“Eh? What think you of that, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked as he laid the papers beside him on the car-seat.
“Rather an interesting medieval legend,” I answered, “but hardly convincing today.”
“Truly,” he conceded, “but as your English proverb has it, where there is much smoke there is apt to be a little flame. Other things I found in the records, my friend. For instance:
“The ashes of this Raimond de Broussac could not be buried in the château chapel among his ancestors and descendants, for the chapel is consecrated ground, and he died excommunicate. They buried him in what was then a pine forest hard by the house where he lived his evil life, and on the stone which they set over him they did declare that he lay there forever.
“But one year from the day of his execution, as the de Broussac chaplain was reciting his office in the chapel, he did see a green-and-gold snake, something thicker than a monk’s girdle but not so long as a man’s forearm, enter the chapel, and the snake attacked the holy man so fiercely that he was much put to it to defend himself.
“Another year went by, and a servant bearing off to refill the sanctuary lamp in the chapel did behold a similar snake, but now grown to the length of a man’s arm, coiled above one of the tombs; and the snake also attacked that servant, and nearly slew him.
“From year to year the records go on. Often about Broussac was seen a snake, but each succeeding time it appeared larger than before.
“Too, there were strange stories current—stories of women of the locality who wandered off into the woods of Broussac, who displayed strange bruises upon their bodies, and who died eventually in a manner unexplained by any natural cause. One and all, mon ami, they were crushed to death.
“One was a member of the de Broussac family, a distant kinswoman of Sieur Raimond himself, who had determined to take the veil. As she knelt in prayer in the chapel one day, a great sleep fell upon her, and after that, for many days, she seemed distrait—her interest in everything, even her religious vocation, seemed to wane to nothing. But it was thought that she was very saintly, for those who watched her did observe that she went often to the chapel by night. One morning she was found, like the others, crushed to death, and on her face was the look not of the agony of dying but the evil smile of an abandoned woman. Even in death she wore it.
“These things I had already read when that gamekeeper brought us news of the great snake he had seen in the garden, and what I had noted down as idle legend appeared possible to me as a sober fact—if we could prove it.
“You recall how we spread flour on the chapel floor; you also recall the tracks we read in the flour next day.
“I remembered, too, how that poor Madame Biddle, who went mad in the château Broussac, did so when she wandered one day by chance into the chapel, and I remembered how she does continually cry out of a great snake which seems to kiss her. The doctor who first attended her, too, when her reason departed, told me of a bruise not to be explained, a spiral bruise about the lady’s arm.
“Pardieu! I think I will test these legends some more, and I search and search until I find this wicked Sieur Raimond’s grave. It was even as the chronicler wrote, for, to prove it, I made you go with me and read the inscription on the tombstone. Morbleu! Against my reason I am convinced, so I make and place them so that their sharp nails would scratch the belly of any snake—if he were really a snake—who tried to crawl over them. Voilà, next she was better. Then I knew for a certainty that she was under the influence of this Sieur Raimond snake, even as that poor intending-nun lady who met so tragic a death in the days of long ago.
“Something else I learn, too. This demon snake, this relic of the accurst Raimond de Broussac, was like a natural snake. Material iron nails would keep him from the house his wickedness had so long held under a spell. If this was so, then a natural weapon could kill his body if one man was but brave enough to fight him. ‘Cordieu, I am that man!’ says Jules de Grandin to Jules de Grandin.
“But in the meantime what do I see? Hélas! That wicked one has now so great an influence over poor Mademoiselle Adrienne that he can compel her, by his wicked will, to rise from her bed at night and go barefoot to the garden to tear away the barrier I have erected for her protection.
“Nom d’un coq! I am angered, I am furious. I decide this snake-devil have already lived too long; I shall do even as the Lady Abbess prescribes and slash his so loathly body into as many parts as the year has weeks.
“Morbleu! I go to Rouen and obtain that holy sword; I come back, thinking I shall catch that snake waiting alone in the chapel for his assignation, since I shall bar Mademoiselle’s way to him. And then her so stupid mother must needs upset all my plans, and I have to fight that snake almost in silence—I can not shout and curse at him as I would, for if I raise my voice I may waken that then, perhaps she goes mad, even as did Madame Biddle.
“Eh bien, perhaps it is for the best. Had I said all the foul curses I had in mind as I slew that blue-eyed snake, all the priests, clergymen and rabbis in the world could scarce have shriven my soul of their weight.”
The Isle of Missing Ships
1
THE MEVROUW, SUMATRA-BOUND OUT of Amsterdam, had dropped the low Holland coast an hour behind that day in 1925, when I recognized a familiar figure among the miscellany of Dutch colonials. The little man with the erect, military carriage, trimly waxed mustache and direct, challenging blue eyes was as conspicuous amid the throng of over-fleshed planters, traders and petty administrators as a fleur-de-lis growing in the midst of a cabbage patch.
“For the Lord’s sake, de Grandin! What are you doing here?” I demanded, seizing him by the hand. “I thought you’d gone back to your microscopes and test tubes when you cleared up the Broussac mystery.”
He grinned at me like a blond brother of Mephistopheles as he linked his arm in mine and caught step with me. “Eh bien,” he agreed with a nod, “so did I; but those inconsiderate Messieurs Lloyd would not have it so. They must needs send me an urgent message to investigate a suspicion they have at the other end of the earth.
“I did not desire to go. The summer is come and the blackbirds are singing in the trees at St. Cloud. Also, I have much work to do; but they tell me: ‘You shall name your own price and no questions shall be asked,’ and, hélas, the franc is very low on the exchange these days.
“I tell them, ‘Ten pounds sterling for each day of my travels and all expenses.’ They agree. Voilà. I am here.”
I looked at him in amazement. “Lloyds? Ten pounds sterling a day?” I echoed. “What in the world—?”
“La, la!” he exclaimed. “It is a long story, Friend Trowbridge, and most like a foolish one in the bargain, but, at any rate, the English money is sound. Listen”—he sank his voice to a confidential whisper—“you know those Messieurs Lloyd, hein? They will insure against anything from the result of one of your American political elections to the loss of a ship in the sea. That last business of theirs is also my business, for the time.
“Of late the English insurers have had many claims to pay—claims on ships which should have been good risks. There was the Dutch Indiaman Van Damm, a sound little iron ship of twelve thousand tons displacement. She sail out of Rotterdam for Sumatra, and start home heavy-laden with spices and silks, also with a king’s ransom in pearls safely locked in her strong box. Where is she now?” He spread his hands and shrugged expressively. “No one knows. She was never heard of more, and the Lloyds had to make good her value to her owners.
“There was the French steamer l’Orient, also dissolved into air, and the British merchantman Nightingale, and six other sound ships gone—all gone, with none to say whither, and the estimable Messieurs Lloyd to pay insurance. All within one single year. Parbleu, it is too much! The English company pays its losses like a true sportsman, but it also begins to sniff the aroma of the dead fish. They would have me, Jules de Grandin, investigate this business of the monkey and tell them where the missing ships are g
one.
“It may be for a year that I search; it may be for only a month, or, perhaps, I spend the time till my hair is as bald as yours, Friend Trowbridge, before I can report. No matter; I receive my ten pounds each day and all incidental expenses. Say now, are not those Messieurs Lloyd gambling more recklessly this time than ever before in their long career?”
“I think they are,” I agreed.
“But,” he replied with one of his elfish grins, “remember, Trowbridge, my friend, those Messieurs Lloyd were never known to lose money permanently on any transaction. Morbleu! Jules de Grandin, as the Americans say, you entertain the hatred for yourself!”
The Mevrouw churned and wallowed her broad-beamed way through the cool European ocean, into the summer seas, finally out upon the tropical waters of Polynesia. For five nights the smalt-blue heavens were ablaze with stars; on the sixth evening the air thickened at sunset. By ten o’clock the ship might have been draped in a pall of black velvet as a teapot is swathed in a cozy, so impenetrable was the darkness. Objects a dozen feet from the porthole lights were all but indistinguishable, at twenty feet they were invisible, and, save for the occasional phosphorescent glow of some tumbling sea denizen, the ocean itself was only an undefined part of the surrounding blackness.
“Eh, but I do not like this,” de Grandin muttered as he lighted a rank Sumatra cigar from the ship steward’s store and puffed vigorously to set the fire going: “this darkness, it is a time for evil doings, Friend Trowbridge.”
He turned to a ship’s officer who strode past us toward the bridge. “Is it that we shall have a storm, Monsieur?” he asked. “Does the darkness portend a typhoon?”
“No,” returned the Dutchman. “Id iss folcanic dust. Some of dose folcano mountains are in eruption again and scatter steam and ash over a hundred miles. Tomorrow, perhaps, or de nex’ day, ve are out of id an’ into de zunzhine again.”
“Ah,” de Grandin bowed acknowledgment of the information, “and does this volcanic darkness frequently come at this latitude and longitude, Monsieur?”
“Ja,” the other answered, “dese vaters are almost alvays cofered; de chimneys of hell poke up through de ocean hereabouts, Mijnheer.”
“Cordieu!” de Grandin swore softly to himself. “I think he has spoken truth, Friend Trowbridge. Now if—Grand Dieu, see! What is that?”
Some distance off our port bow a brand of yellow fire burned a parabola against the black sky, burst into a shower of sparks high above the horizon and flung a constellation of colored fireballs into the air. A second flame followed the first, and a third winged upward in the wake of the second. “Rockets,” de Grandin announced. “A ship is in distress over there, it would seem.”
Bells clanged and jangled as the engine room telegraph sent orders from the bridge; there was a clanking of machinery as the screws churned in opposite directions and the steering mechanism brought the ship’s head about toward the distress signals.
“I think we had best be prepared, my friend,” de Grandin whispered as he reached upward to the rack above us and detached two kapok swimming jackets from their straps. “Come, slip this over your shoulders, and if you have anything in your cabin you would care to save, get it at once,” he advised.
“You’re crazy, man,” I protested, pushing the life preserver away. “We aren’t in any danger. Those lights were at least five miles away, and even if that other ship is fast on a reef our skipper would hear the breakers long before we were near enough to run aground.”
“Nom d’un nom!” the little Frenchman swore in vexation. “Friend Trowbridge, you are one great zany. Have you no eyes in that so empty head of yours? Did you not observe how those rockets went up?”
“How they went up?” I repeated. “Of course I did; they were fired from the deck—perhaps the bridge—of some ship about five miles away.”
“So?” he replied in a sarcastic whisper. “Five miles, you say? And you, a physician, do not know that the human eye sees only about five miles over a plane surface? How, then, if the distressed ship is five miles distant, could those flares have appeared to rise from a greater height than our own deck? Had they really a masthead, at that distance—they should have appeared to rise across the horizon. As it was, they first became visible at a considerable height.”
“Nonsense,” I rejoined; “whoever would be setting off rockets in midair in this part of the world?”
“Who, indeed?” he answered, gently forcing the swimming coat on me. “That question, mon ami, is precisely what those Messieurs Lloyd are paying me ten pounds a day to answer. Hark!”
Distinctly, directly in our path, sounded the muttering roar of waves breaking against rocks.
Clang! The ship’s telegraph shrieked the order to reverse, to put about, to the engine room from the bridge.
Wheels and chains rattled, voices shouted hoarse orders through the dark, and the ship shivered from stem to stern as the engine struggled hysterically to break our course toward destruction.
Too late! Like a toy boat caught in a sudden wind squall, we lunged forward, gathering speed with each foot we traveled. There was a rending crash like all the crockery in the world being smashed at once, de Grandin and I fell headlong to the deck and shot along the smooth boards like a couple of ball players sliding for second base, and the stout little Mevrouw listed suddenly to port, sending us banging against the deck rail.
“Quick, quick, my friend!” de Grandin shouted. “Over the side and swim for it. I may be wrong, prie-Dieu I am, but I fear there will be devil’s work here anon. Come!” He lifted himself to his feet, balanced on the rail a moment, then slipped into the purple water that swirled past the doomed ship’s side a scant seven feet below us.
I followed, striking out easily toward the quiet water ahead, the kapok jacket keeping me afloat and the rushing water carrying me forward rapidly.
“By George, old fellow, you’ve been right this far,” I congratulated my companion, but he shut me off with a sharp hiss.
“Still, you fool,” he admonished savagely. “Keep your silly tongue quiet and kick with your feet. Kick, kick, I tell you! Make as great commotion in the water as possible—nom de Dieu! We are lost!”
Faintly luminous with the phosphorescence of tropical sea water, something seeming as large as a submarine boat shot upward from the depths below, headed as straight for my flailing legs as a sharpshooter’s bullet for its target.
De Grandin grasped my shoulder and heaved me over in a clumsy back somersault, and at the same time thrust himself as deeply into the water as his swimming coat would permit. For a moment his fiery silhouette mingled with that of the great fish and he seemed striving to embrace the monster, then the larger form sank slowly away, while the little Frenchman rose puffing to the surface.
“Mordieu!” he commented, blowing the water from his mouth, “that was a near escape, my friend. One little second more and he would have had your leg in his belly. Lucky for us, I knew the pearl divers’ trick of slittin’ those fellows’ gills with a knife, and luckier still I thought to bring along a knife to slit him with.”
“What was it?” I asked, still bewildered by the performance I had just witnessed. “It looked big enough to be a whale.”
He shook his head to clear the water from his eyes as he replied. “It was our friend, Monsieur le Requin—the shark. He is always hungry, that one, and such morsels as you would be a choice titbit for his table, my friend.”
“A shark!” I answered incredulously. “But it couldn’t have been a shark, de Grandin, they have to turn on their backs to bite, and that thing came straight at me.”
“Ah, bah!” he shot back disgustedly. “What old wives’ tale is that you quote? Le requin is no more compelled to take his food upside down than you are. I tell you, he would have swallowed your leg up to the elbow if I had not cut his sinful gizzard in two!”
“Good Lord!” I began splashing furiously. “Then we’re apt to be devoured any moment!”
“
Possibly,” he returned calmly, “but not probably. If land is not too far away that fellow’s brethren will be too busy eating him to pay attention to such small fry as us. Grace à Dieu, I think I feel the good land beneath our feet even now.”
It was true. We were standing armpit-deep on a sloping, sandy beach with the long, gentle swell of the ocean kindly pushing us toward the shore. A dozen steps and we were safely beyond the tide-line, lying face down upon the warm sands and gulping down great mouthfuls of the heavy, sea-scented air. What de Grandin did there in the dark I do not know, but for my part I offered up such unspoken prayers of devout thanksgiving as I had never breathed before.
My devotions were cut short by a sputtering mixture of French profanity.
“What’s up?” I demanded, then fell silent as de Grandin’s hand closed on my wrist like a tightened tourniquet.
“Hark, my friend,” he commanded. “Look across the water to the ship we left and say whether or no I was wise when I brought us away.”
Out across the quiet lagoon inside the reef the form of the stranded Mevrouw loomed a half shade darker than the night, her lights, still burning, casting a fitful glow upon the crashing water at the reef and the quiet water beyond. Two, three, four, half a dozen shades gathered alongside her; dark figures, like ants swarming over the carcass of a dead rat, appeared against her lights a moment, and the stabbing flame of a pistol was followed a moment later by the reports of the shots wafted to us across the lagoon. Shouts, cries of terror, screams of women in abject fright followed one another in quick succession for a time, then silence, more ominous than any noise, settled over the water.
Half an hour, perhaps, de Grandin and I stood tense-muscled on the beach, staring toward the ship, waiting expectantly for some sign of renewed life. One by one her porthole lights blinked out; at last she lay in utter darkness.
The Horror on the Links Page 8