I was lying on my back, staring straight upward to the high ceiling of our chamber and wondering if the vision of the night before had been some trick of our imaginations, when de Grandin’s sharp, strident whisper cut through the darkness and brought me suddenly wide-awake. “Trowbridge,” he murmured, “I hear a sound. Someone is attempting entrance!”
I lay breathless a moment, straining my ears for any corroboration of his statement, but only the soughing of the wind through the evergreens outside and the occasional rasp of a bough against the house rewarded my vigil. “Rats!” I scoffed. “Who’d try to break into a house with such a reputation as this one’s? Why, Mr. Selfridge told us even the tramps avoided the place as if it were a plague-spot.”
“Nevertheless,” he insisted as he drew on his boots and pulled a topcoat over his pyjamas, “I believe we have uninvited guests, and I shall endeavor to mend their manners, if such they be.”
There was nothing to do but follow him. Downstairs, tiptoe, our flashlights held ready and our pistols prepared for emergency, we stole through the great, dark hall, undid the chain-fastener of the heavy front door, and walked softly around the angle of the house.
At de Grandin’s direction, we kept to the shadow of the tall, black-branched pine trees which grew near the house, watching the moonlit walls of the building for any evidence of a housebreaker.
“It is there the young Aglinberry sleeps,” de Grandin observed in a low voice as he indicated a partly opened casement on the second floor, its small panes shining like nacre in the rays of the full moon. “I observe he has not obeyed our injunctions to close his sash in the night-time. Morbleu, that which we did see last night might have been harmless, my friend, but, again, it might have been—ah, my friend, look; look!”
Stealthily, silently as a shadow, a stooped form stole around the corner of the wall, paused huddled in a spot of darkness where the moonbeams failed to reach, then slowly straightened up, crept into the light, and began mounting the rough rubblestone side of the house, for all the world like some great, uncanny lizard from the preadamite days. Clinging to the protuberances of the rocks with clawlike hands, feeling for toeholds in the interstices where cement had weathered away, the thing slowly ascended, nearer and yet nearer Aglinberry’s unlatched window.
“Dieu de Dieu,” de Grandin muttered, “if it be a phantom, our friend Aglinberry is in misfortune, for ’twas he himself who left his window unfastened. If it be not a ghost—parbleu, it had better have said its paternosters, for when he puts his head in that window, I fire!” I saw the glint of moonlight, on the blue steel of his pistol barrel as he trained it on the climbing thing.
Inch by inch the creature—man or devil—crept up the wall, reached its talon hands across the stone sill, began drawing itself through the casement. I held my breath, expecting the roar of de Grandin’s pistol each second, but a sudden gasp of astonishment beside me drew my attention from the creeping thing to my companion.
“Look, Friend Trowbridge, regardez, s’il vous plait!” he bade me in a tremulous whisper, nodding speechlessly toward the window into which the marauder was disappearing like a great, black serpent into its lair. I turned my gaze toward the window again and blinked my eyes in unbelief.
An odd luminescence, as if the moon’s rays had been focused by a lens, appeared behind the window opening. It was like a mirror of dull silver, or a light faintly reflected from a distance. Tiny bits of impalpable dust, like filings from a silversmith’s rasp, seemed floating in the air, whirling, dancing lightly in the converging moon rays, circling about each other like dust-motes seen in a sun-shaft through a darkened room, driving together, taking form. Literally out of moonlight, a visible, discernible something was being made. Spots of shadow appeared against the phosphorescent gleam, alternate high-lights and shadows became apparent, limning the outlines of a human face, a slender, oval face with smoothly-parted hair sleekly drawn across a high, broad forehead; a face of proud-mouthed, narrow-nosed beauty such as the highest-caste women of the Rajputs have.
A moment it seemed suspended there, more like the penumbra of a shadow than an actual entity, then seemed to surge forward, to lose its sharpness of outline, and blend, mysteriously, with the darkness of the night-prowler’s form, as though a splash of mercury were suddenly thrown upon a slab of carbon.
A moment the illusion of light-on-darkness held, then a scream of wire-edged terror, mingled with mortal pain, shuddered through the quiet night as a lightning flash rips across a thunder cloud. The climber loosed both hands from the window sill, clawed frantically at the empty air above him, then hurtled like a plummet to the earth, almost at our feet.
Our flashlights shot their beams simultaneously on the fallen man’s face as we reached his side, revealing the features of Nikolai Brondovitch, the gipsy Aglinberry had ordered off the place that morning.
But it was a different face from that the Romany had displayed when threatening Aglinberry or attempting to conciliate de Grandin. The eyes were starting from their sockets, the mouth hung open with an imbecile, hang-jawed flaccidity. And on the gipsy’s lean, corded throat was a knotted swelling, as though a powerful clamp had seized and crushed the flesh together, shutting off breath and blood in a single mighty grasp. Both de Grandin and I recognized the thing before us for what it was—trust a physician to recognize it! Death is unique, and nothing in the world counterfeits it. The scoundrel had died before his body touched the ground.
“Nom d’un nom!” de Grandin murmured wonderingly, “And did you also see it, Friend Trowbridge?”
“I saw something,” I answered, shuddering at the recollection.
“And what did you see?” his words came quickly, like an eager lawyer cross-examining a reluctant witness.
“It—it looked like a woman’s face,” I faltered, “but—”
“Nom de Dieu, yes,” he agreed, almost hysterically, “a woman’s face—a face with no body beneath it! Parbleu, my friend, I think this adventure is worthy of our steel. Come, let us see the young Aglinberry.”
We hurried into the house and up the stairs, hammering on our host’s door, calling his name in frenzied shouts.
“Eh, what’s up?” his cheery voice responded, and next moment he unfastened the door and looked at us, a sleepy grin mantling his youthful face. “What’s the idea of you chaps breaking a fellow’s door down at this time o’ night?” he wanted to know. “Having bad dreams?”
“Mon—Monsieur!” de Grandin stammered, his customary aplomb deserting him. “Do you mean—have you been sleeping?”
“Sleeping?” the other echoed. “What do you think I went to bed for? What’s the matter, have you caught the family ghost?” He grinned at us again.
“And you have heard nothing, seen nothing—you do not know an entrance to your room was almost forced?” de Grandin asked incredulously.
“An entrance to my room?” the other frowned in annoyance, looking quizzically from one of us to the other. “Say, you gentlemen had better go back to bed. I don’t know whether I’m lacking in a sense of humor or what my trouble is, but I don’t quite get the joke of waking a man up in the middle of the night to tell him that sort of cock-and-bull story.”
“Nom d’un chou-fleur!” De Grandin looked at me and shook his head wonderingly. “He has slept through it all, Friend Trowbridge!”
Aglinberry bristled with anger. “What’re you fellows trying to do, string me?” he demanded hotly.
“Your hat, your coat, your boots, Monsieur!” de Grandin exclaimed in reply. “Come outside with us; come and see the vile wretch who would have slaughtered you like a pig in the shambles. Come and behold, and we shall tell you how he died.”
BY MUTUAL CONSENT WE decided to withhold certain details of the gipsy’s death from the coroner’s jury next day, and a verdict to the effect that the miscreant had come to his death while attempting to “break and enter the dwelling house of one John Aglinberry in the night-time, forcibly, feloniously aud against the f
orm of the statute in such case made and provided” was duly returned.
The gipsy was buried in the Potter’s Field and we returned to our vigil in the haunted house.
Aglinberry was almost offensively incredulous concerning the manner of the gipsy’s death. “Nonsense!” he exclaimed when we insisted we had seen a mysterious, faintly luminous face at the window before the would-be housebreaker hurtled to his death. “You fellows are so fed up on ghost-lore that you’ve let this place’s reputation make you see things—things which weren’t there.”
“Monsieur,” de Grandin assured him with injured dignity, “it is that you speak out of the conceit of boundless ignorance. When you have seen one-half—pardieu, one-quarter or one-eighth—the things I have seen, you will learn not to sneer at whatever you fail to understand. As that so magnificent Monsieur Shakespeare did say, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“Probably,” our host interrupted, smothering a yawn, “but I’m content to let ’em stay there. Meantime, I’m going to bed. Goodnight.” And up the stairs he marched, leaving us to share the warmth of the crackling pitch-pine fire.
De Grandin shook his head pityingly after the retreating youngster. “He is the perfect type of that Monsieur Babbitt,” he confided. “Worldly, materialistic, entirely devoid of imagination. Parbleu, we have them in France, too! Did they not make mock of Pasteur, le grand, when he announced his discoveries to a skeptical world? Most assuredly. Like the poor, the materialist we have always with us.—Ha! what is that! Do you hear it, Trowbridge, my friend?”
Faintly, so faintly it was like the half-heard echo of an echo, the fine, musical jangle of tiny bells wafted to us through the still, cold air of the dark old house.
“In there, ’twas in the library it sounded!” the Frenchman insisted in an excited whisper as he leaped to his feet and strode across the hall. “Your light, Friend Trowbridge; quick, your light!”
I threw the beam of my electric torch about the high-walled, sombre old reading room, but nothing more ghostly than the tall walnut book cases, empty of books and laden only with dust these many years, met our eyes. Still the soft, alluring chime sounded somewhere in the shadows, vague and indefinite as the cobwebbed darkness about us, but insistent as a trumpet call heard across uncounted miles of night.
“Morbleu, but this is strange!” de Grandin asserted, circling the room with quick, nervous steps. “Trowbridge, Trowbridge, my friend, as we live, those bells are calling us, calling—ah, cordieu, they are here!”
He had halted before a carved panel under one of the old bookcases and was on his hands and knees, examining each figure of the conventionalized flowers and fruits which adorned its surface. With quick, questing fingers he felt the carvings, like a cracksman feeling out the combination of a safe. “Nom d’un fromage, I have it!” he called in lilting triumph as he bore suddenly down upon a bunch of carved grapes and the panel swung suddenly inward upon invisible hinges. “Trowbridge, mon ami, regardez vous!”
Peering into the shallow opening left by the heavy, carved plank, we beheld a package carefully wrapped in linen, dust-covered and yellowed with age.
“Candles, if you please, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin commanded as he bore our find in triumph to the hall. “We shall see what secret of the years these bells have led us to.” He sank into his armchair and began unwinding the linen bands.
“Ah? And what is this?” He unreeled the last of the bandages and displayed a small roll of red morocco leather, a compact little case such as an elder generation of men carried with them for supplying needles, buttons, thread and other aids to the womanless traveler. Inside the wallet was a length of tough, age-tanned parchment, and attached to it by a loop of silk was a single tiny hawk-bell of gold, scarcely larger than a bead, but capable of giving off a clear, penetrating tinkle as the parchment shook in de Grandin’s impatient hands.
I looked over his shoulder in fascinated interest, but drew back with disappointment as I saw the vellum was covered with closely-written scrawls somewhat resembling shorthand.
“U’m!” de Grandin regarded the writing a moment, then tapped his even, white teeth with a meditative forefinger. “This will require much study, Friend Trowbridge.” he murmured. “Many languages have I studied, and my brain is like a room where many people speak together—out of the babel I can distinguish but few words unless I bear my attention on some one talk. This”—he tapped the crinkling parchment—“is Hindustani, if I mistake not; but to translate it will require more time than these candles will burn. Nevertheless, we shall try.”
He hurried to our bedroom, returning in a moment with a pad of paper and a fresh supply of candles. “I shall work here for a time,” he announced, reseating himself before the fire. “It will be long before I am prepared for bed, and it may be well for you to seek repose. I shall make but poor company these next few hours.”
I accepted the dismissal with an answering grin and, taking my candle, mounted the stairs to bed.
“EH BIEN, MY FRIEND, you do sleep like the dead—the righteous dead who have no fear of purgatory!” de Grandin’s voice roused me the following morning.
The bright spring sunshine was beating into our chamber through the open casement, and a puff of keen breeze fluttered the trailing bed-clothes, but my friend’s face rivaled the brilliance of the breaking day. “Triomphe!” he exclaimed, brandishing a sheaf of papers above his blond head. “It is finished, it is complete, it is done altogether entirely. Attend me, my friend, listen with care, for you are not like to hear such a tale soon again:
Lord of my life and master of my heart: This day is the fulfilment of the fate overhanging the wretched woman who has unworthily been honored by your regard, for this night I was bidden by my father to choose whether I would be married by the priests to the god Khandoka, and become a temple bayadere—and my lord well knows what the life of such an one is—or go to the shrine of Omkar, God of Destruction, to become kurban. I have chosen to make the leap, my lord, for there is no other way for Amari.
We have sinned, thou against thy people and I against mine, in that we did dare defy varna and love, when such a love is forbidden between the races. Varna forbids it, the commands of thy people and mine forbid it, and yet we loved. Now our brief dream of kailas is broken as the mists of morning break and fly before the scarlet lances of the sun, and thou returnest to thy people; Amari goes to her fate.
By the leap I assure my sinful spirit of a resting place in kailas, for to the kurban all sins are forgiven, even unto that of taking the life of a Brahmin or giving herself in love to one of another race; but she who retreats from the leap commits a sin with each step so great that a thousand reincarnations can not atone for it.
In this life the walls of varna stand between us, but, perchance, there may come a life when Amari inhabits the body of a woman of the sahib’s race, or my lord and master may be clothed in the flesh of one of Amari’s people. These things it is not given Amari to know, but this she knows full well: Throughout the seven cycles of time which shall endure through all the worlds and through all eternity, when worlds and the gods themselves shall have shuddered into dust, Amari’s heart is ever and always inclined to the sahib, and the walls of death or the force of life shall not keep her from him. Farewell, master of Amari’s breath, perchance we shall meet again upon some other star, and our waking spirits may remember the dream of this unhappy life. But ever, and always, Amari loves thee, sahib John.”
“Yes?” I asked as he finished reading. “And then?”
“Parbleu, my friend, there was no then!” he answered. “Listen, you do not know India. I do. In that so depraved country they do consider that the woman who goes to the bloody shrine of the god Omkar and hurls herself down from a cliff upon his bloody altar attains to sainthood. It was that which this poor one meant when she did speak of ‘the leap’ in her farewell note to her white lover. Kurban is the word in their so detestable lang
uage for human sacrifice, and when she speaks of attaining kailas she refers to their heathenish word for heaven. When she says varna stood between them she did mean caste. Cordieu—you English, you Americans! Always you drive yourselves crazy with thoughts of what should and what should not be done, Nom d’un coq! Why did not this Monsieur Aglinberry the elder take this Hindoo woman to wife, if he loved her, and thumb his nose at her brown-skinned relatives and his fair-eyed English kin as well? ’Tis what a Frenchman would have done in like case. But no, he must needs allow the woman he loved to hurl herself over a cliff for the edification of a crowd of monkey-faced heathen who are undoubtedly stewing in hell at this moment, while he ran overseas to America and built him a mansion in the wilderness. A mansion, pardieu! A mansion without the light of love in its rooms or the footfalls of little children on its floors. Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu, a mansion of melancholy memories, it is! À bas such a people! They deserve la prohibition, nothing better!” He walked back and forth across the room in a fury of disgust, snapping his fingers and scowling ferociously.
“All right,” I agreed, laughing in spite of myself, “we’ll grant all you say; but where does that get us as regards Redgables? If the ghost of this Hindoo girl haunts this house, how are we going to lay it?”
“How should I know?” he returned peevishly. “If the ancient fires of this dead woman’s love burn on the cold hearth of this sacré house, who am I to put them out? Oh, it is too pitiful, too pitiful; that such a love as theirs should have been sacrificed on the altar of varna—caste!”
“Hullo, hullo, up there!” came a cheery hail from the hall below. “You chaps up yet? Breakfast is ready, and we’ve got callers. Come down.”
“Breakfast!” de Grandin snorted disgustedly. “He talks of breakfast, in a house where the ghost of murdered love dwells! But”—he turned an impish grin on me—“I hope he has compounded some of those so delicious flap-the-jacks for us, even so.”
The Horror on the Links Page 20