by James Doig
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“No: what?”
“I distinctly heard someone draw a long, deep breath, as if in relief.”
“I heard it too,” I said, for I was too fascinated to leave the spot.
Father looked dubious; he had heard nothing.
Two or three strokes of the pick soon showed Uncle Ned that there were stones under the clay floor. We were all on our knees in an instant, removing them.
Then came the earth, and there also the deep dark stain corresponding to the stain on the floor. This time father used his spade. We waited, scarcely daring to breathe. The ground seemed to slope to that particular spot.
Presently the spade scraped against something, and father brought up a tin “billy” of the kind that is used in the bush to this day. But it was black and discoloured, and of the same sodden hue as the earth.
“I scarcely like to touch it,” said father, pausing in his work.
But Uncle Ned was not so squeamish. He prised the lid off at once with his clasp-knife, and revealed to our wondering gaze a small canvas bag, a bundle of letters, and some faded photographs.
They smelt horribly, and were, like the tin, discoloured.
He cut open the bag. It was full of sovereigns; tarnished-looking, but true enough, Uncle Ned said, as he examined them.
Then father opened the bundle of letters. It took some time to decipher the writing, but he made out they were all in the same hand, and from a woman named Mary Elwyn, living in Sonsea, England, for her name and address were on every letter, and the superscription on the envelopes ran: to “George Elwyn, Post Office, Goulburn, New South Wales.”
I looked at the photographs, and dropped them with a gasp.
“What!” they all cried.
“The man I saw in my dream,” I explained.
The photograph showed him standing beside a sweet-faced young woman in her wedding dress. The picture which portrayed the same girl holding a baby was less soiled than the others.
Father examined every paper, and found a deed, much obliterated, but distinctly showing the name “George Elwyn” as purchaser of some land at “Tandarra.”
“Tandarra!” exclaimed Uncle Ned; “that’s just over the road. ‘No man’s land,’ they call it now.”
“We must see into this,” said father, as he replaced everything in the billy. “We must try and hunt up Mary Elwyn. Evidently she is George Elwyn’s wife.”
“Hadn’t we better break up the whole floor while we are about it?” said Uncle Ned.
“Not yet,” answered father; “we must get James Bon here as a witness. I wish to make the search honestly and thoroughly. God knows what poor widowed woman is waiting and hoping in England for the husband that can never return.”
Father was a local justice of the peace, so was James Bon in his district, and they thought it would be an easy matter to get at the true nature of the discovery. But the date of the deed was thirty years ago, and the end of it was, father had to go up to Sydney, and Uncle Ned to Goulburn, to find traces of “George Elwyn” in the Government books of the time.
The affair created quite a stir, for father was anxious to make it as public as possible, to stimulate interest and talk, in the hope of learning anything about the first occupants of the place. Bit by bit the story pieced itself together.
Long ago a small family of settlers had taken up land at “Carrap” and “Tandarra.” Skirmishes with the blacks were plentiful in those years ago, and the settlers were often called on to defend themselves.
One night the place was burnt down after a fierce fight; but it was the last attack the blacks made, for they lost so many men and met with so much slaughter, that they fled farther inland.
The two Englishmen—brothers, named Baxter—who survived, and one of their wives, left the district after selling “Carrap” to a man who had a craze for building, but knew nothing of land cultivation. His one idea was to have a house in the bush, and there he lived for several years.
On his death his widow gave the charge of the place to an old shepherd, until a purchaser was found in John Crosland, my father.
But all this threw no light on the discovery of George Elwyn’s property under the old kitchen at Carrap.
Father found the record of the purchase of the land at Tandarra, but there was neither stick nor stone, barring the remains of an old hut, to tell of George Elwyn. But as it was common enough in those days for settlers to band together as much as possible for protection, father concluded that George Elwyn must have concealed his treasure at the Baxters’, for greater security. This was as near as we ever got to the heart of the mystery.
Father wrote to a solicitor he had known in London, asking him to make inquiries, and also wrote to Mrs Mary Elwyn, at Sonsea, in the chance hope that she might be still living there.
And she was! It seemed ages before we heard any news, but when the letters came, everything was cleared up.
George Elwyn had left his young wife with her people, while he went to make a home for her beyond the seas. Her one child, a son, was now her support, and dark days had settled on them.
The news of the property scarcely surprised the widow, who had waited thirty years.
“I knew George Elwyn would prove himself true to me,” she said; “he said it so often in my dreams.”
But there was a tremendous amount of time wasted, and many tedious delays, before Mary Elwyn could get her claim recognised.
If it had not been father, I doubt whether the affair, as far as the land was concerned, would have ever been made straight.
Eventually Mary Elwyn and her son came to New South Wales, and on to Carrap to stay with us.
The old kitchen was quite demolished by that time, and every bit of the ground it stood upon dug up; but I pointed out the spot where I saw her husband fall in my vision, and she knelt down and prayed, while the tears ran down her cheeks.
“That stain was his life-blood,” she whispered.
And it seemed to me I once more heard that long, long sigh, as of unutterable relief, and rest and peace, at last.
THE STRANGE CASES OF DR. WYCHERLEY, by Max Rittenberg
The Blue Book Magazine, November 1911
Max Rittenberg (1880-1965) was born in Sydney and educated at Tonbridge and Cambridge University. He was a prolific author for several English magazines, but is best known as the creator of the character Dr Xavier Wycherley, a psychologist and psychic who helped solve crimes. Dr. Wycherley first appeared in The London Magazine in 1911 in the story “The Man Who Lived Again.” Rittenberg wrote a total of eighteen Wycherley stories, a selection of which were later collected in The Mind-Reader (1913). He also wrote a series of stories about Magnum, a scientific detective, beginning with “The Mystery of the Sevenoaks Tunnel” in 1913. His other works include: Potted Game: Some Triflings with the Highly Serious Subject of Sport (1908), How to Compose Business Letters (1909), Everyone Has Something to Sell (1910), Selling Schemes for Retailers (1911), Swirling Waters (1913), The Cockatoo: A Novel of Public-School Life (1913), The Modern Chesterfield (1914), Every Man His Price (1914), Gold and Thorns (1915), Modern Retailing (1915), Effective Postal Publicity (1923), How to Finance a Business (1923), Practical Points in Postal Publicity (1927), Mail-Order Made Easy (1928) and Direct Mail and Mail-Order Principles and Practice (1931).
THE STRANGE CASES OF DR. WYCHERLEY: THE SORCERER OF ARJUZANX
She was climbing painfully on her knees the long flight of stone steps that leads from the Grotto of the Vision of Bernadette up to the great double Basilique of Lourdes. With her, helping and encouraging, was her parish priest, Père Bonivet.
“Courage, my child, and faith!” he was whispering. “Have faith, and all will be well. Only faith in Our Lady can cure you!”
Out
of the crowd of the sick and the dying that had come to Lourdes—the lame, the blind, the palsied, the epileptic, the tuberculous, the cancerous—this peasant girl had above all attracted the attention of Dr. Wycherley. He was there in pursuit of his life-study, psychological research, for at Lourdes there gather a great multitude of those who are sick in mind. Apart from his study of the cures that earnest faith brings to pass at the Shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes, many of his previous cases had been garnered there—cases where faith had been powerless to heal the injured mind.
This young peasant girl—scarcely more than a child—now on her knees on the long flight of stone steps, had attracted Dr. Wycherley’s attention above all the rest. There was that in her face that lifted her out of the ruck of peasants. Not the beauty of her features, nor her soft, liquid eyes, nor her raven-black hair was it that first caught the attention of the observer but the spiritual light in her soul that shone through her face as a light shines through wax.
She might have posed as a model for a Joan of Arc when the call first came to her Domrémy.
Dr. Wycherley watched the girl and the on their painful climb to the Basilique, as he had watched them on many days previously; he waited outside the church until they came from their devotions. In Père Bonivet’s face was a look of deep disappointment; in the eyes of the girl was a hardened look, a glitter that had not been there before. The light her soul no longer shone clear—it as though a marsh mist had dimmed it with a clammy film.
As the priest was hurrying her to their temporary home in the town, Dr. Wycherley raised his hat and addressed him.
“Mon père,” he said, “I ask pardon for this intrusion if it is unwelcome. But I, like yourself, do my humble best to help the weak and the suffering and I see clearly that your pilgrimage to Lourdes has not brought the benefit you hoped for mademoiselle.”
“We must be patient. In God’s good time He will vouchsafe His mercies,” returned the priest. “But I thank you—I see that you have the good heart.”
“If you should need me…,” said Dr. Wycherley, and wrote the name of his hotel on his card. Père Bonivet took the card and thanked him courteously.
* * * *
On the evening of the next day the priest called on Dr. Wycherley in anxious distress of mind.
“I have come,” he said, “because I fear that this case is beyond my powers. It may be that I am unworthy—that my soul is too stained with the cares and pettinesses of this world to take my prayers before the Most High. Tonight I can do nothing with Jeanne. She has blasphemed against the Holy Name—she will not listen to me! It is terrible, pitiable! And”—he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper—“the mark of the beast is coming upon her!” He shuddered at his own words.
Dr. Wycherley drew a chair forward for Père Bonivet. “Will you not sit down and tell me the trouble of mademoiselle? I have studied many cases of diseased mind, and it may be my knowledge can help. She is hystérique, is it not so?”
“So the doctor has told us, but in the Landes, where Jeanne Dorthez lives and where I go about the work of my Master, the peasants give it another name—a very terrible name. They say that she is possessed—bewitched!
“Myself I believe nothing of that,” added the priest hastily. “I am of the modern school, and such things belong to the superstitions of the Middle Ages. So I laid the case of Jeanne Dorthez before Monseigneur the Bishop, and he advised me to take her on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Out of his own purse our good bishop gave the money that was necessary for us, for Jeanne is but a poor peasant girl, the daughter of a woodcutter of the Landes, and myself I have little to spare.”
“If they say she is bewitched, then they must have in mind some man or woman on whom they place suspicion of sorcery.”
“You are right, monsieur. They say that Osper Camargo has bewitched her. They whisper many terrible things of Osper Camargo, that he is in league with the Evil One—but you and I, should we put belief in the superstitious chatter of peasants?”
The mental healer did not answer this. “Jeanne is a good girl,” he said; “it is plain for all to read. When her attacks come upon her, she changes in mind, is it not so?”
“She changes terribly. Tonight she blasphemed against the Holy Name. I greatly fear that she may lose her reason.”
“What other signs?”
Of course, monsieur, it is nonsense what I have now to tell you. But one day the women of the village forced her to be examined, and they whisper that upon her they found places where the prick of a pin was not felt!”
“Those places were of a definite and regular shape?”
“How did monsieur guess? Yes. The shape of the pentacle—that is what they whisper. The doctor at Mont de Marsan could find nothing, and myself I did not believe it. But tonight I have seen the mark of the beast upon her! Red upon her breast!” Again he shuddered, and crossed himself hastily.
Dr. Wycherley looked very thoughtful. “Let us go to see Jeanne,” he suggested, and from a travelling medicine-chest slipped a few phials into his pocket.
The girl was lodging near at hand, and in a few minutes they had arrived at the house, a humble dwelling in a little back street of the town. When they were a few yards from the door the figure of a man slipped out quickly from the threshold and into the darkness of an alleyway.
The Priest started back. “For a moment I thought that was Osper Camargo! But the light is tricky in this narrow ruelle.”
“He has a scrawny beard and a pair of evil-looking eyes?” asked Dr. Wycherley.
“Camargo has that and a nose crushed by the fall of a pine-tree upon his face. It was at the time of the accident—many years ago now—that he ceased to attend Mass, and after that he gradually became feared by the villagers. But of course it could not be Camargo, for he is far from here in the salt-marshes of the Landes—there would be no reason why he should come to Lourdes.”
The woman who opened the door to them put her finger to her lips. “S’sh, mon père, she is at last asleep! It was with difficulty that we could quiet her.”
They moved softly upstairs to the room, and at Dr. Wycherley’s request the woman turned back the bedclothes and opened the girl’s nightgown.
Above and between her breasts, distinct and unmistakable, was an angry reddish patch of the shape of a pentacle.
“Last night I saw it for the first time!” whispered the woman, with horror in her voice. “Tonight it is much redder! Monsieur le Curé, Monsieur le Docteur, what can it mean?”
Jeanne stirred in her sleep, and in her sleep murmured: “I will come. Oh, cease to torment me, for I will come!”
Dr. Wycherley stayed the night through in the girl’s room—watching and studying her. Outside the window the Gave de Pau roared unceasingly down its torrential bed. There was menace in its voice.
* * * *
Jeanne awoke in the morning with a curious dull glaze in her eyes. She expressed a strong desire to return home to her hamlet of Aureilhac, in spite of the counsels of Père Bonivet still to have patience and faith.
He appealed to Dr. Wycherley, but the latter drew him aside and suggested earnestly: “Let Jeanne have her way, mon père. I think it will be for the best.… It is upon your lips to tell me that if she will only have faith enough, she will be cured. Yes, but she has not the faith—she has lost heart.… Now you are about to ask me what can be hoped for if the pilgrimage to Lourdes has failed.”
“You read my thoughts, monsieur!” said the priest in surprise.
“And you, mon père, read mine, for you see that I wish for Jeanne only what will be for her good.”
“Yes, yes. But if she goes back to the Landes with her faith broken, who can save her from madness? I, alas, am not worthy to do this work for my Master—that I bow my head in sorrow to acknowledge.”
“We must work
together—I will return with you.”
“But her father, Pierre Dorthez, is only a poor woodcutter. In the Landes we are all poor. How could we pay you, monsieur? No doubt you would need many francs—perhaps many hundred francs.” To his simple mind the sum loomed vast.
“Mon père, you and I have both learnt that the true money lies in the grateful hearts of men and women.”
The priest raised his hand in benediction. “I know not if you are of our faith, monsieur, but may the blessing of God be upon you!”
They travelled by slow, cross-country trains to the village of Labouheyre in the middle of the Landes district. It was a hot and sultry day, and the hundred-mile train journey seemed interminable.
Beyond Dax they had come into the true Landes country—great silent pine-forests alternating with wide stretches of sedgy marshland. At Labouheyre their arrival was unexpected, but one of the villagers at once offered to drive them in his ox-cart to Aureilhac. It was an honour to do a service for Père Bonivet.
But Dr. Wycherley noted that the villager took care that Jeanne should not touch him even with her garment.
The two oxen drew them along the great silent highway that runs level and straight northwards to Bordeaux, stone-paved like the streets of a town to bear the weight of the lumbering timber-wagons.
The oxen plodded along with the slow patience which is theirs.
The silence of the great forest fell upon them. Even in the full light of the afternoon the sombre forest carried something of the grim and awesome. No wonder that for the simple peasants there were still spirits of evil that lurked in its shadows and on Midsummer Eve gathered together for unholy revels out in the marsh of Arjuzanx.
From time to time they would pass a solitary goatherd lying down on his rough skin coat and dully guarding his little flock of longhaired goats. Once they caught sight of the local postman making his round on the stilts of the Landes to the outlying huts and farms, separated by stretches of marshland impassable on foot.