As the words sounded through the room it seemed to me that a great cloud of shadow, like a billow of black vapor, rose from the dark corners of the apartment, eddied toward the circle of lamps, swaying their flames lambently, then suddenly gave back, evaporated and disappeared with a noise like steam escaping from a boiling kettle.
“Behold, Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin ordered, pointing to the still figure which lay over the sign of Mercury at his feet.
I bent forward, stifling my repugnance, then sighed with mingled relief and surprise. Calm as a sleeping child, Edith Evander, freed from all the hideous stigmata of the wolf-people, lay before us, her slender hands, still bound in the wooden ropes, crossed on her breast, her sweet, delicate features as though they had never been disfigured by the curse of the blood-flower.
Loosing the bonds from her wrists and feet the Frenchman picked the sleeping woman up in his arms and bore her to her bedroom above stairs.
“Do you summon her husband and the nurse, my friend,” he called from the turn in the stairway. “She will have need of both anon.”
“WH—WHY, SHE’S HERSELF AGAIN!” Evander exclaimed joyfully as he leaned solicitously above his wife’s bed.
“But of course!” de Grandin agreed. “The spell of evil was strong upon her, Monsieur, but the charm of good was mightier. She is released from her bondage for all time.”
“I’ll have your fee ready tomorrow,” Evander promised diffidently. “I could not arrange the mortgages today—it was rather short notice, you know.”
Laughter twinkled in de Grandin’s little blue eyes like the reflection of moonlight on flowing water. “My friend,” he replied, “I did make the good joke on you last night. Parbleu, to hear you agree to anything, and to announce that you did trust to my methods, as well, was payment enough for me. I want not your money. If you would repay Jules de Grandin for his services, continue to love and cherish your wife as you did last night when you feared you were about to lose her. Me, morbleu! but I shall make the eyes of my confrères pop with jealousy when I tell them what I have accomplished this night. Sang d’un poisson, I am one very clever man, Monsieur!”
“IT’S ALL A MYSTERY to me, de Grandin,” I confessed as we drove home, “but I’m hanged if I can understand how it was that the man was transformed into a monster almost as soon as he wore those flowers, and the woman resisted the influence of the things for a week or more.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “that is strange. Myself, I think it was because werewolfism is an outward and visible sign of the power of evil, and the man was already steeped in sin, while the woman was pure in heart. She had what we might call a higher immunity from the virus of the blood-flower.”
“And wasn’t there some old legend to the effect that a werewolf could only be killed with a silver bullet?”
“Ah bah,” he replied with a laugh. “What did thost old legend-mongers know of the power of modern fire arms? Parbleu, had the good St. George possessed a military rifle of today, he might have slain the dragon without approaching nearer than a mile! When I did shoot that wolfman, my friend, I had something more powerful than superstition in my hand. Morbleu, but I did shoot a hole in him large enough for him to have walked through!”
“That reminds me,” I added, “how are we going to explain his body to the police?”
“Explain?” he echoed with a chuckle. “Nom d’un bouc, we shall not explain: I, myself, did dispose of him this very afternoon. He lies buried beneath the roots of an ash tree, with a stake of ash through his heart to hold him to the earth. His sinful body will rise again no more to plague us, I do assure you. He was known to have a habit of disappearing. Very good. This time there will be no reappearance. We are through, finished, done with him for good.”
We drove another mile or so in silence, then my companion nudged me sharply in the ribs. “This curing of werewolf ladies, my friend,” he confided, “it is dry work. Are you sure there is a full bottle of brandy in the cellar?”
The Veiled Prophetess
“BUT, MADAME, WHAT YOU say is incredible,” Jules de Grandin was saying to a fashionably dressed young woman as I returned to the consulting room from my morning round of calls.
“It may be incredible,” the visitor admitted, “but it’s so, just the same. I tell you she was there.”
“Ah, Trowbridge, mon cher,” de Grandin leaped up as he beheld me in the doorway, “this is Madame Penneman. She has a remarkable story to tell.
“Madame,” he bowed ceremoniously to our caller, “will you have the goodness to relate your case to Dr. Trowbridge? He will be interested.”
The young lady crossed her slender, gray-silk clad legs, adjusted her abbreviated black-satin dress in a manner to cover at least a portion of her patellæ, and regarded me with the fixed, dreamy stare of a pupil reciting a lesson learned by rote.
“My name is Naomi Penneman,” she began; “my husband is Benjamin Penneman, of the chocolate importing firm of Penneman & Brixton. We have been married six months, and came to live in Harrisonville when we returned from our honeymoon trip, three months ago. We have the Barton place in Tunlaw Street.”
“Yes?” I murmured.
“I heard of Dr. de Grandin through Mrs. Norman—she said he did a wonderful piece of work in rescuing her daughter Esther from some horrible old man—so I brought my case to you. I wouldn’t dare go to the police with it.”
“U’m?” I murmured. “Just what—”
“It’s about my husband,” she went on, without giving me time to form my query. “There’s a woman—or something—trying to take him away from me!”
“Well—er—my, dear young lady, don’t you think you would better have consulted a lawyer?” I objected. “Physicians sometimes undertake to patch up leaky hearts, but they are scarcely in the business of repairing outraged affections, you know.”
“Mais non, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin denied with a delighted chuckle, “you do misapprehend Madame’s statement. Me, I think perhaps she speaks advisedly when she does say ‘a woman or something’ designs to alienate her husband.
“Proceed, Madame, if you please.”
“I graduated from Barnard in ‘24,” Mrs. Penneman took up her statement, “and married Ben last year. We went on a ninety-day cruise for our wedding tour, and moved here as soon as we came back.
“Our class had a reunion at the Allenton Thursday of Christmas week, and some of the girls were crazy about Madame Naîra, the Veiled Prophetess, a fortune-teller up in East Eighty-second Street. Thy talked about her so much the rest of us decided to pay her a call.
“I was afraid to go by myself, so I teased Ben, my husband, into going with me, and—and he’s been acting queer ever since.”
“Queer?” I echoed. “How?”
“Well”—she made a vague sort of gesture with one of her small, well-manicured hands and flushed slightly—“you know, Doctor, when two people have been married only six months the star-dust oughtn’t to be rubbed off the wings of romance, ought it? Yet Ben’s been cooler and cooler to me, commencing almost immediately after we went to see that horrid woman.”
“You mean—”
“Oh, it’s hard to put into words. Just little things, you know; none of them important in themselves, but pretty big in the aggregate. He forgets to kiss me good-bye in the morning, stays over in New York late at night—sometimes without calling me up to let me know he won’t be home—and breaks engagements to take me places without warning. Then, when I expostulate, he pleads business.”
“But my dear madame,” I protested, “this is certainly no case for us. Not every man has the capacity for retaining romance after marriage. Mighty few of them have, I imagine. And it may easily be exactly as your husband says: His business may require his presence in New York at nights. Be reasonable, my dear; when you were first married, he might have strained a point to be home while dinner was still hot, and let his partners handle matters, but you’re really old married folks now, you kno
w, and he has to make a living for you both. You’d best let me give you a bromide—this thing may have gotten on your nerves—and go home and forget your silly suspicions.”
“And will the bromide keep her—or it—out of my house—out of my bedroom—at night?” Mrs. Penneman asked.
“Eh, what’s that?” I demanded.
“That’s what made me call on Dr. de Grandin,” she replied. “It was bad enough when Ben took to neglecting me, but on the second of last month, while we were in bed, I saw a woman in our room.”
“A woman—in your bedroom?” I asked. The story seemed more sordid than I had at first supposed.
“Well, if it wasn’t a woman it was something in the shape of one,” she replied. “I’d been pretty much upset by Ben’s actions, and had reproached him pretty severely the Sunday before when he didn’t show up to take me from the Ambersons’ reception, and he’d promised to reform.
“He did, too. For four nights, from Monday to Thursday, he’d been home to dinner on time, and Thursday night—the second—we’d been to the theater over in New York. We went to a night club after the play and came back on the owl train. It must have been one o’clock before we got home. I was awfully tired and went to bed just as soon as I could get my clothes off; but Ben was in bed first, and was sound asleep when I got into mine.
“I was just dropping off when I happened to remember he hadn’t kissed me good night—we’d rather gotten out of the habit during the last few weeks.
“I turned my covers back and was in the act of getting out of bed to lean over Ben and kiss him, when I noticed he was moaning, or talking in his sleep. Just as I put my feet to the floor, I heard him say, ‘Second, Second!’ twice, just like that, and put his hands out, as if he were pushing something away from him.
“Then I saw her. All at once she was standing by the door of our room, smiling at him like—like a cat smiling at a bird, if you can imagine such a thing—and walking toward him with her arms outstretched.
“I thought I was dreaming, but I wasn’t. I tell you, I saw her. She walked across the rug and stood beside him, looking down with that queer, catty smile of hers, and took both his hands in hers. He sat up in bed, and looked at her like—as he used to look at me when we were first married!
“I was spellbound for a moment, then I said, ‘Dream or no dream, she shan’t have him!’ and leaped to my feet. The woman loosed one of her hands from Ben’s and pointed her finger at me, smiling that same awful, calm smile all the time.
“‘Woman,’ she said, ‘get you gone. This man is mine, bound to me forever. He has put you away and wedded me. Be off!’ That’s just what she said, speaking in a sort of throaty voice—and then she went away.”
“How do you mean, ‘went away’?” I asked. “Did she vanish?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Penneman answered. “I couldn’t say whether she actually vanished or faded out like a motion picture or went through the door. She just wasn’t there when I looked again.”
“And your husband?”
“He fell right back on the pillows and went to sleep. I had to shake him in order to wake him up.”
“Shamming?”
“No-o, I don’t think so. He really seemed asleep, and he didn’t seem to know anything about the woman when I asked him.”
“U’m?” I gave de Grandin a quick look, but there was no gleam of agreement in his round blue eyes as they encountered mine.
“Proceed, Madame, if you please,” he urged with a nod at our caller.
“She’s been back three times since then,” Mrs. Penneman said, “and each time she has warned me to leave. The last time—night before last—she threatened me. Said she would wither me if I did not go.”
“Tell me, Madame,” de Grandin broke in, “is there any condition precedent to this strange visitant’s appearance?”
“I—I don’t believe I understand,” the girl replied.
“Any particular conduct on your husband’s part which would seem to herald her approach? Does he show any signs? Or, perhaps, do you have any feelings of apprehension or presentiment before she comes?”
“No-o,” Mrs. Penneman answered thoughtfully, “no, I can’t say that—wait a moment!—yes! Every time she’s come it’s been after a period of reformation on Ben’s part, after he’s been attentive to me for several days. As long as he’s indifferent to me she stays away, but each time he begins to be his old, dear self, she makes her appearance, always very late at night or early in the morning, and always with the same command for me to leave.
“One thing more, Doctor. The last time she told me to go—the time she threatened me—I noticed Ben’s seal ring on her finger.”
“Eh, what is that?” de Grandin snapped. “His ring? How?”
“He lost his ring when we went to visit Madame Naîra. I’m sure he did, though he declares he didn’t. It was a class ring with the seal of the university on it and his class numerals imposed on the seal.”
“And how came he to lose it, if you please?”
“He was clowning,” the girl answered. “Ben was always acting like a comedian in the old days, and he was showing off when we went to the Veiled Prophetess’ that day. Really, I think the place rather impressed him and he was like a little boy whistling his way past the graveyard when he acted like a buffoon. The place was awfully weird, with a lot of Eastern bric-à-brac in the reception room where we waited for the Prophetess to see us. Ben went all around, examining everything, and seemed especially taken with the statue of a woman with a cat’s head. The thing was almost life-size, and shaped something like a mummy—it gave me the creeps, really. Ben put his hat—he was wearing a derby that day—on its head, and then slipped his seal ring on its finger. Just then the door to the Prophetess’ consulting room opened, and Ben snatched his hat off the thing’s head in a hurry, but I’m sure he didn’t get his ring back. We were ushered into the fortune-teller’s place immediately, and went out by another door, and we were so full of the stuff she’d told us that neither of us missed the ring till we were on the train coming home.
“Ben ’phoned her place next day, but they said no such ring had been found. He didn’t like to confess he’d put it on the statue’s finger, so he told them he must have dropped it on the floor.”
“Ah?” de Grandin drew a pad of paper and a pencil toward him and scribbled a note. “And what did she tell you, this Madame Veiled Prophetess Naîra, if you please, Madame?”
“Oh”—the girl spread her hands—“the usual patter the fortune-tellers have. Recited my history fairly accurately, told me I’d been to Egypt—nothing wonderful in that; I was wearing a scarab Ben bought me in Cairo—and ended up with some nonsense about my having to make a big sacrifice in the near future that others might have happiness and destiny be fulfilled.”
She paused, a rosy flush suffusing her face. “That frightened us a little,” she confessed, “because, when she said that, we both thought maybe she meant I was going to die when—well, you see—”
“Perfectly, Madame,” de Grandin nodded with quick understanding. “Mankind is perpetuated by woman’s going into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to fetch up new lives. Fear not, dear lady, I do assure you the Prophetess meant something quite otherwise.”
“And you will help me?” she begged. “Dr. de Grandin, I—I am going to do what you said about the Valley of the Shadow this spring, and I want my husband. He is my man, my mate, and no one—no thing—shall take him from me. Can you make her go away? Please?”
“I shall try, Madame,” the little Frenchman answered gently. “I can not say I quite understand everything—yet—but I shall make your case my study. Parbleu, but I shall sleep not until I have reached a working hypothesis!”
“Oh, thank you; thank you!” the young matron exclaimed. “I feel ever so much easier already.”
“But of course,” de Grandin acquiesced, bending a smile of singular sweetness on her, “that is as it should be, ma chère.” He raised her f
ingers to his lips before escorting her from the room.
“And now, Friend Trowbridge, what do you think of our case?” he demanded when the front door had closed behind our caller.
“Since you ask me,” I answered with brutal frankness, “I don’t know who’s the crazier, Mrs. Penneman or you; but I think you are, for you should know better. You know as well as I that illusions and hallucinations are apt to occur at any time during the puerperal period. This is a clear case of mild manic-depressive insanity. Because of her condition this poor child has construed her husband’s absorption in his business as neglect. She’s a psychic type, reacting readily to external stimuli, and in her state of depression she thinks his love has failed. That’s preyed on her mind till she’s on the borderline of insanity, and you were very unkind to humor her in her delusions.”
He rested his elbows on the desk, cupping his little pointed chin in his hands, and puffed furiously on his cigarette till its acrid, unpleasant smoke surrounded his sleek blond head in a gray nimbus. “O, la, la, hear him!” he chuckled. “Suppose, Trowbridge, mon vieux, I were to say I do not consider la belle Penneman mad at all. Not even one little bit. What then?”
“Humph!” I returned. “I dare say you’d have agreed with her if she’d said that statue her husband put his ring on had come to life?”
“Perhaps,” he returned with an irritating grin. “Before we are through with this case, my friend, we may see stranger things than that.”
TWO DAYS LATER HE announced matter-of-factly, “Today, Friend Trowbridge, we go to interview this Madame Naîra, the Prophetess of the Veil.”
“We?” I responded. “Perhaps you do, but I’ll have nothing to do with the matter.”
“Pardieu, but you will!” he replied with a laugh. “This case, my friend, promises as much adventure as any you and I have had together. Come, a spice of the unusual will be a tonic for you after an uneventful season of house-to-house calls.”
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