“Remember my instructions, good Friend Trowbridge—strike!” he gasped while he strove to wrench himself from the position into which he had been forced by that unseen malevolence.
He was suffering, I could see. The force with which he struck the wall had knocked the breath out of him, and something which I could not see was pressing on his throat, his diaphragm, his limbs, and held him with his arms outstretched and head thrown back as though he had been crucified. He gasped and fought for breath, but the struggle was uneven. In a moment he would fall unconscious from asphyxia, for no air could reach his lungs, and his lips were even then beginning to show blue while his eyeballs started from their sockets.
Across the room I leapt, swinging my double-bladed ax: about my head and bringing it down with all my might upon the golden ikon on the altar.
It seemed for an instant that I had cut into an electric cable, for a shock of numbing pain ran up my forearms, and I all but dropped my weapon as I staggered back.
“Bravo, bravissimo, my friend; that was nobly done!” De Grandin’s voice was stronger, now; he had managed to inhale a breath of air, but even as he cheered me came a rattling in his throat. He was being throttled by his unseen adversary.
I struck again, and this time swept the ikon to the floor. It fell face-downward, its pictures hidden from my sight.
A surge of sudden wild, insensate anger swept through me. How or why I did not know, but this picture somehow was responsible for Jules de Grandin’s plight. When I assaulted it he gained a temporary respite, in the momentary pause between my blows he suffered strangulation. I went stark, raving mad. For a wild, exhilarated moment I knew the fury and the joy our Saxon forebears felt when they went berserker and, armor cast aside, leapt bare-breasted into battle.
I felt my ax-blade cleave the ikon’s golden plates, wrenched it free and struck again; chopping, hewing, battering. The heavy golden plates were bent and broken, now, and little bits of colored stone were strewn about the floor where my furious assault had smashed the priceless mosaics. I drove my axhead through the center panel, cleft the figure of the beautiful young man in twain, cut the dancing horrors into bits, smashed the crawling infantile monstrosities to utter formlessness; finally, insane with murderous rage, drove the battered golden casque into the fireplace as a hockey-player might shoot the puck into the goal-net, then reached up frenziedly, dragged down a hanging lamp and dashed it on the logs which lay in order ready for the match.
The dry wood kindled like a torch, and as the leaping ocherous flame licked hungrily at the shapeless mass which had a moment earlier been a priceless relic of the tessellater’s art, de Grandin staggered forward, gasping thirstily for air like a diver coming to the surface after long immersion.
“Oh, excellent Friend Trowbridge, brave camarade; camarade brave comme l’epée qu’il porte, parbleu, but I do love you!” he exclaimed, and before I could defend myself had flung his arms around me, drawn me to him and planted a resounding kiss upon each cheek.
“I’m sorry that I lost my head and wrecked that lovely thing,” I muttered, gazing ruefully at the melting gold and flame-discolored fragments of bright marble in the fireplace.
“Sorry? Mort de ma vie, it is your sober reason that speaks now—and when has truth been found in staid sobriety? Your instinct was truer when it urged that you consign this loathsome thing to cleansing fire. Tiens, had someone had the wit to do it seven hundred years ago, how much misery would have been averted! Pah”—he seized the poker and probed viciously at the remnants of the reliquary—“burn, curse you! Your makers and your votaries have stewed and fried in hell for centuries; go thou to join them, naughty thing!” Abruptly:
“Come, we have work to do, Friend Trowbridge; let us be about it.”
We draped the sable coat round Karen Kirsten, drew the fur-trimmed boots upon her feet, bundled up her tattered negligée, then, quietly as a pair of burglars, took her through the window, through the service-pantry door, and upstairs to her bedroom.
“It is well Monsieur le Capitaine had but two men set to watch the house,” de Grandin chuckled as we got the girl’s pajamas on and drew the bedclothes over her. “The young man who snores so watchfully before the kitchen door would be surprised if he could know with what impunity his charges come and go at will, I think.”
“I SUPPOSE YOU’RE GOING TO tell me thoughts are things, and that explains the goings-on we’ve witnessed?” I accused as we got into bed.
“By damn, I am,” he answered with a sleepy laugh. “If it were not so I should have had a merry chase to find a reason for these evil doings. Attend me, if you please: That ikon might be called a devil’s palimpsest. First the olden, wicked tessellaters contrived the scenes we saw tonight, the wicked worshipers of evil gods who danced together back to back, as in the days when dancing widdershins paid honor to the pig-faced Moloch, the terrible, amorphous things which typified primeval wickedness, finally the Lord Adonis. Then by a trick of cunning workmanship they overlaid their true design with those sweet, innocuous scenes of innocence, and in the center set the picture of a saint. ‘Beauty is in the beholder’s eye,’ the ancient proverb says. It might have added that wickedness and goodness are to a great extent the same. Only when summoned by deliberate thought of evil did the underlying pictures dedicated to the unclean worship of the evil old ones come to light; at other times the ikon showed an air of innocence. Ha, but that was in the very long ago, my friend. Like a jar of porous earthenware filled constantly with aromatic liquids, this ikon was the center of a very evil worship, the receptacle of concentrated thoughts of wickedness and hate. Thoughts are things; they filled the very substance of the ikon as the aromatic liquors will in time so permeate the fiber of the earthen jug that it will always afterward give off their scent. Yes, certainly.
“In time the evil principle became so strongly concentrated in this ikon that it changed unbidden from its good to wicked aspect, and this was so especially when the person who beheld it harbored secret thoughts of sin. More, it added to, it strengthened these desires for evil. Did the person in its presence have suppressed longings to forsake the ways of soberness and take to drink? His resolution to remain a sober citizen was straightway weakened to the breaking-point, his thirst for drink increased tenfold. And so right through the Decalogue. Whatever secret evil one had struggled with and conquered became so magnified when he came in this ikon’s presence that be was unable to resist the sinful urge. He was vanquished, beaten, routed, lost in sin.
“And as person after person yielded to its wicked influence this devil’s tool waxed ever greater in its strength. Eventually it was not necessary for the one corrupted to have harbored evil thought; he need only be impressionable, psychic, to behold the changing of the pictures and, unless he had unusual strength of character, to succumb to their foul lure. Karen Kirsten realized this when first she stepped into the gunroom; Wyndham Farraday had suffered from the same experience; often Philippe Classon must have seen those pictures change; it was that which preyed upon his mind and made him seek to lull his fears by having others look at them and hear the testimony which they gave. You see? It is quite simple, Yes. Thoughts most assuredly are things.”
“But why should they select Adonis as typifying Evil?” I demanded. “As I recall it, he was a shy young man whom Venus wooed—”
“In Monsieur Shakespeare’s poems, yes,” he interrupted, “but not in the belief of those who worshiped Evil for its evil self. No, not at all; by no means.
“When those wicked ones were gathered to make mock of holy things and bend the knee to sinfulness, they invoked some god or goddess of the ancient days, or, in later times, the devil. At gatherings of devil-worshipers it was not always as a hairy man or goat that the devil was adored. He had other aspects, too. Sometimes he came as a most beautiful young man, Lucifer the Lightbearer; as Baron Satanas, cold, haughty, proud, but most distinguished in appearance; sometimes as Adonis, the young man beautiful and cold as ice, impervious
alike to little children’s lisping pleas or woman’s charming beauty—it was not bashfulness, but utter, cold indifference that made Adonis proof against the blandishments of the Queen of Love and Beauty. He it was—still is, parbleu!—who gave nothing in return for worship but lies and bitter disappointments.
“Besides, the men who made those pictures and the worshippers who bent the knee before it were Greeks; degenerate Greeks, of course, but still inheritors of the culture that was Athens. A Greek could not do homage to a god, even to a god of evil, who was anything but beautiful.”
“That dreadful shadow that we saw, the shadow that seemed to detach itself from the wall and reach toward Karen Kirsten just before you challenged it?” I asked. “That was—”
“Thought made manifest, my friend. The evil thought which for generation upon generation had been poured upon that cursèd ikon, that devil’s palimpsest. It was the same thought that induced rebellion in the heavens against the power of good, the thought which prompted Cain to slay his brother, which brought the sacrificial babes to Moloch; parbleu, it was everything that is detestable and vile concresced into that little reservoir which was that never-to-be-sufficiently-anathematized palimpsest of Satan!”
“It’s positively the damnedest thing I ever saw, swore Captain Chenevert next day. “Two killings in that room with no more clues to ’em than if they’d been in China. Then someone sneaks in there last night and smashes up a piece of bric-à-brac so valuable that no one can appraise it. Hanged if it doesn’t almost seem as if the place were haunted!”
“I damn think you have right, Monsieur le Capitaine,” de Grandin answered, his face expressionless as a death mask.
He reached out for the bell-pull: “Will you have Scots or Irish with your soda water, gentlemen?”
Pledged to the Dead
THE AUTUMN DUSK HAD stained the sky with shadows and orange oblongs traced the windows in my neighbors’ homes as Jules de Grandin and I sat sipping kaiserschmarrn and coffee in the study after dinner. “Mon Dieu,” the little Frenchman sighed, “I have the mal du pays, my friend. The little children run and play along the roadways at Saint Cloud, and on the Île de France the pastry cooks set up their booths. Corbleu, it takes the strength of character not to stop and buy those cakes of so much taste and fancy! The Napoléons, they are crisp and fragile as a coquette’s promise, the éclairs filled with cool, sweet cream, the cream-puffs all aglow with cherries. Just to see them is to love life better. They—”
The shrilling of the door-bell startled me. The pressure on the button must have been that of one who leant against it. “Doctor Trowbridge; I must see him right away!” a woman’s voice demanded as Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, grudgingly responded to the hail.
“Th’ docthor’s offiss hours is over, ma’am,” Nora answered frigidly. “Ha’f past nine ter eleven in th’ marnin’, an’ two ter four in th’ afthernoon is when he sees his patients. If it’s an urgent case ye have there’s lots o’ good young docthors in th’ neighborhood, but Docthor Trowbridge—”
“Is he here?” the visitor demanded sharply.
“He is, an’ he’s afther digestin’ his dinner—an’ an illigant dinner it wuz, though I do say so as shouldn’t—an’ he can’t be disturbed—”
“He’ll see me, all right. Tell him it’s Nella Bentley, and I’ve got to talk to him!”
De Grandin raised an eyebrow eloquently. “The fish at the aquarium have greater privacy than we, my friend,” he murmured, but broke off as the visitor came clacking down the hall on high French heels and rushed into the study half a dozen paces in advance of my thoroughly disapproving and more than semi-scandalized Nora.
“Doctor Trowbridge, won’t you help me?” cried the girl as she fairly leaped across the study and flung her arms about my shoulders. “I can’t tell Dad or Mother, they wouldn’t understand; so you’re the only one—oh, excuse me, I thought you were alone!” Her face went crimson as she saw de Grandin standing by the fire.
“It’s quite all right, my dear,” I soothed, freeing myself from her almost hysterical clutch. “This is Doctor de Grandin, with whom I’ve been associated many times; I’d be glad to have the benefit of his advice, if you don’t mind.”
She gave him her hand and a wan smile as I performed the introduction, but her eyes warmed quickly as he raised her fingers to his lips with a soft “Enchanté, Mademoiselle.” Women, animals and children took instinctively to Jules de Grandin.
Nella dropped her coat of silky shaven lamb and sank down on the study couch, her slim young figure molded in her knitted dress of coral rayon as revealingly as though she had been cased in plastic cellulose. She has long, violet eyes and a long mouth; smooth, dark hair parted in the middle; a small straight nose, and a small pointed chin. Every line of her is long, but definitely feminine; breasts and hips and throat and legs all delicately curved, without a hint of angularity.
“I’ve come to see you about Ned,” she volunteered as de Grandin lit her cigarette and she sent a nervous smoke stream gushing from between red, trembling lips. “He—he’s trying to run out on me!”
“You mean Ned Minton?” I asked, wondering what a middle-aged physician could prescribe for wandering Romeos.
“I certainly do mean Ned Minton,” she replied, “and I mean business, too. The darn, romantic fool!”
De Grandin’s slender brows arched upward till they nearly met the beige-blond hair that slanted sleekly backward from his forehead. “Pardonnez-moi,” he murmured. “Did I understand correctly, Mademoiselle? Your amoureux—how do you say him?—sweetheart?—has shown a disposition toward unfaithfulness, yet you accuse him of romanticism?”
“He’s not unfaithful, that’s the worst of it. He’s faithful as Tristan and the chevalier Bayard lumped together, sans peur et sans reproche, you know. Says we can’t get married, ’cause—”
“Just a moment, dear,” I interrupted as I felt my indignation mounting. “D’ye mean the miserable young puppy cheated, and now wants to welch—”
Her blue eyes widened, then the little laughter-wrinkles formed around them. “You dear old mid-Victorian!” she broke in. “No, he ain’t done wrong by our Nell, and I’m not asking you to take your shotgun down and force him to make me an honest woman. Suppose we start at the beginning: then we’ll get things straight.
“You assisted at both our débuts, I’ve been told; you’ve known Ned and me since we were a second old apiece, haven’t you?”
I nodded.
“Know we’ve always been crazy about each other, too; in grammar school, high school and college, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“All right. We’ve been engaged ever since our freshman year at Beaver. Ned just had his frat pin long enough to pin it on my shoulder-strap at the first freshman dance. Everything was set for us to stand up in the chancel and say ‘I do’ this June; then Ned’s company sent him to New Orleans last December.” She paused, drew deeply at her cigarette, crushed its fire out in an ash-tray, and set a fresh one glowing.
“That started it. While he was down there it seemed that he got playful. Mixed up with some glamorous Creole gal.” Once more she lapsed into silence and I could see the heartbreak showing through the armor of her flippant manner.
“You mean he fell in love—”
“I certainly do not! If he had, I’d have handed back his ring and said ‘Bless you, me children’, even if I had to bite my heart in two to do it; but this is no case of a new love crowding out the old. Ned still loves me; never stopped loving me. That’s what makes it all seem crazy as a hashish-eater’s dream. He was on the loose in New Orleans, doing the town with a crowd of local boys, and prob’bly had too many Ramos fizzes. Then he barged into this Creole dame’s place, and—” she broke off with a gallant effort at a smile. “I guess young fellows aren’t so different nowadays than they were when you were growing up, sir. Only today we don’t believe in sprinkling perfume in the family cesspool. Ned cheated, that’
s the bald truth of it; he didn’t stop loving me, and he hasn’t stopped now, but I wasn’t there and that other girl was, and there were no conventions to be recognized. Now he’s fairly melting with remorse, says he’s not worthy of me—wants to break off our engagement, while he spends a lifetime doing penance for a moment’s folly.”
“But good heavens,” I expostulated, “if you’re willing to forgive—”
“You’re telling me!” she answered bitterly. “We’ve been over it a hundred times. This isn’t 1892; even nice girls know the facts of life today, and while I’m no more anxious than the next one to put through a deal in shopworn goods, I still love Ned, and I don’t intend to let a single indiscretion rob us of our happiness. I—” the hard exterior veneer of modernism melted from her like an autumn ice-glaze melting in the warm October sun, and the tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting little valleys in her carefully applied make-up. “He’s my man, Doctor,” she sobbed bitterly. “I’ve loved him since we made mud-pies together; I’m hungry, thirsty for him. He’s everything to me, and if he follows out this fool renunciation he seems set on, it’ll kill me!”
De Grandin tweaked a waxed mustache-end thoughtfully. “You exemplify the practicality of woman, Mademoiselle; I applaud your sound, hard common sense,” he told her. “Bring this silly young romantic foolish one to me. I will tell him—”
“But he won’t come,” I interrupted. “I know these hard-minded young asses. When a lad is set on being stubborn—”
“Will you go to work on him if I can get him here?” interjected Nella.
“Of a certitude, Mademoiselle.”
“You won’t think me forward or unmaidenly?”
A Rival from the Grave Page 51