After some good-natured argument we agreed the girl should occupy Phipps’s cot, for the identity of the charming guest’s name with that of the author of the family curse seemed to have unnerved the youngster, and he declared sleep impossible.
Nevertheless, we all dropped off after a time, de Grandin once more rolled in his blankets like an Indian, I lying on my cot and watching the flames of the replenished fire, the girl sleeping lightly as a child, her cheek pillowed on her uninjured hand; Phipps hunched in his ancestor’s great chair before the fireplace.
IT WAS MARGUERITE’S SCREAM that wakened me. Bolt upright, wide awake as if sleep had not visited my lids, I looked about the great dark hall. Phipps still sat in the great armchair before the dying fire, de Grandin, apparently, slept undisturbed in his blankets; Marguerite DuPont sat erect in bed, lips parted to emit another scream.
A creak on the wide oaken stairs diverted my attention from the frightened girl. Slowly, seeming more to float than walk, a tall, white shrouded figure came toward us.
“Conjuro te, sceleratissime, abire ad tuum locum!” the sonorous Latin words of exorcism rang through the high-ceiled hall as de Grandin, now thoroughly awake, hurled them at the ceremented figure bearing down on us.
He paused a moment, as though testing the efficacy of the spell, and from the fluttering folds of the advancing specter’s winding-sheet there came a peal of wild, derisive laughter.
I caught my breath in dismay, for the laughter seemed completely infernal, mad as a cachinnating echo from a madhouse, sounding the death-knell of sanity, but Jules de Grandin advanced on the apparition. “Ha, so Monsieur le Fantôme, you are not to be deterred by words? You try to make one sacré singe of Jules de Grandin? Perhaps you have an appetite for this?”
The speed with which he snatched the little Belgian automatic from his pocket was incredible, and the shots followed in such quick succession that they seemed like a single prolonged report.
The mocking laughter stopped abruptly as a tuned-out radio, and the sheeted thing swayed for a moment then fell head-foremost down the wide stairway.
“Good heavens!” I gasped. “I—I thought it was a—a—”
“Un fantôme?” de Grandin supplied with a half amused, half hysterical laugh. “Me, I think that that was the intention of the masquerade, and I damnation think they set their stage poorly. In the first dullness of awakening I also was deceived, but I heard a stair creak underneath his foot, and ghosts do not cause creaky boards to squeak. Alors, I turned from exorcism to execution, and”—he indicated the sheet-swathed form—“it seems I made a real ghost where there was a make-believe before. I have skill at that, my friend. Oh, yes.”
Bending over the white cheesecloth-wrapped figure he drew the cerements aside. The man beneath was naked to the waist and wore a pair of corduroy trousers tucked into Army-surplus combat boots. Six bullet-wounds, as blue as bruises and hardly bleeding at all, were pitted in his left breast in a space that could be covered by a man’s hand. From the corners of his mouth twin threads of blood trickled, indicting pleural haemorrhage.
“Why, it’s Claude Phipps!” the DuPont girl gasped in an awe-struck voice. Frightened almost senseless when she thought she saw a ghost, she showed only a sort of fascinated curiosity at sight of the dead body.
“Eh, what is it you say, Mademoiselle—Phipps?” de Grandin queried sharply.
“Yes, sir. Claude Phipps. He’s always been a wild sort, never seemed to keep a job, but just a little while ago he started making money. Big money, too. Everybody thought he played the races. Maybe so. I wouldn’t know. His family’s lived in Woolwich since I don’t know when, and last year he and Marcia Hopkins were married and built a lovely home over at Mallowfield. But now—”
“But now, indeed, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin cut in. “One wonders. There is more here than we see. This childish masquerade of ghosts; the warning you and your unvalorous escort received, your wounding—
“Down, my friends! Ventre à terre! Keep from the light!” Matching his command with performance, he flattened himself to the floor and the rest of us followed instant suit.
Nor were we a second too quick. The thunderous roar of sawed-off shotguns bellowed even as we dropped, and a shower of slugs whistled over us.
The Frenchman’s little pistol barked a shrewish rejoinder, and Edwin Phipps, revolver in hand, wriggled across the floor, firing rapidly. Somebody screamed in the dark and the crash of rending wood was followed by a hurtling body striking the hall floor with a thud. The ensuing silence was almost deafening; then a whimper from the fallen man before us and a piteous groan from the balcony told us the battle was ended with all casualties on the other side.
By the light of our electric torches we examined our late foemen. The man who fell from the balcony when the balustrade gave way had shattered his left tibia and fractured his left clavicle. The man above was shot through the right shoulder and left thigh, neither wound being serious except for profuse haemorrhage.
For a few minutes, with improvised bandages and splints, de Grandin and I worked feverishly. We were rigging a crude Spanish windlass to staunch the bleeding from our late enemy’s leg when Marguerite called shrilly: “Fire! The house is burning!”
“My God!” our patient begged hoarsely. “Get us out o’ here, quick! There’s two drums o’ benzine in th’ cellar, an’—Quick, Mister. There’s a car hid in th’ woodshed!”
No second warning was necessary. We piled the wounded men on cots and rushed them from the house, found the Cadillac concealed in the crumbling woodshed and set the motor going. Five minutes later, with Marguerite for pilot, we started down the road for Woolwich.
We did not take our departure too soon. The house, entirely of wood save for its chimneys and hall-paving, was burning like an English village balefire on Guy Fawkes Day before we reached the highway. Before we’d travelled half a mile there came a muted detonation and showers of sparks and burning brands shot into the sleet-stabbed December night.
“That would be le pétrole,” murmured Jules de Grandin sadly. “It seems our task is somewhat delayed by this night’s business.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It is that we must wait until the embers of that wicked house have cooled—a week, perhaps—before we draw the fires of the old grudge,” he replied enigmatically.
THE STORY THAT THE wounded men told the police surgeon to whom we turned them over was not particularly novel. Claude Phipps, ne’er-do-well descendant of the proud old family, had grown to manhood with all the vices and few, if any, of the virtues of his ancestors. His widowed mother had sufficient money to send him to art school, but not enough to support him as a dilettante, and his attempts to support himself were abortive. He was one of those who could be trained but not taught; though he could copy almost anything with photographic fidelity he had no more ability to compose a picture than his brush or palette or mahl-stick. Enraged at failure and on the brink of actual starvation, he took up engraving as a trade and had no difficulty in earning high wages, but his passion for expensive living and his frustrated snobbery made a prosperous craftsman’s life distasteful. Since boyhood he had consorted with petty criminals, race touts, petty gamblers and the like, and when one of these introduced him to an ex-convict who had been a counterfeiter the result was predictable as the outcome of a motion picture mystery. He became the chief engraver of the ring, the two men we had captured were his plant-printer and assistant; the former convict and his associates distributed the product.
The evil legends of the old Phipps homestead and the fact that it had been untenanted for years provided them a cheap and relatively safe headquarters, and their plant was set up in the cellar, while the sleeping rooms upstairs provided them with a pied-à-terre. Once or twice neighbours had attempted half-hearted investigation of strange lights and sounds observed there after dark, but the ghost-outfit with which the unbidden tenants had provided themselves, accompanied by appropriately eerie shr
ieks and demoniacal laughter, discouraged amateur detectives.
Recently, however, Treasury operatives had been becoming uncomfortably inquisitive, and “the boss” had ordered operations discontinued when one last lot of spurious bills had been printed. It was with the fear of the Secret Service in their minds that Claude and his assistants had discovered Marguerite and her escort apparently reconnoitering the approaches of the house and fired on them.
The two survivors were for shooting us at once when our presence was discovered, for they had no doubt we were Treasury operatives, but Claude prevailed on them to let him try his spectral masquerade before resorting to firearms.
“U’m,” de Grandin murmured thoughtfully as the wounded man concluded his recital. “This Monsieur Claude of yours, he lived at Mallowfield, did he not? Will you be good enough to furnish us his address?”
As soon as our business with the police was concluded he rushed from the station house and hailed a taxicab. “To 823 Founders’ Road, Mallowfield,” he ordered, and all the way through the long drive he seemed almost like a victim of acute chorea.
A light burned in the upper front room of the pretty little suburban villa before which the taximan deposited us, and through a rear window showed another gleam of lamplight. A large closed car was parked at the curb, and as we passed it I espied the device of a Mercury’s caduceus on its license plate, thus proclaiming its owner a member of the medical fraternity.
No answer came to de Grandin’s sharp ring at the doorbell, and he gave a second imperative summons before a light quick step sounded beyond the white-enamelled panels. A pleasant-faced woman in hospital white opened the door and regarded us with a half-welcoming, half-inquiring smile. “Yes?” she asked.
“Madame Phipps? She is here—she may be seen?” de Grandin asked, and for once his self-assurance seemed to have deserted him.
The nurse laughed outright. “She’s here, but I don’t think you can see her just now. She had a little son—her first—two hours ago.”
“Sacré nom! Le sort—the ancient curse—it still holds!” he exclaimed. “I knew it, I was certain; I was positive we should find this, but I had to prove it! Consider: Monsieur Claude the worthless, I shot him some two hours ago; he died with blood upon his mouth, and almost in that same moment his wife became the mother of his firstborn. This is no business of the monkey with which we deal, mon ami; mille nons; it is a matter of the utmost gravity. But certainly.” He nodded solemnly.
“Nonsense!” I broke in. “It’s just coincidence, a gruesome one, I’ll grant you, but—well, I still say it’s just coincidence.”
“You may have right,” he agreed sombrely. “But men have died with blood upon their mouths by such coincidences as this since 1758. Unless we can—”
“Can what?” I prompted as we retraced our steps toward the waiting taxi.
“No matter. Hereafter we must deal in deeds, not words, Friend Trowbridge.”
IT WAS ALMOST A week before the fire-ravaged ruins of the old house cooled sufficiently to permit us to rummage among charred timbers and fallen bricks. The great central chimney stood like the lone survivor of a burned forest among the blackened wreckage. The heat-blasted paving of the hall, supported by the arches of the vaulted cellar, remained intact, as did the mighty fireplace with its arch of fieldstone; otherwise the house was but a rubble of burned joists and fallen brick.
The little Frenchman had been busily engaged during the intervening time, making visits here and there, interviewing this one and that, accumulating stray bits of information from any source which offered, particularly interviewing the French Canadian priest who served the Catholic parish within the confines of which the ancient house had stood.
Beginning with a call of perfunctory politeness to inquire concerning her wound, Edwin Phipps had spent more and more time in Marguerite DuPont’s company. What they talked of as they sat before the pleasant open fire of her cottage while he assisted her with tea things, lighted her cigarette and otherwise made his two hale hands do duty for her injured member I do not know, but that their brief acquaintanceship was ripening into something stronger was evidenced by the glances and covert smiles they exchanged—silent messages intended to deceive de Grandin and me, but plainly read as hornbook type.
I was not greatly surprised when Edwin drove Marguerite up to the site of the old house late in the forenoon of the day appointed by de Grandin for “la grande experience.”
Beside the little Frenchman, with stole adjusted and service book open, stood Father Cloutier of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Near the cleric, viewing the scene with a mixture of professional dignity and wondering expectation, stood Ricardo Paulo, sexton of the church and funeral director, and near him was an open casket with the white silk of its tufted lining shining in the bright December sunshine.
From a roll of burlap de Grandin produced a short, strong crowbar, inserted its wedge-end between the slate hearthstone and the pavement, and threw his weight upon the lever. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge, lend me your bulk,” he panted, bearing heavily upon the bar. “I lack the weight to budge it, me!”
I joined him, bore down on the crowbar, and wrenched the iron sidewise at the same time. The great slab came away from its anchorage, tilted obliquely a moment, then rolled back.
Before us lay a stone-walled crypt some two and a half feet deep by four feet wide, more than six feet long, floored with a bed of sand. I am not certain just what I expected; a skeleton, perhaps; perhaps a desiccated lich, kiln-dried from long immurement in a crypt before the great fireplace.
A girl, young slim and delicate, lay on the sand that floored the catacomb. From linen cap to heavy brogans decorated with brass knuckles she was carefully arrayed as if clad to attend a town meeting of old Woolwich. True, her wrists were bound together with a rawhide thong, but the fingers of her hands lay placidly together as though folded in prayer, and her face was calm and peaceful as the faces of few who die “naturally” in bed are.
But what amazed me most was the startling resemblance between the dead girl and Marguerite DuPont who even now came timidly to look upon the features that had lain beneath the stone of sacrifice for almost two hundred years.
“A-a-ah!” de Grandin let his breath out slowly between his teeth. “La pauvre, la pauvre belle créature! Now, Monsieur le Curé, is the time—”
Something—a wisp of vapour generated by the burning of the house and confined in a cranny of the hearth-grave, perhaps—wafted from the martyred French girl’s tomb and floated lightly in the chill midwinter air. Next instant Edwin Phipps had fallen to the pavement, clawing at his neck and making uncouth gurgling noises. About him, as if his clothing were steeped in warm water, hung a steamlike wraith of fume, and at the comers of his mouth appeared twin tiny stains of blood, as though a vessel in his throat had ruptured.
“No—no; you shall not have him! He’s mine; mine, I tell you!” the cry seemed wrung from Marguerite DuPont who, on her knees beside the fallen man, was fighting frantically to drive the hovering vapour off, beating at it with her hands as if it were a swarm of summer gnats.
“To prayers, Friend Priest! Pour l’amour d’un canard, be about your work all quickly!” De Grandin waved imperatively to the mortician and his assistants.
“Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, 0 Lord; for in Thy sight shall no man he justified, unless through Thee he find pardon …” Father Cloutier intoned.
Quickly, but with astonishingly dextrous gentleness, the funeral assistants lifted the girl’s body from its crypt and placed it in the waiting casket. There was a sharp click, and the casket lid was latched.
Like steam dissolving in the morning chill the baleful vapour hanging round young Phipps began to disappear. In a moment it was gone, and he lay panting, his head pillowed in the crook of Marguerite’s uninjured arm, while with her handkerchief she wiped the blood away from his mouth.
“Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shin
e upon her …”
De Grandin’s sudden laugh broke through the priest’s cantillation. “Barbe d’un ver de terre, c’est drole ça—but it is funny, that, my friends! Me, I knew all; I have made much inquiry of late, yet never did I foresee that which has transpired. Jules de Grandin, thou great stupide, the good jest is on thee!
“Observe them, if you please, Friend Trowbridge,” he nodded with delight toward Phipps and Marguerite. “Is it not one excellent-good joke?”
I looked at him in wonder. Edwin was recovering under Marguerite’s ministrations, and as he opened his eyes and murmured something she bent and kissed him on the mouth.
“What’s so damn funny?” I asked.
“Forgive my seeming irreverence,” he begged as we set out for the cemetery to witness the interment of poor Marguerite DuPont’s body, “but as I said before, I knew much that is withheld from you, and might have foreseen that which has occurred had I not been one great muttonhead. Attend me, if you please:
“You have expressed surprise that Mademoiselle Marguerite shows such a strong resemblance to her whom we have but a moment since raised from her unconsecrated grave. Parbleu, it would be strange if it were otherwise. The one is great-great-granddaughter of the other, no less! Consider: When first the young Monsieur Phipps advised us of this so mysterious doom that overhangs his family I was greatly interested. If, as the olden Obediah recounted in his journal, poor Marguerite DuPont lay buried underneath the evil hearthstone of that wicked house, I thought perhaps the memory of an ancient grudge—resentment which held fast like death—was focused there, for where the misused body lay, I thought, there would be found the well-spring of the malediction which has dogged the house of Phipps. Therefore, I told me, we must go there, untomb the body of unfortunate one and give it Christian burial. A fervent Catholic she had lived, such, presumably, she died, though there was no priest to shrive her soul or read the burial service over her. These omissions, I told me, must be remedied, and then perhaps she should have peace and the bane of her old curse might be unloosed. You see the logic of my reasoning? Bien.
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