“Wh—why,” I asked stupidly, “what’s it all mean, de Grandin?”
“Je ne sais quoi,” he answered with a shrug, “but one thing I know: I like not this house, Friend Trowbridge. I …”
Above the hissing of the rain against the windows and the howl of the sea-wind about the gables, there suddenly rose a scream, wire-edged with inarticulate terror, freighted with utter, transcendental anguish of body and soul.
“Cordieu!” He threw up his head like a hound hearing the call of the pack from far away. “Did you hear it, too, Friend Trowbridge?”
“Of course,” I answered, every nerve in my body trembling in horripilation with the echo of the hopeless wail.
“Pardieu,” he repeated, “I like this house less than ever, now! Come, let us move this dresser before our door. It is safer that we sleep behind barricades this night, I think.”
We blocked the door, and I was soon sound asleep.
“TROWBRIDGE, TROWBRIDGE, MY FRIEND”—DE Grandin drove a sharp elbow into my ribs—“wake up, I beseech you. Name of a green goat, you lie like one dead, save for your so abominable snoring!”
“Eh?” I answered sleepily, thrusting myself deeper beneath the voluminous bedclothes. Despite the unusual occurrences of the night I was tired to the point of exhaustion, and fairly drunk with sleep.
“Up; arise, my friend,” he ordered, shaking me excitedly. “The coast is clear, I think, and it is high time we did some exploring.”
“Rats!” I scoffed, disinclined to leave my comfortable couch. “What’s the use of wandering about a strange house to gratify a few unfounded suspicions? The girl might have been given a dose of chloral hydrate, but the chances are her father thought he was helping her when he gave it. As for these trick devices for opening and locking doors, the old man apparently lives here alone and has installed these mechanical aids to lessen his work. He has to hobble around with a cane, you know.”
“Ah!” my companion assented sarcastically. “And that scream we heard, did he install that as an aid to his infirmities, also?”
“Perhaps the girl woke up with a nightmare,” I hazarded, but he made an impatient gesture.
“Perhaps the moon is composed of green cheese, also,” he replied. “Up, up and dress; my friend. This house should be investigated while yet there is time. Attend me: But five minutes ago, through this very window, I did observe Monsieur our host, attired in a raincoat, depart from his own front door, and without his cane. Parbleu, he did skip, as agilely as any boy, I assure you. Even now he is almost at the spot where we abandoned your automobile. What he intends doing there I know not. What I intend doing I know full well. Do you accompany me or not?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” I agreed, crawling from the bed and slipping into my clothes. “How are you going to get past that locked door?”
He flashed me one of his sudden smiles, shooting the points of his little blond mustache upward like the horns of an inverted crescent. “Observe,” he ordered, displaying a short length of thin wire. “In the days when a woman’s hair was still her crowning glory, what mighty deeds a lady could encompass with a hairpin! Pardieu, there was one little grisette in Paris who showed me some tricks in the days before the war! Regard me, if you please.”
Deftly he thrust the pliable loop of wire into the key’s hole, twisting it tentatively back and forth, at length pulling it out and regarding it carefully. “Très bien,” he muttered as he reached into an inside pocket, bringing out a heavier bit of wire.
“See,” he displayed the finer wire, “with this I take an impression of that lock’s tumblers, now”—quickly he bent the heavier wire to conform to the waved outline of the lighter loop—“voilà, I have a key!”
And he had. The lock gave readily to the pressure of his improvised key, and we stood in the long, dark hall, staring about us half curiously, half fearfully.
“This way, if you please,” de Grandin ordered; “first we will look in upon la jeunesse, to see how it goes with her.”
We walked on tiptoe down the corridor, entered the chamber where the girl lay, and approached the bed.
SHE WAS LYING WITH her hands folded upon her breast in the manner of those composed for their final rest, her wide, periwinkle-blue eyes staring sightlessly before her, the short, tightly curled ringlets of her blonde, bobbed hair surrounding her drawn, pallid face like a golden nimbus encircling the ivory features of a saint in some carved ikon.
My companion approached the bed softly, placing one hand on the girl’s wrist with professional precision. “Temperature low, pulse weak,” he murmured, checking off her symptoms. “Complexion pale to the point of lividity—ha, now for the eyes; sleeping, her pupils should have been contracted, while they should now be dilate—Dieu de Dieu! Trowbridge, my friend, come here.
“Look,” he commanded, pointing to the apathetic girl’s face. “Those eyes—grand Dieu, those eyes! It is sacrilege, nothing less.”
I looked into the girl’s face, then started back with a half-suppressed cry of horror. Asleep, as she had been when we first saw her, the child had been pretty to the point of loveliness. Her features were small and regular, clean-cut as those of a face in a cameo, the tendrils of her light-yellow hair had lent her a dainty, ethereal charm comparable to that of a Dresden china shepherdess. It had needed but the raising of her delicate, long-lashed eyelids to give her face the animation of some laughing sprite playing truant from fairyland.
Her lids were raised now, but the eyes they unveiled were no clear, joyous windows of a tranquil soul. Rather, they were the peepholes of a spirit in torment. The irises were a lovely shade of blue, it is true, but the optics themselves were things of horror. Rolling grotesquely to right and left, they peered futilely in opposite directions, lending to her sweet, pale face the half-ludicrous, wholly hideous expression of a bloating frog.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, turning from the deformed girl with a feeling of disgust akin to nausea; “What a terrible affliction!”
De Grandin made no reply, but bent over the girl’s still form, gazing intently at her malformed eyes. “It is not natural,” he announced. “The muscles have been tampered with, and tampered with by someone who is a master hand at surgery. Will you get me your syringe and some strychnine, Friend Trowbridge? This poor one is still unconscious.”
I HASTENED TO OUR BEDROOM and returned with the hypodermic and stimulant, then stood beside him, watching eagerly, as he administered a strong injection.
The girl’s narrow chest fluttered as the powerful drug took effect, and the pale lids dropped for a second over her repulsive eyes. Then, with a sob which was half moan, she attempted to raise herself on her elbow, fell back again, and, with apparent effort, gasped, “The mirror, let me have the mirror! Oh, tell me it isn’t true; tell me it was a trick of some sort. Oh, the horrible thing I saw in the glass couldn’t have been I. Was it?”
“Tiens, ma petite,” de Grandin replied, “but you speak in riddles. What is it you would know?”
“He—he”—the girl faltered weakly, forcing her trembling lips to frame the words—“that horrible old man showed me a mirror a little while ago and said the face in it was mine. Oh, it was horrible, horrible!”
“Eh? What is this?” de Grandin demanded on a rising note. “‘He’? ‘Horrible old man’? Are you not his daughter? Is he not your father?”
“No,” the girl gasped, so low her denial was scarcely audible. “I was driving home from Mackettsdale last—oh, I forget when it was, but it was at night—and my tires punctured. I—I think there must have been glass on the road, for the shoes were cut to ribbons. I saw the light in this house and came to ask for help. An old man—oh, I thought he was so nice and kind!—let me in and said he was all alone here and about to eat dinner, and asked me to join him. I ate some—some—oh, I don’t remember what it was—and the next thing I knew he was standing by my bed, holding a mirror up to me and telling me it was my face I saw in the glass. Oh, please, please, tell
me it was some terrible trick he played on me. I’m not truly hideous, am I?”
“Morbleu!” de Grandin muttered softly, tugging at the ends of his mustache. “What is all this?”
To the girl he said: “But of course not. You are like a flower, Mademoiselle. A little flower that dances in the wind. You …”
“And my eyes, they aren’t—they aren’t”—she interrupted with piteous eagerness—“please tell me they aren’t …”
“Mais non, ma chère,” he assured her. “Your eyes are like the pervenche that mirrors the sky in springtime. They are …”
“Let—let me see the mirror, please,” she interrupted in an anxious whisper. “I’d like to see for myself, if you—oh, I feel all weak inside …” She lapsed back against the pillow, her lids mercifully veiling the hideously distorted eyes and restoring her face to tranquil beauty.
“Cordieu!” de Grandin breathed. “The chloral re-asserted itself none too soon for Jules de Grandin’s comfort, Friend Trowbridge. Sooner would I have gone to the rack than have shown that pitiful child her face in a mirror.”
“But what’s it all mean?” I asked. “She says she came here, and …”
“And the rest remains for us to find out, I think,” he replied evenly. “Come, we lose time, and to lose time is to be caught, my friend.”
DE GRANDIN LED THE way down the hall, peering eagerly into each door we passed in search of the owner’s chamber, but before his quest was satisfied he stopped abruptly at the head of the stairs. “Observe, Friend Trowbridge,” he ordered, pointing a carefully manicured forefinger to a pair of buttons, one white, one black, set in the wall. “Unless I am more mistaken than I think I am, we have here the key to the situation—or at least to the front door.”
He pushed vigorously at the white button, then ran to the curve of the stairs to note the result.
Sure enough, the heavy door swung open on its hinges of cast bronze, letting gusts of rain drive into the lower hall.
“Pardieu,” he ejaculated, “we have here the open sesame; let us see if we possess the closing secret as well! Press the black button, Trowbridge, my friend, while I watch.”
I did his bidding, and a delighted exclamation told me the door had closed.
“Now what?” I asked, joining him on the stairway.
“U’m,” he pulled first one, then the other end of his diminutive mustache meditatively; “the house possesses its attractions, Friend Trowbridge, but I believe it would be well if we went out to observe what our friend, le vieillard horrible, does. I like not to have one who shows young girls their disfigured faces in mirrors near our conveyance.”
Slipping into our raincoats we opened the door, taking care to place a wad of paper on the sill to prevent its closing tightly enough to latch, and scurried out into the storm.
As we left the shelter of the porch a shaft of indistinct light shone through the rain, as my car was swung from the highway and headed toward a depression to the left of the house.
“Parbleu, he is a thief, this one!” de Grandin exclaimed excitedly. “Holà, Monsieur!” He ran forward, swinging his arms like a pair of semaphores. “What sort of business is it you make with our moteur?”
The wailing of the storm tore the words from his lips and hurled them away, but the little Frenchman was not to be thwarted. “Pardieu,” he gasped, bending his head against the wind-driven rain, “I will stop the scoundrel if—nom d’un coq, he has done it!”
Even as he spoke the old man flung open the car’s forward door and leaped, allowing the machine to go crashing down a low, steep embankment into a lake of slimy swamp-mud.
For a moment the vandal stood contemplating his work, then burst into a peal of wild laughter more malignant than any profanity.
“Parbleu, robber, Apache! You shall laugh from the other side of your mouth!” de Grandin promised, as he made for the old man.
But the other seemed oblivious of our presence. Still chuckling at his work, he turned toward the house, stopped short as a sudden heavy gust of wind shook the trees along the roadway, then started forward with a yell of terror as a great branch, torn bodily from a towering oak tree came crashing toward the earth.
He might as well have attempted to dodge a meteorite. Like an arrow from the bow of divine justice, the great timber hurtled down, pinning his frail body to the ground like a worm beneath a laborer’s brogan.
“Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin announced matter-of-factly, “observe the evil effects of stealing motor cars.”
WE LIFTED THE HEAVY bough from the prostrate man and turned him over on his back. De Grandin on one side, I on the other, we made a hasty examination, arriving at the same finding simultaneously. His spinal column was snapped like a pipestem.
“You have some last statement to make, Monsieur?” de Grandin asked curtly. “If so, you had best be about it, your time is short.”
“Y—yes,” the stricken man replied weakly. “I—I meant to kill you, for you might have hit upon my secret. As it is, you may publish it to the world, that all may know what it meant to offend a Marston. In my room you will find the documents. My—my pets—are—in—the—cellar. She—was—to—have—been—one—of—them.”
The pauses between his words became longer and longer, his voice grew weaker with each labored syllable. As he whispered the last sentence painfully there was a gurgling sound, and a tiny stream of blood welled up at the corner of his mouth. His narrow chest rose and fell once with a convulsive movement, then his jaw dropped limply. He was dead.
“Oh ho,” de Grandin remarked, “it is a hemorrhage which finished him. A broken rib piercing his lung. U’m? I should have guessed it. Come, my friend, let us carry him to the house, then see what it was he meant by that talk of documents and pets. A pest upon the fellow for dying with his riddle half explained! Did he not know that Jules de Grandin can not resist the challenge of a riddle? Parbleu, we will solve this mystery, Monsieur le Mort, if we have to hold an autopsy to do so!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, hush, de Grandin,” I besought, shocked at his heartlessness. “The man is dead.”
“Ah bah!” he returned scornfully. “Dead or not, did he not steal your motor car?”
WE LAID OUR GRUESOME burden on the hall couch and mounted the stairs to the second floor. With de Grandin in the lead we found the dead man’s room and began a systematic search for the papers he had mentioned, almost with his last breath. After some time my companion unearthed a thick, leather-bound portfolio from the lower drawer of a beautiful old mahogany highboy, and spread its wide leaves open on the white-counterpaned bed.
“Ah,” he drew forth several papers and held them to the light, “we begin to make the progress, Friend Trowbridge. What is this?”
He held out a newspaper clipping cracked from long folding and yellowed with age. It read:
ACTRESS JILTS SURGEON’S CRIPPLED
SON ON EVE OF WEDDING
Declaring she could not stand the sight of his deformity, and that she had engaged herself to him only in a moment of thoughtless pity, Dora Lee, well-known variety actress, last night repudiated her promise to marry John Biersfield Marston, Jr., hopelessly crippled son of Dr. John Biersfield Marston, the well-known surgeon and expert osteologist. Neither the abandoned bridegroom nor his father could be seen by reporters from the Planet last night.
“Very good,” de Grandin nodded, “we need go no farther with that account. A young woman, it would seem, once broke her promise to marry a cripple, and, judging from this paper’s date, that was in 1896. Here is another, what do you make of it?”
The clipping he handed me read as follows:
SURGEON’S SON A SUICIDE
Still sitting in the wheel-chair from which he has not moved during his waking hours since he was hopelessly crippled while playing polo in England ten years ago, John Biersfield Marston, son of the famous surgeon of the same name, was found in his bedroom this morning by his valet. A rubber hose was connected with a ga
s jet, the other end being held in the young man’s mouth.
Young Marston was jilted by Dora Lee, well-known vaudeville actress, on the day before the date set for their wedding, one month ago. He is reported to have been extremely low-spirited since his desertion by his fiancée.
Dr. Marston, the bereaved father, when seen by reporters from the Planet this morning, declared the actress was responsible for his son’s death and announced his intention of holding her accountable. When asked if legal proceedings were contemplated, he declined further information.
“So?” de Grandin nodded shortly. “Now this one, if you please.” The third clipping was brief to the point of curtness:
WELL-KNOWN SURGEON RETIRES
Dr. John Biersfield Marston, widely known throughout this section of the country as an expert in operations concerning the bones, has announced his intention of retiring from practice. His house has been sold, and he will move from the city.
“The record is clear so far,” de Grandin asserted, studying the first clipping with raised eyebrows, “but—morbleu, my friend, look, look at this picture. This Dora Lee, of whom does she remind you? Eh?”
I took the clipping again and looked intently at the illustration of the article announcing young Marston’s broken engagement. The woman in the picture was young and inclined to be overdressed in the voluminous, fluffy mode of the days before the Spanish-American War.
“U’m, no one whom I know …” I began, but halted abruptly as a sudden likeness struck me. Despite the towering pompadour arrangement of her blonde hair and the unbecoming straw sailor hat above the coiffure, the woman in the picture bore a certain resemblance to the disfigured girl we had seen a half-hour before.
The Frenchman saw recognition dawn in my face, and nodded agreement. “But of course,” he said. “Now, the question is, is this young girl whose eyes are so out of alignment a relative of this Dora Lee, or is the resemblance a coincidence, and if so, what lies behind it? Hein?”
The Horror on the Links Page 17