will have had an eye on him at headquarters. At any rate they can verify that he’s left. Get busy now, time is precious.”

More long distance, and while the sergeant was busy at the task, under Braithwait’s nervous directions, plainclothes men, on duty watching the harvesting of the pickpockets convened by Carnival, were called in and dispatched north, east, south and west. A description of the wanted man was circulated. With radio rapidity, the dragnet was spread.

“You’re right,” came the voice of the chief, as he glanced over the shoulder of the man at the telephone who was jotting down in shorthand the words that were pouring over the wire from Atlanta. “He gave them the slip. Got out of town some time last week. They haven’t the remotest idea where he went. He’d got a job in a garage, and seemed to be working honestly; lived with his friends, didn’t go to any of the hangouts.”

“All right,” the detective cut in, “tell them to get in touch with the people he stayed with — they may come across with something.” He looked at his colleague, suddenly conscious of his bedraggled state.

“You’re all in, Mr. Braithwait,” the chief said kindly. “You need a bath and a change. I’ll send you to your hotel in one of the department cars. There’s nothing more you can do now, until we begin to get reports in.”

Braithwait looked at his torn and soiled blouse and spattered trousers, no longer white. “Pretty tough looking customer — what? But just the same I’m grateful to these sad rags. I’ll tell you why later on, if you haven’t guessed it already.”

“Guessed what — that you’ve been forty-eight hours without sleep? I don’t have to guess, I know,” said the officer.

“Not that at all,” said the detective, yawning. “But never mind, you’re right. Me for forty winks and some everyday clothes. I’ve had about all of this tragic masquerade that I can use. Put me aboard your dreadnought and pack me home. If anything stirs, wake me upland for goodness’ sake, don’t call me unless there is.”

Braithwait, as it happened, was allowed all of ten hours of rest before he was called — he was even up and dressed before his telephone rang.

“We’ve got him,” said the voice of the chief over the wire. “Picked him up in New Iberia. Think he was headed west. He won’t talk. No trace of pearls. Kelly and Bassee are bringing him back.”

“Not in the baggage and not on him, hey?” said Braithwait sharply. “Get a specimen of his handwriting. Go to the post office here in the city and find out what packages were sent out by parcel post, early this morning. It’s dollars to doughnuts he’s mailed them to himself under another name — somewhere west, since he was headed that way. But don’t neglect address in Mexico, either. Probably it’s insured — he wouldn’t take a chance on losing them. Have them look up registered packages first of all.”

“At that, you may be right,” came the answer. “I’ll have the P.O. combed inside of half an hour. Call you again later.”

It was hardly more than the time specified when the bell jangled once more.

“There are three packages registered, between 9 and 11 a.m.,” the chief reported. “One to Galveston, one to Los Angeles, and one to San Francisco. We’re having all three watched for on delivery. If he’s sent them to himself, he won’t be there to receive it. But we’ll have ’em all held for identification in case he’s got a pal at the other end. All the other stuff that went through unregistered was bulky stuff and from known residents. We’ve checked up all the stations.”

“Good,” approved Braithwait. “My bet is Galveston. Just a hunch, of course, but I think he’ll make for a port less conspicuous than San Francisco, and more handy than Los Angeles. However, we mustn’t be too sure, our man’s no fool.”

Braithwait hung up, and, realizing that the hunger that gripped him was the natural result of semi-starvation, betook himself to breakfast. Later he went in search of Thiery and found the little Frenchman in the depths of despair. There was no justice in the world — all his faith in Braithwait’s prowess had ebbed.

“I don’t blame you,” said the detective; “but I’m sure, positive, and it’s straight deductions. I’m not just playing a hunch. Poor Mlle. Bébé’s ghost is not going to walk, demanding vengeance, though I doubt if she was ever the sort to demand it—” He paused and his eyes had a far away look. “Funny thing — imagination,” he said softly. “Do you know I can see what happened last night, as clearly and in detail as if I’d been hidden in that great armoire of hers watching it all. There’s only one detail that is still a mystery to me, but that I’ll know very soon. I’m going to have the prisoner brought directly to the Dumontel house. He’s due in an hour, if he isn’t here already. Wait, I’ll telephone.” He was gone only a few moments, when he returned, he nodded with an air of satisfaction. “Come on, Thiery, let’s go. The chief is coming, too.” He laid his hand with a comforting gesture on Thiery’s bowed shoulder.

Into the silent courtyard, now blurring into the soft shadows of twilight they made their way. The curious crowd had dispersed, only the policeman on duty differentiated the entrance under the ancient doorway from its counterparts up and down the street. Here and there a citizen hurrying home, or a brightly-garbed masquer on his way to dinner, enlivened the thoroughfare.

“He’s coming now,” said Braithwait, as he caught the distant sound of an approaching patrol wagon.

“We’ll go straight to Mlle. Bébé’s room. She will confront him.”

Roxanne, her dignity broken by the strain, admitted them tearfully. She had been advised by telephone of what was to happen.

“Leave this to us, Mlle. Dumontel,” said Braithwait sympathetically; “but rest assured, justice is not going to be cheated this time.”

With her handkerchief to her eyes, the bereaved sister motioned them to proceed down the corridor.

On the bed in Mlle. Bébé’s virginal room lay the little corpse, so small, so young seeming, like a child asleep. She was dressed in the lace negligee, for in this, Roxanne had decided, Mlle. Bébé was to be buried. At head and foot the soft radiance of many candles glowed. An ebony and silver crucifix lay on the still breast beneath her delicate hands. Through the open window the breeze stole softly, bending the candles’ flame. On the floor lay, undisturbed at the detective’s orders, the three pieces of the broken statuette of St Rita. The officer sitting outside the door, saluted respectfully. With a sob, Thiery threw himself on his knees by the bedside, his lips moving in silent prayer.

“What I am going to do,” whispered Braithwait, “will be rather spectacular. Don’t let it get on your nerves, old man. I’m going to put over a third degree of my own invention, from inside that armoire. When the chief is here, tell him, so the suspect won’t hear you. Get him outside. The chances are that the guilty man will be so upset at sight of his victim he won’t notice anything else. Listen — I hear them.”

He tiptoed to the massive wardrobe, tested its balance and stepped inside. Its depth was sufficient to readily conceal him, behind the pendant clothing and the cardboard boxes he had to push aside. The doors he left ajar.

Thiery rose to his feet, and a moment later, the door to the passage was pushed open and the chief entered. Close behind him, between two uniformed policemen, stumbled a haggard, wild-eyed man. As his gaze fell upon the dead woman he gave a smothered shriek and, had it not been for the men beside him, would have crumpled to the floor.

The chief spoke low, his voice reproachful. “How could you kill a helpless little woman like that?”

The prisoner began to tremble, his handcuffs rattled sharply.

“Eric Johns,” said an eerie voice. “Eric Johns!”

The prisoner struggled, twisted, fought; even the men who held him paled.

Thiery, close to the chief, was whispering eagerly.

“And you swore you were my pal,” said the voice, “and you used all I told you — to rob her — the woman I loved. You had learned that for love of me, me — Creel — she had lost her reason. You waited till it was Carnival time, till you could come in the disguise and masque I told you I had worn, when I came to her with the pearls. You thought that, seeing you, she would think it was I come again. And for me she would reveal the hiding place of the trust she had kept so long and well.”

Half-fainting the accused reeled. His face was ghastly, sweat poured from his brow. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t, I didn’t!” he screamed. “She tried to follow me. I threw her down — I didn’t know — I didn’t know!”

“She thought I had come back to her,” the hollow voice went on. “She told you the hiding place. You couldn’t wait. You broke the statue, the necklace fell out, the pearls — my pearls — I had gambled my life for. You threw her from you, when she clung, thinking that her lover was leaving her — you!”

“Oh, my God! Listen, I didn’t mean to kill her,” cried the frantic prisoner. “I did dress as you told me you had that night — in a black Spanish costume with a red cape. She fell for it, yes, and let me in — but I didn’t mean to kill her, didn’t even know she was dead till now. I thought it out. The pearls weren’t no use to her — she was crazy. If she’d died, nobody would have known, they’d ’a’ been just lost. Creel, Creel, for the love of God, don’t haunt me! You’d ’a’ done the same thing yourself, you know you would.”

He groveled, his breath came in hoarse rattling gasps.

The cool voice of the chief cut the pause. “What did you do with the loot, Johns?”

“I’ll give ’em back, I will,” panted the huddled wreck on the floor. “I sent them to Galveston by parcel post, to William Haynes — that’s the name I used. I faked stuff to identify myself with. I’ll get ’em — I’ll send for ’em — but for the love of God, get a priest, and have him lay that ghost. He was my pal, Creel was, and I went back on him. I double-crossed him after he was dead, but so help me, I didn’t kill her. She was such a little bit of a thing I just shook her off, and she fell, I didn’t even look back, just thought she dropped — so help me, Creel, that’s the God’s truth.” With an unconsciously dramatic gesture he approached the bed and laid his shaking hand on the two quiet ones that lay above the crucifix.

“I do believe you.” The impulsive Frenchman spoke for all present. The thief turned his haggard eyes gratefully to his face. “I do believe you,” Thiery repeated, “and I loved her.”

“Take the prisoner down,” said the chief huskily. “I’ll join you in a moment.”

Between the two guards Eric Johns was led from the room. A moment later Braithwait appeared at the door of the wardrobe and stepped to the floor. Even his steeled nerve was shaken. It showed in the drawn look about his mouth and eyes.

“Poor devil!” he said at length. “Poor devil — anyway we got the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” He paused, then crossed softly to the window. “She saw the masquer in the garden,” he said dreamily, as one recalling a half-forgotten memory. “He must have called to her, somehow attracted her attention, so she flew to the great armoire, hurried into her beautiful gown, found her satin mules, fastened the lace at her throat with the brooch he had given her, and opened the windows to let him in. Anyway, she had her little moment of happy illusion before she went.”

The Chief of Police came up to Braithwait and held out his hand. “You were right every inch of the way. What put you on the trail?”

“The fifteen years’ lapse of time,” said Braithwait. “If it had been possible for anyone having the requisite knowledge and capable of such a thing to act before, he would have acted. In the second place, when I caught sight of my own reflection in the mirror, I suddenly remembered Thiery’s story, of how Creel had warned her the night he brought the pearls, to expect a masquer in her garden. Had anyone known all this and known also the poor woman’s delusions, which was a very open secret, there would be ninety-nine chances to a hundred that the imposter would be received with open arms, and the secret of the lost pearls revealed. It would be the only way to break through her habit of secrecy. And, of course, the man who had been Eric John’s pal in prison, who had written to the fiancée the particulars of his death, would be the one person in the world who would know in all probability how he had disguised himself on that fateful night, and he would have had to wait fifteen years, until he had served his term to make use of his knowledge. Well, the mystery is cleared. Eric Johns goes back to jail. Mrs. Charling Bullard of Washington, will get the agreeable surprise of her life — and Mademoiselle Bébé has entered into rest. Saint Rita pray for her.”

“Short Stories” magazine, 10 Jul 1924

Phantom Perfumes

The old mansion stood on a little eminence, shadowed by towering elms and rock-maples. Its plain Georgian front looked down to the main road, across a long slope of what had once been lawn. The narrow double-galleried porch at the back commanded a great sweep of farm-dotted valley, encircled by cradling hills that seemed to enfold the quiet spot lovingly.

Key in hand, Phoebe Sands walked around the house. Her suitcase lay on the stone slab before the front door, but as yet she had not entered into her kingdom She wanted to comprehend it all, to realize that this was hers — this — her inheritance. Peace, beauty, security — all hers.

There was no tinge of sadness in her ecstasy of possession, not even when she passed the little enclosure where two mossy headstones recorded the names of her Great-aunt Aurelia and her Great-uncle Stephen. Aunt Cornelia, their only daughter, was not buried beside them. Phoebe did not know where the body of her benefactress reposed. She had never seen her Aunt Cornelia. The separation between the members of the family had been complete. Aunt Cornelia had clung to the home town, and her brother’s determination to seek the golden West had met with her strong disapproval.

But as the twilight of life had merged into the night of death, she had remembered that blood was blood and that her brother’s marriage out in California had resulted in the continuance of the honored strain. Therefore, her will — a lean, hard document without even the color of affectionate hypocrisy — had left her wide acres and her tiny income to “Phoebe Sands, daughter of my deceased brother, Milton Sands.”

Phoebe’s young, adventurous heart had responded eagerly to this call of a home in far-away New England. For this was romance — Cinderella’s mice and pumpkin turning into coach and six. Pride in her blood, her family, her heritage, entered her heart, now that she stood in the shadow cf the ancestral walls. “Afy land, my people, the home of my people — it belongs to me and I am part of it.”

The thrill of ownership deepened as at length she thrust the key into the lock and turned it deliberately, savoring the moment.

The sunlight leaped into the silent hall, throwing her slim shadow sharply on the worn oak flooring. The entry ran straight through to the Dutch door at the back that gave out onto the porch. To left and right opened great rooms. Solid shutters made them dark, but through the gloom Phoebe Sands could distinguish the shapes of a huge sofa, a desk-bureau, an oblong table surrounded by chairs, drawn up as if for a committee meeting of ghosts.

Light! She wanted to see the sunshine flooding in. This dusk in broad daylight was forbidding. She forced up the heavy iron hooks that secured the shutters of the nearest window and, exerting all her strength, thrust them back against the outer walls, where they jarred, with a whack, against the clapboards. A heavy smell of box swept into the room. The next window gave to her hand. Then she caught her breath sharply.

What was this? She found herself looking out upon a little lake with lily-pads dotting its polished surface, a lilac hedge, a path leading to the water, with unclipped box bushes outlining its length and willow trees in the far distance! Surely, in her wanderings about the grounds, she had seen no such place as this! She closed her eyes for a moment and gazed again. Two white butterflies were fluttering over the walk; a fish jumped in the pond, sending a crinkle of rings to the farther marge. These windows must be in an ell, she reasoned. This was a part of the grounds she had not visited.

She turned her back on the disturbing landscape and looked within the room. Now she saw the heavy, old-fashioned furniture in detail — rugs rolled, tied, and wrapped in newspapers lay against the baseboard; pictures, covered with pink mosquito-netting, adorned the walls. She noted her own footprints outlined in the dust that lay heavy on the floor.

The scent of box was overpowering! Strange, she had seen none outside! Now the window next to the fireplace yielded to her efforts. It must open upon the side lawn and the picket enclosure of the graves, she reasoned. Blinding sunlight rushed in. Shading her eyes, she stared before her. There was a garden, bright with flowers, and a high hedge with a little gate, beyond which she glimpsed feathery rows of carrots and the purple-red of beet tops. A sparkle of water, where the pond turned, glinted in the distance.

Clinging to the sill, she leaned out. To the right the grass grew long under the branches of apple trees. It was a big orchard, for in orderly ranks it climbed a rise and marched on over it. A soft murmur of anxious bees filled the air and the scent of box lay over all.

Phoebe drew back. Certainly no orchard grew upon this elm-and-maple-planted knoll. There was no pond with willows at its brink, no box hedges, no bee-inviting garden. This was an illusion, a dream, or else the outside world she had left was utterly changed.

Hardly knowing what she did, she turned and ran, stumbling, outside the open door to the three wide granite steps before it. She glanced back at the windows of the drawing-room. They were wide open, their shutters resting against the house, and it was from these very windows that she had looked upon a lily-dotted pond and seen two white butterflies fluttering above a box-enclosed walk! This was madness! Below her fell the easy descent of the lawn till it met the highway. Maples bordered it. On either side great elms rose and drooped their fine foliage above the roof.

Steadying herself along the wall, she reached the corner of the house and stood beside that other opened window from which she had seen lush grass and the ranks of apple trees. The scent of box no longer assailed her with its aromatic fragrance. Instead, there was the perfume of peonies in their bed along the stone foundation. Between the elms she could see the edge of the iron pickets that guarded the sleep of Stephen and his wife, Aurelia.

She was not frightened; fear was absent from this strange experience. It never for a moment entered her head that she could not spend the night there, as she had planned to do. She told herself that she was simply overtired. Like all modern young women, she had a smattering of science. The “subconscious mind,” she knew, was quite capable of any freak. If one were very tired — and she was tired—

For days and nights she had been traveling. She had come straight through from California to Stonevale and, being unused to trains, she had slept but little.

Defiantly, she turned to the front door, took up her suitcases, set them inside, and entered the drawing-room; and, still defiant, crossed to the window.

The strange pictures were were no longer there. The view corresponded to what she knew lay without. Gone were the willows and the pond. No smell of box hung on the air. Each window framed its proper outlook. There were no apple trees and no old-fashioned garden.

The sun was gliding down the sky toward the horizon. Soon night would come. She whistled a little tune as she found a lamp half full of oil and lit it. She had been informed where to find linen and blankets. In her suitcase was a comfortable packet of emergency food. She would light a fire. She would take possession — yes, possession. Again that wonderful sense of ownership and of oneness with the past came over her. She was at home! The house itself was telling her. This was her home, now and as long as she should live.

•   •   •   •   •   •

Morning found her up with the larks to greet it. She had slept refreshingly in the antique low-post bed, between the heavy linen sheets under the hand-woven blankets. She had contemplated her reflection in the wavy green mirror that hung above a massive chest of drawers in her bedroom and, with a giggle, pulled back her rebellious black hair into a hard knot, trying to imagine herself in a gray print wrapper. She must dress the part of a New England spinster, she decided, though her only experience of the type was of the theatrical variety. The pulled back hair could not dim the beauty of the soft oval of her face and her great, black eyes defied New England and all its works.

There was very little left from her last night’s supper and she found that the telephone, the one concession to modernity in the place, was disconnected.

“What to do? What to do?” she inquired of the empty air as she twirled her hat on one finger. “Not a house in sight — milk — eggs — bread — the village two miles away.” Walk? She was without a pair of sensible shoes till the arrival of her trunk. Well, people in country places always gave one another a “lift.” She’d go down to the road and intercept the first village-going car. She slapped on her hat and ran down the path outside! to the stone horse-block, where she settled herself, her feet swinging.

She had not long to wait. A roadster rounded the bend and came toward her with slackening speed as if it anticipated the appeal of her upraised hand. It was driven by a young man whose intent blue eyes seemed to catch and hold her own even from the first moment of his appearance. He compelled attention not only by the brilliant magnetism of his turquoise-colored eyes, but by his whole appearance. His hair, uncovered to the morning, glinted with high lights. His body filled the space behind the wheel with easy grace, but it was his sudden smile that set her heart beating. From him came a calm greeting, “Hello, Phoebe Sands!”

“Yes, I’m Phoebe Sands,” she admitted, somewhat taken aback, “and also, who are you?”

“I’m Clinton Wade. Thought you might want a lift to town. Am I right?” He opened the door.

“You must be a mind reader,” she said as she settled herself.

He grinned at her. “I have to be. It’s important self-protection, you see. You’re my Hereditary Enemy.”

He started the car before she could formulate her puzzlement.

“Hereditary Enemy?”

He frowned quizzically. “Didn’t the old girl leave a curse on me? Didn’t she warn you against the Wades?”

“If you mean my Aunt Cornelia,” Phoebe said testily, “she never said anything to me about you or anybody else. I’m her heir, that’s all.”

“She never saw you, did she? I wonder—” he broke off meditatively. “You don’t look like a Sands at all,” he added.

She bridled. “Appearances are deceitful then. But why are you an enemy — what’s the joke?”

“No joke about it,” he replied seriously. “Your aunt hated my father and mother like poison.”

“What in the world for?” she wanted to know. “I didn’t know they had feuds in New England.”

“You didn’t? Well — you’re in the line of one. I’m glad it wasn’t deeded to you.”

“But why?” she persisted.

“It isn’t nice to say of a lady that she got mad when she was jilted,” he observed abstractly.

“Do you mean to say,” she cried indignantly, “that your father jilted my Aunt Cornelia? That wasn’t very nice either.”

He smiled at her.“Don’t blame me. I wasn’t there. and now that I know you weren’t willed the Hate — I take it all back. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.”

“So am I.” she spoke with unconscious warmth. “I’m glad you’re a neighbor, too. You are a neighbor, aren’t you?”

“The neighest sort of a neighbor — just over the hill there,” he answered. “and at your service. Who’s going to live with you?”

“Nobody,” she informed him. “I haven’t anyone. I’m all alone on the family tree — the last leaf, so to speak — but
I love the idea of being by myself in my very own house. You see, I’ve worked since I was seventeen. Hard work, stores and factories, and to make both ends meet I had to room with other girls — girls that I didn’t like sometimes. You can guess what this freedom means to me. It’s just heaven.”

“You poor kid,” he said gently. “You poor kid. Well, you’ve got your own house now — forget the past.” His tone changed to one of gaiety. “And here we are in Stonevale Village. Welcome to our city.”

“Stonevale Village,” she repeated softly. “Father used to tell me about it.” She remained seated in the car, looking up the shaded Main Street with its little colonnaded shops, unchanged since the days when her father was “little Milton Sands,” running errands, barefooted and carefree, along its “feather-stitch” brick sidewalks.

“There’s the Bank,” she whispered. “Red sandstone, just like he said. And there’s the Doctor’s house beyond, with the iron dogs in the yard. And that’s the same name over the General Store: ‘Madham Brothers.’ Isn’t it funny that he never once described his home to me? It was always the Village and the boys and girls he used to play with, but never a word about his house. I wonder why?”

Wade made no suggestion, and she descended from the automobile. He shut off the motor and swung himself to her side.

His own business could wait, he assured her. It wasn’t every day that Phoebe Sands came to town and he admitted he had anticipated her coming and had planned to be on hand to help her.

Their presence together seemed to attract surprised comment; evidently, the whole town knew of the feud and had wondered whether Miss Sands had handed on a legacy of hatred with her more solid possessions. There were looks, questioning and smiling — underbrow glances that she caught from the tail of her eye — but her fellow townsmen and women proved most kind and attentive, most cordial in their offers of assistance and hospitality.

“Coming home” — yes, that’s what it was — “coming back home.”

Her companion, responding to her mood, was sympathetically silent as they drove homeward. She relaxed gently in the warmth of his understanding. He assisted her with her packages, arranging them as she directed on the pantry shelves — together they investigated the countless cupboards, the quaint ovens, the elaborately hidden back stairs and mysterious ham-closet. She watched him, wondering. Why was he so intent? Why did his face wear that strange expression, as if he listened achingly for distant voices? Why did his hands so insistently caress the worn woodwork, his fingers pass with such soft touches over the cracked paneling of the ancient walls? Could it possibly be that he, too, might see the strange visions she had seen?

She led him into the hall and through the great rooms, pausing before each window with a thrill of expectancy, but as they contemplated each outlook, no scent of box drifted into them. The long slopes with their elms and maples remained unchanging.

He turned from the window and faced the fireplace, a beautiful Georgian bit of classic architecture. Above it hung a crayon portrait in a bright gold frame, mercifully obscured by faded pink mosquito-netting.

“Our Aunt Cornelia,” he said musingly. He stared at the grim dull eyes of the picture. “This is the first time I’ve ever set foot in your house, Miss Cornelia Sands,” he said, “and now I’ve come, you won’t get me out!”

He said it with such concentrated determination that Phoebe started. It was as if the picture was the actual presence of her benefactress. The black eyes stared back from behind their pink veil. Phoebe held her breath, almost fearful of an answer to the uttered defiance.

“Don’t,” she said, laughing quickly. “You’ll make her come alive and I don’t want to live with Aunt Cornelia, I tell you flat — and I want the house to learn to like me. Don’t call her back!”

“I won’t,” he promised, solemnly, and turned to Phoebe with sudden smile. “I’m sure I don’t want her back.” He straightened his wide shoulders and drew himself to his full height. “And now I’ll leave you, Miss Sands. I’ll see that they connect your phone, and don’t forget, I’m right on the other end of it. Good-bye.” He paused, words seemed to press behind his lips; his strange eyes were full of meaning; he was on the point of saying something — something that intimately concerned her. The look passed from his face. “Good-bye,” he repeated, and turned toward the door.

She watched him as he bounded down the path to the waiting car, and waved her hand in farewell. Why had he hesitated? She returned to the living-room window, to stand gazing after the cloud of dust in his wake. The rattle of the car’s departure shook the window panes. Then silence. All sound ceased, hushed to the droning of bees. The aromatic breath of sun-warmed box pervaded the room in a sudden hot breath. The highway with its bordering trees was no more. Before her, level with the stone steps of the entrance, stood a box walk to a little wharf. Beyond it, the lily-dotted pond spread its shining length, pale willows shutting off the distant view.

With a stifled cry, she fled across to the window by the fireplace and stared from the casement. Lush grass and apple trees, spikes of larkspur, poppies, and bleeding-heart — a box hedge and the corner of a vegetable garden behind a white gate!

Turning her back on the peaceful vision, she flung herself at the windows sheltered by the porch, the windows that ought to look out upon the broad sweep of the valley and the distant cradling hills. But the hills were not there. A sweep of grass-grown lawn through which a brook meandered; a far meadow, its fence-line marked by a row of gnarled cedars. A clapboarded barn, with a huge fanlight on either side of the open hay-loft door. She imagined the stir of cattle and the thump of horses’ hoofs. But there was no sound at all now; even the hum of anxious bees was stilled.

Phoebe Sands drew up one of the ancient chairs and sat down. Spellbound, she stared at the landscape: peace, beauty, security — all hers. It, too, was hers, this other vista. It was deeply hers. She wished it would not vanish. It came upon her that she wished it would stay always. She did not want the elms and maples to return. She wanted the house just like that, cuddled down in homely comfort with bees and flowers and countless apple trees. She wanted the gay little lily pond and the smell of sun-warmed box — oh, always, always the smell of sun-warmed box. She took no heed of the passing hours as she watched the changing lights and shadows. Time was not. She was at peace.

•   •   •   •   •   •

Days passed and Phoebe Sands settled into the routine of her new life. People came to call — the minister and his wife; the president of the bank; prim old ladies and up-to-date young ones whose clothes were cut on the very latest modes and whose talk was flavored with a little bit of all the world. Her Aunt Cornelia had had no friends at all, they informed her. Why, indeed, should she? She had despised the community in which she had lived, as cordially as it had despised her.

That there was something strange about the house, Phoebe could not help but gather. Several times her visitors had started to say something and had suddenly become reticent.

The enmity between her Aunt Cornelia and the Wades was touched upon not infrequently. There was no concealment about that and the constant presence of the inherited enemy came in for plenty of amused comment. But she sensed that something was being withheld.

To her inquisitive and kindly neighbors she frankly told her simple story. To them all she was friendly and welcoming. But to none did she speak of the strange duality of the house. More and more she came to look forward to the coming of the change, whose first intimation was always the scent of box and the humming of bees.

Never did the substitution take place when she was out-of-doors. The moment she came across the threshold she was [outside?] of actuality. Sometimes she [missing text] with the scent of dew-drenched box in her nostrils and, running softly to her bedroom window, would sit for hours watching the moonlight break in silver spangles on the lake and the slow-waving silhouettes of long willow fringes. It was her secret — the mysterious confidence the house gave to her alone. Something to treasure, never to reveal, not even to Clinton Wade who more and more took hold of her thoughts and longings. Dear Enemy! Surely Aunt Cornelia must have relented in her heart of hearts, since she had made no mention of the feud in her will. She must have fancied — Phoebe got no further with her musings. There was a veiled presence in her soul that she would not look at, face to face.

Summer cooled and ripened into Autumn. The maples turned to gold and crimson, and the elms crisped to bronze. She had seen the valley yellow with stubble and the hills aflame with color.

And from the windows opening into the mystic garden she had watched the blue of the larkspurs give place to the brown and yellows and wine-stained ivories of button-chrysanthemums; had seen. the apples turn red and russet, and now, mingled with the scent of box, their luscious smell, clean and honest as their ruddy cheeks, made anew fragrance. The fringes of the willows had thinned. The cypress hedges gave glimpses of the green of winter wheat. The pond reflected a bluer sky. The lily pads were darkening, and the white stars of their blooms no longer dotted the quiet surface of the pool.

•   •   •   •   •   •

As the evenings grew chill, she no longer sat with Clint on the stone step before the door. Now they drew up to the fire, crackling and leaping behind the massive brass andirons, and chatted idly of each day’s happenings. He seemed to belong there by her side, his blue, intent eyes glinting in the warm light, his strong hands quiescent on the polished arms of Aunt Cornelia’s best mahogany chair.

She could not prevent the visions that crowded to her heart. He must be there always, close to her. Her husband someday. But never as his wife would she enter that stucco renovated, electric-lighted, up-to-date house of his, never! He belonged here in the old mansion, amid its faded grandeurs. He was part of its dream duality. He must come to her. She could not, would not, go to him. She could not abandon the house, not even for him.

“Nobody asked you to, sir, she said,” she quoted to herself, upbraiding her errant fancy. But she knew that the unseen ties that bound them together were as real and as mysterious as the visions of the house. They were not to be explained or argued about; they were.

Autumn burned down to its embers, and the white ash of Winter blew in snow along hill and dale. Sharp, crusty mornings followed crystal nights. Noon days sparkled like diamonds or darkened to gray dusks of bitter sleet. Now the dream pond was black with ice. The willows streamed funereal fringes before the gale. The box hedges were snow-dotted, the apple trees purple-brown with moisture and outlined with ermine. Now the long view of the valley was stained in mauves and pale yellow, varnished thinly with white. The water courses marked themselves with brittle cleanness. When the vision faded, the elms and rock-maples, divested of their gold and scarlet, held up black lace against the sky. The long lawn was _ glare-ice over smooth-laid snow, neat as a well-set tablecloth.

Christmas was close at hand. Her first Christmas at home, she thought happily.

The afternoon and evening of Christmas Eve, Clint had promised to spend with her. He’d come early and help her prepare. He had promised her the biggest bunch of mistletoe to be bought, the finest holly wreaths to be found. The house was to have a festival — a wreath in every window with a candle in the middle. Over every mantelpiece were fastened evergreen boughs. Not a nook or corner but had its festive sign.

“The house hasn’t had a party for forty years,” they decided.

•   •   •   •   •   •

On Christmas Eve, Phoebe stood before the glowing stove where a cake, a wonderful, pretentious cake, was baking, along with a turkey — a present from the banker’s wife — stuffed according to an old and respected recipe. The plum pudding came out of a can, but what of that? The side table was loaded with “fixin’s,” all the tidbits she could remember as ever being served on this occasion, First they’d have a little run-around of calls in the car, then return for dinner téte-a-téte. How shocked the town would be if it knew, which doubtless it did, after the manner of towns.

But suppose he didn’t come, after all? Suppose he should jilt her first party as his father had jilted Aunt Cornelia? The absurd thought flashed through her mind and turned her heart cold just as she was removing the cake from the oven, and, in her panic, she almost dropped it to the floor. Perhaps people inherited traits like that. She set down the pan and stood beside the kitchen table, her face twisted with pain at the sudden realization of what such a disaster would mean to her. Why, she could hate in return, as long and as abominably as Aunt Cornelia! People did inherit queer things. But Clint — no, no! Her hands shook as she spread the thick chocolate between the layers. No, not Clint.

At last, all was ready for his coming. She put on her new black-and-white flowered chiffon frock and the long string of pearls.

She heard his car purr to a stop before the horse-block and the quick clip of his steps up the path. Before he could knock, she opened the door and curtseyed before him.

He came in, bringing a cold breath of outer air. He closed the door and stood looking at her as he pulled off his heavy gloves with nervous fingers. They moved into the dining room and stood for a moment by an open window, breathing the crisp air — joyous to be alive.

Neither spoke. Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, straining close. A tearing, rapturous thrill passed over and engulfed them. They clung together, dizzily, caught in the age-old maelstrom.

As if on a rush of sudden wind came the sharp odor of box.

She drew away and looked up, wide-eyed.

He was staring out of the window, his face white, his eyes fixed in amazed wonder.

She twisted in his grasp, looking over her shoulder. Yes, it had come, the mysterious change! There, before them, stretched the path to the lake: the willows waving in the winter wind; the copper light of the setting sun casting royal purple shadows in patterns on the snow.

“Clint,” she cried, “don’t be frightened. It comes like that often and often. Don’t look that way, don’t! It’s nothing to hurt, really!”

She shook him frantically. He released his hold of her and covered his eyes with both hands. Then he raised his head and looked again.

“Have I gone crazy?” he ejaculated.

She threw herself upon him, panting with eagerness. She was glad, so glad, that he saw too.

“You mustn’t mind it. I love it. I wait for it to come!”

“The apple orchard — the brook!” he said in an awed whisper.

Amazement fell upon her. “How did you know?” she stammered. “How could you know? You haven’t looked out of the other windows.” She felt him quiver, shaken as if by an inner storm.

“And you’ve seen this all the time?” he asked thickly.

“Ever since I came. I never know when, till I smell the box.”

“The box — yes — the old box hedges—” he repeated in a voice so strange that her fears renewed.

“What is it? Oh, what is it?” she begged. “What does it mean?”

“But it can’t be!” he cried and lurched to the other side of the room, where he leaned heavily against the sill and looked out. “But it is, it is!” He drew himself erect suddenly as if galvanized with joyous energy. “Come — come with me — now!”

He threw her coat about her, pulled her fur cap down on her head, jerked open the door, and dragged her to the car. Obediently, she sat down beside him, as with wild eyes and set lips he turned and drove recklessly down the road: For a half mile or more the car flew down the highway. Then he slowed, got out, let down a bar, and turned into a country lane. No macadam here, but frozen brown earth with tangled purple and wine-colored briar burning red in the snow. Another half mile and a pair of high stone gates came into view.

Clinton Wade stopped the car with shrieking brakes and turned to Phoebe. “Will you do as I tell you, Phoebe Sands?”

She nodded.

“Close your eyes, then, and let me lead you. Don’t open them till I say when.”

He put his arm about her shoulders and took her right hand in his. She heard their feet crunch on frosted gravel and knew it had been long neglected, for she stumbled over hummocks, and thorns tore at her skirt. They progressed slowly. Now the scent of box was in the keen air, growing stronger, and a faint, ciderish smell as stored apples. Close to her she felt his heart beating hard and fast and heard his breath in a shuddering sigh.

“Open your eyes,” he whispered.

She looked up. Green mounds of box surrounded her. A green, box-bordered alley opened before her — a path that ended in a frozen pond. Beyond were willows like whips of gold. And over on the right, rank on rank, marched the battalions of bare apple trees.

“Why, this is the place,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said. “See.” He turned her about.

There, beyond, was the barn, whose haymow door swung creaking in the wind and whose fanlights gaped, glassless. He eased her to a seat on a stone wall. Then she realized that below, half filled with débris and snow, yawned cellars. There was the place where a chimney had been. She was seated on the foundation of a house. She could trace its form and extent. Here had been a garden. The box still flourished. Yonder, through the cypress, the meadow showed, striped with white in the furrows of brown earth. She did not question it. It was within and without her, beauty, security, peace. Home — the place of the vision.

He was speaking, his lips close to her hair. “Phoebe, dear, I didn’t want you to know how your Aunt Cornelia got the house. You’d never be happy in it, if you knew. I made everybody swear not to tell you. But now this has happened, you ought to know what the house is trying to tell you.” He was silent a moment as if choosing his next words. “It, isn’t the home of your people, dearest — it was the home of mine.” She gazed at him, astonished. “My father and your Aunt Cornelia were engaged to be married,” he explained. “He made over to her his old homestead as his wedding gift. And then — he met my mother. He jilted your Aunt and she never forgave him. Part of her vengeance was that she kept the house. She knew how he loved it, how much it meant to him.

“It cost her half of all she had, to do it, but she had the house put on rollers and moved to the place where it is now. The old Sands mansion had burned down two years before, and so she set it up on the stone foundation that was hers by right. And there they lived, the house and Cornelia. Now, do you understand?”

There was a long silence, then she spoke very softly. “I think she forgave.”

He shook his head. “I won’t try to explain it. I’ve always had the strangest feeling about the old place. Even when I was little, I used to come here and imagine how it used to be; how I could look out from the windows, if I ever got inside, and see all this around it. I wouldn’t let myself think of it up there on the hill. I used to try and make myself believe the house was lonely and homesick, and wanted to come back. Just a kid’s rebellious fancying, I guess, but I wanted my father’s house — wanted it always. And then, when I was grown and your Aunt Cornelia died, I couldn’t buy it. I tried to, but it was left to you. And since you came — well, I can’t think of the house without you in it. I can’t think of any house of mine except as yours.”

“You felt like that, and yet you told everybody to keep mum about how Aunt Cornelia stole your father’s house — because you knew I’d feel I’d have to give it back! You couldn’t know then that the house wanted us together.”

He drew her closer. “It was no fault of yours, no matter who you were. It wouldn’t have been fair, that’s all.”

She turned trusting, adoring eyes to him. “You’re so dreadfully good,” she whispered, “that if it wouldn’t hurt the house’s feelings, I wouldn’t marry you.”

He seemed not to hear her. His eyes were set, his head inclined as if intently listening — the familiar look she had learned to know. She, too, bent her head. Her gaze sought the distance.

“I know,” she said softly. “I hear it, too. The House is calling. It says: ‘Come here at once, you two; you’ll catch your deaths of cold, and besides, my fires are burning low. Come at once and begin to make your plans to move back home.’”

“Ghost Stories” magazine, Dec 1927