Devil’s Rosary

JULES DE GRANDIN DREW a final long puff from his cigarette, ground its butt against the bottom of the ash tray and emitted a tapering cone of smoke from his pursed lips, regarding our visitor with narrowed eyes. “And your gran’père, also, Monsieur?” he asked.

“Yes, sir; and my great-great-grandfather, and his father. Not a man of my branch of the family since old Joshua Phipps has lived to see his children. Joshua fell dead across the threshold of his wife’s room ten minutes after she became a mother. Elijah, the son whom Joshua never saw, died in the last assault on Cornwallis’s works at Yorktown. News travelled slowly those days, but when the company returned to Massachusetts they told his widow of their captain’s death. All agreed he was shot through the lungs a little after ten in the morning. Half an hour earlier his wife had given birth to a son. That son died at Buena Vista the same day his son was born, and that son, my great-grandfather, was shot in the draft riots in New York during the Civil War. His twin children, a son and daughter, were born the same night. My grandfather died at San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt the same day my father was born. I was born June 6, 1918—”

“Mordieu, the day that your so glorious Marines met the boche at Château-Thierry—”

“Precisely, sir. I was born a little after noon. My father went down shortly after one o’clock, full o’ machine gun bullets as a pudding is of plums.

“Call it superstition, coincidence—anything you like—but I can’t shake off the thought of it—”

“Parfaitement,” the little Frenchman agreed. “The remembrance of these so strange deaths has bored into your inner consciousness like a maggot in a cheese. You are—how do you say in American? Sans bouc—goatless?”

”Exactly,” the other smiled wanly. “If it were something I could sink my hands in—something tangible that I could shoot or stick a bayonet into—I’d stand up to it and say, ‘You be damned!’ but it’s not. The men of my family—except old Joshua, perhaps—seem to have been pretty decent fellows. They fought their country’s battles; they paid their debts; they were good to their wives, but—there it is. The birth of a child is the death warrant of every Phipps descended from Joshua of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I don’t mind admitting that it’s got my goat. I’ve been more than ordinarily successful in my work—I’m an architect, you know—I’ve several good commissions right now, but I just can’t seem to get my mind on ’em. I’ve as much to live for as most men—work, achievement, possibly a woman’s love and children; but there’s this constant threat eating into me like a canker-worm, walking at my elbow, lying down to sleep with me and rising with me in the morning. I can’t shake it any more than I can my skin. It hangs on like Sinbad’s Old Man of the Sea. I’ve consulted half a dozen of these so-called occultists, even went to a clairvoyant and a couple of mediums.”

He gave a short, hard laugh. “Did they help? Like hell! They all say, ‘Fear nothing; evil from without cannot prevail against the good within!’ or some such fiddle-faddle. I’m not after fairy-tale comfort, Dr. de Grandin; I want some assurance of safety, if it’s to be had.

“Once I tried a psychoanalyst. He wasn’t much better than the other quacks. Used a lot of learnèd-sounding double-talk about relative subconsciousness, fear complexes and inhibitions, then assured me it was all in my mind—but you can damned well bet he couldn’t explain why all my male ancestors died as soon as they became fathers, and he didn’t attempt it. Now”—the young man looked almost challengingly into de Grandin’s thoughtful eyes—“they tell me you’ve an open mind. You don’t slop over about the spirits of the departed, but you don’t pooh-pooh any intimation of the supernatural. The mediums and occultists I’ve been to were a lot of ignorant charlatans. The psychoanalyst didn’t seem to grasp the idea that there’s something more than the merely natural behind all this—he waved aside everything that couldn’t be recorded on one of his instruments or hadn’t been catalogued by Freud. I believe that you can help if anybody can. If you can’t do something for me, God have mercy. His mercy didn’t seem to help my ancestors much.”

“I appreciate your confidence and frankness, Monsieur,” de Grandin answered. “Also, I concur in the pious wish that you may have the assistance of Deity. It may be true, as you say, that heaven’s mercy did little or nothing for your ancestors, but then in olden days Providence was not assisted by Jules de Grandin. Today the case is different.

“Suppose, now, we commence at the commencement, if you please. You have, perhaps, some intimation concerning the untimely taking-off of your forebears? You have heard some plausible reason why your so distinguished ancestor Monsieur Josué found death’s grinning countenance where he thought to look upon the features of his first-born?”

“Yes!” young Phipps answered tersely, a slight flush mounting to his face. “You’ll probably call it a lot o’ nonsense, but I’m convinced it’s—it’s a family curse!”

“U’m?” de Grandin thoughtfully selected a long black cigar from the humidor, bit its end and struck a match. “You interest me, Monsieur. Who cursed your family, and why, if you please?”

“Here,” Phipps drew a small brown-leather volume from his pocket and thrust it into the Frenchman’s hand, “you’ll find the history of it there. Obediah, Joshua’s younger brother, wrote it in his diary way back in 1755. Start reading there; I’ve checked the pertinent entries in red,” he indicated a dog-eared page of ancient, porous paper closely barred with fine writing in faded logwood ink. “Obediah’s comments may seem melodramatic in the cold light of the twentieth century; but when we remember how Joshua fell strangled with blood at the entrance of his wife’s chamber, and how his son and his son’s sons died without seeing their children, it doesn’t seem so overdrawn, after all. Something else: Every man jack of ’em died in such a way that his mouth was smeared with blood. Oh, the old curse has been carried out to the letter, whether by coincidence or not!”

“U’m?” de Grandin repeated noncommittally, taking the slender book in his hand and examining its binding curiously.

It was a cap octavo volume, bound in beautifully tanned leather carved with scrolls, oeils-de-boeuf and similar ornaments dear to eighteenth century bookbinders. Across the back was stamped in gold:

OBEDIAH PHIPPS

HYS JOURNALL

“Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin rushed quickly through the book’s yellowed leaves, then passed it to me, “have the kindness to read us what old Monsieur Obediah set down in the long ago. Me, I understand the barbarities of your language passably, but I think we shall get the fuller effect by hearing you read aloud. I should make sad hash of the old one’s entries. Read on, my friend, like Monsieur Balaam’s ass, I am all ears.”

Adjusting my pince-nez I moved nearer the desk lamp, glanced hastily at the indicated page, then, bending closer, for the once-black ink had faded to pale sepia with the passage of two hundred years, I read:

3d. Sep. 1775—This day came the trained band from fighting with the French; Joshua my brother looking mighty fine and soldier-like in his scarlet coat and the long sword which swung from his baldric. With them are come a parcel of prisoners of war, holden at the King his Majesty’s pleasure. Mostly children and young folk they be, and though they are idolaters and not of our Christian faith, I find it in my heart to pity their hard lot, for from this day they must be bearers of burdens, hewers of wood and drawers of water, bound to menial service to our people that the Commonwealth’s substance be not eaten up in keeping them in idleness.

What is it I say? Obediah, it is well you are for Harvard College and the law, for the sternness of the soldier’s trade or the fiery Gospel of the Lord of Hosts are things too hard for thee, meseemeth. And yet, while none shall hear me murmur openly against the fate of these poor wretches, I pity them with all my soul.

One among them rouses my compassion most. A lissome chit of girl, she, with nut-brown hair and eyes as grey as the sea, and such a yearning in her pale, frightened child-face as might wring compassion from a stone. I hear tell she will be put on the block on Wednesday next, though it is understood that Brother Joshua shall have her for his household drudge in part requital of his valiant work against the Frenchmen and the Indians. If this be so, God pity the poor wench, for Joshua is a hard man and passionate, never sparing of himself or others, and prodigal with fist and whip to urge his servants unto greater diligence.

“Eh bien, Monsieur,” remarked de Grandin as I sought the next marked sage in the diary, “it seems this Monsieur Joshua of yours was the very devil of a fellow.”

“Huh, you haven’t got to first base yet,” Phipps answered with a grimness of expression that belied the lightness of his words.

29th Sep. 1755—Have pity, gentle Saviour, for I, the meanest of thy creatures and a sinful man, harbor thoughts of blood and death against mine own kin. On Lord’s Day I visited my brother, and as I made to enter at the kitchen did behold Marguerite DuPont, the Popish serving wench, bearing water from the well. A brace of heavy buckets, oaken-staved and bound with brass, she staggered under, and their weight was like to bear her down, had not I hastened to her succor.

A look of passing wonder she gave me as I took the bucket-yoke from off her shoulders and placed it on mine own, and, “Merci beaucoup, M’sieu”, she whispered, with the words dropping me a curtsey as though she were a free woman and mine equal in station.

Her hands are red and rough with toil, but small and finely made, and in die greyness of her eyes dwells that to make a man’s heart beat the faster. Perchance she is a witch, like most of the idolaters, as Parson did expound at meeting that same morning. Howbeit, she is very fair to look on, nor do I take shame to myself for that I took her burden on me.

“C’est le sabbat, n’est-ce-pas, M’sieu’?” she asks me as I set the buckets down beside the doorstep, and when I nodded she looked at me so sadly I was like to weep for very pity.

Then from the bodice of her gown she drew a tiny cross-shaped thing, a bit of sinful vanity shaped like the cross whereon our Lord suffered for the vileness of mankind, and would have raised the symbol to her lips.

“What means this heathenry, ye Papist slut?” bellows Brother Joshua, bursting from the house-door like a watchdog from his kennel at scent of a marauder. “What means this demonry in a Christian man’s house?” with which he struck the fond thing from her hand and caught her such a cuff upon the ear that down she fell beside it.

The lass picked up the cross and would have hid it in her dress again, but Joshua was quicker, and ground it under heel, well-nigh crushing her frail hand therewith.

She sprang up like a pantheress, her mild eyes all aflame, and defied him to his face.

“Thou harlot’s brat, I’ll learn ye to act so to your betters!” raged he, and struck her on the mouth with his clenched hand, so that the blood flowed down her chin and onto her kirtle.

“Nay, brother,” I opposed, “entreat her not thus spitefully. ‘Tis Lord’s Day, and she, of all the townsfolk, labours. ‘Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy … thou and thy manservant and thy maidservant …’ As for her vanity, bethink you that her faith, mistaken though it be, is dear to her as ours is to us.”

“Now, as the Lord liveth,” swore Brother Joshua, “meseemeth thou art half a Papist thyself, Obediah. Whence comes this sudden courage to champion the Popish bitch? The Sabbath Day, quotha? at knoweth she of sabbaths, save those wherein the witches and warlocks make merry? Rest and meditation on the Sabbath are for the Lord’s elect, not such as she. Now go thy ways, and quickly, lest I forget thou art my brother, and do thee injury.”

Lord Christ, forgive! In that wild moment I could have slain him where he stood, nor had a thought of guilt for doing it. In will, if not in act, I am another Cain!

At college, hard at work upon the middle voice of Greek, yet making sorry business of it.

Mea culpa,—I have sinned. Into my heart hath crept a lustful and unhallowed love for Marguerite DuPont, the kitchen-drudge.

What boots it is she be a bondmaid and a servant of the Antichrist? What matter though she be joined to her idols like Ephraim of old? Surely, though we approach God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, or through His maid-mother Mary, the goal we seek is still the same, however different be our roads. And yet I may not tell her of my love; I dare not clip her in mine arms and whisper ’dearmeats to her. She is my brother’s thing and chattel, bound even as his blackamoors and Indians are bound, though by the letter of the law she is a war-captive and subject to release on ransom or exchange. Woe me, that I have loved a Hagar in the tents of Abraham!

“Name of a small blue man, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin tweaked the ends of his diminutive mustache, “I think I sniff the odour of romance here. Read on, I pray. I burn, I itch, I am consumed with curiosity.”

O Lord Christ, fill me plenteously with Thy love, for love of woman never shall be mine! This day sennite Marguerite gave birth to a man-child. She holds her peace right stubbornly, though many of the goodwives, and even Parson himself, have urged her to declare her partner in iniquity that he may stand his trial with her for adultery. Anon, when she is taken from her bed, she must make recompense for her sin, and if her paramour be not discovered, must bear the scarlet symbol of concupiscence alone upon her bosom to her life’s end.

Brother Joshua shows strange kindness for one so stern and upright. The child is cared for by his orders, and he has even visited the wretched mother in the outhouse where she lies. Forgive me, brother, I did wrong thee when I said thy heart was flint.

The child is dark, unlike its mother, and well favoured withal. ’Tis pity it must go through life as filius nullius, according to the lawmen’s phrase.

My brother builds a house without the town. Foundations are already digged, and soon the chimneys will be raised. The idea likes me much, for when the building is completed he will take Marguerite and the child there, and she shall thus have respite from the townsfolk’s jeers.

11th Dec. ’56—My brother’s charity is interpreted. ‘Twas passing strange that he who would have rayed a flea for hide and tallow should have spent his substance on a bond-woman’s brat. Her bastard? Nay, his own! The child she bore was his, and he who calls himself a man of war and valiant battler for the Lord, has taken refuge from his shame behind a woman’s petticoat, and left her lonely to bear calumny, while she for very loyalty to her child’s sire forbore to name him to the elders, however much they pressed her to declare her paramour.

25th Dec. 1756—O Marguerite, my Marguerite, how fondly have I loved thee! I had e’en thought of asking thee for wife and giving my name to thy brat, but now it is too late—have pity, Heaven!—too late!

Marguerite is no more, and on my brother’s brow is graved indelibly the brand of Cain. From Cujo his blackamoor slave I have the tale, and though I may not denounce him, for I have but my own word, sith word of slave may not be taken in the court against the master, I here and now brand him a murderer. Joshua my brother, Thou art the man!

Together with his black slaves and his Indians, as precious a crew of cut-throats as ever hanged in chains, my brother went to his new house to lay the hearth, and with him went the child and Marguerite. In the darkness of the night they heard her singing to the babe as she gave suck, a wanton song wherewith the Popists greet the Christmas-tide, “Venite adoremus.”

“What means this heathenry within a half-built Christian house?” asks Brother Joshua, and catches her a smart cuff on the ear so that the child fell down upon the floor, and as it set up a wailing he spurned it with his foot. Thereat my Marguerite rose up and snatched a dagger from her dress and wounded him full sore, for she was like a she-bear when it sees its cub threatened.

“By Abraham and Isaac, and by the Joshua whose name I bear, I’ll lay the hearthstone of my house according to the ancient rites!” my brother swears. “My house shall have to guard it that which none other in the colony can boast!”

And then they digged a great hole in the earth before the fireplace, and laid her bound therein, and rolled the hearth-slab forward to cement it over her.

So when she knew her end was come, and all hope fled, she cursed him in the English tongue she scarce could frame to form aright.

“Wo to thee, soiler of the innocent and hider of thy shame,” she told him. “The wrath of God be on thy head and countenance, and on thy sons and thy sons’ sons from generation unto generation. May thou and thy descendants drink blood in the day thy first-born is delivered. May thou and thy seed never look upon the faces of thy children or on thy wives in motherhood, and may this curse endure while hatred lasts!”

What more she would have said they know not, for even Joshua paled before her maledictions, and gave the signal for the stone to be put in its place.

De Grandin was leaning forward, his little round blue eyes fixed on me in a set, unwinking stare as I turned to the next entry. Young Phipps, too, sat rigidly, and it seemed to me the very air of my peaceful study was pregnant with the presence of those tragic actors in the old New England tragedy.

“3rd. Mar. ’58,” I read. “Joshua this day intermarried with Martha Partridge.”

The next item was the last in the book, and seemed much later than the others, for the ink retained some semblance of its original blackness.

25th Dec. 1758—The curse has fallen. This night Martha my brother’s wife, who hath been gravid, was delivered of a son whom they will call Elijah. Joshua sate before the fire in his great chair, gazing into the flames and on the hearth-stone which hides the evidence of the filthy act he wrought two little years agone, and thinking the Lord God only knows what thoughts. Did you see Marguerite’s pale face in the flames, brother; did the wind in the chimney recall her pleading voice as you waited the midwife’s summons to ascend the stairs?

Anon they came and said he had a son, and straightaway he rose up and went to look on him. But at the entrance of the chamber he fell down like Sisera of old when Jael smote him. And in that moment salt and bitterness were in his mouth, for from his lips gushed forth a bloody spate that dyed his beard and stained the oaken planking of the floor. He never saw the features of his lawful first-born son.

Have pity, Jesu!

It was dead-still in the study as I closed the little book. The soft hiss of a pine log in the fireplace sounded through the shadows, and the hooting of a motor horn outside came to us like a doleful period to the tale of futile love and stark tragedy.

“It sounds fantastic to me,” I commented as I returned the book to young Phipps. “I remember the Arcadians were expatriated by the New England colonists during King George’s War—Longfellow tells the story in Evangeline—but I never heard the poor devils were made virtual slaves by the New Englanders, or that they—”

“Many unpleasant things concerning our histories we forget easily, my friend,” de Grandin reminded with a slightly sarcastic smile. “Your Monsieur Whittier the realist takes up the tale where Monsieur Longfellow the romanticist leaves off. However,”—he raised his shoulders in a shrug—“why hold resentment? The crimes the ancestors committed against New France was nobly atoned for by their descendants. Did not your soldiers from New England pour out virile young blood like water in two vast transfusions—twice in one generation, by blue! when la belle France bled white with the sale boche’s bayonet wounds? At Cantigny and Château-Thierry and in the Argonne and on the beaches of Normandy they died all gloriously, while the descendants of those very Arcadians rested comfortably at home, enjoying the protection of Britain’s arm, making no move to help the land whence they had sprang—parbleu, I damn think they had sprung too far!”

“But that other,” I protested. “Burying a live woman under a hearthstone—why, it’s incredible. They might have done such things in heathen times, but—”

“Hélas, Friend Trowbridge, your ecclesiastical learning is little better than your knowledge of history,” de Grandin cut in. “Those old ones, Christian as well as pagan, laid the foundations of their houses, forts and even churches in blood. Yes.

“Saint Columba, founder of the abbey of Inona, inhumed one of his monks named Oran alive beneath the walls because he feared the demons of the earth might tear the holy structure down unless appeased by human sacrifice. Later historians have endeavored to sugar-coat the facts—later writers have revised the tale of Chaperone Rouge to make the little girl and her gran’mère come forth alive from the wolf’s belly, also.

“Again, no later than 1885, was found another evidence of such deeds done by Christians. That year the parish church of Holsworthy, in north Devonshire, England, was restored. In the southwest angle-wall the workmen found a human skeleton interred; its mouth—and nose-places were stopped with mortar. The evidence was plain; it was a live-burial designed to make the walls stand firm because of human sacrifice to the earth-demons. Once more: In tearing down an ancient house in Lincolnshire the workmen found a baby’s skeleton beneath the hearth. Yes, my friends, such things were done, doubtlessly, in olden days, and our Monsieur Joshua was but reviving a dead-but-not-forgotten custom of the past when he declared he’d lay the hearthstone of his house according to the ancient rites.”

“H’m,” I reflected, “it hardly seems possible such bigotry could have obtained so late, though. Just think, the Revolutionary War began only fifteen years later, yet here was a man so intolerant that—”

“Eh bien, again you do forget, my friend,” the little Frenchman chuckled. “Your war of revolution had been fought and won, also your second war with England, and our so glorious Revolution was a fait accompli while yet the Catholics burned Protestant and Jew with fine impartiality. It was not till the year that Andrew Jackson held New Orleans from the British—1814—that the last auto da fé had been held in Spain. And not till 1829 were Catholics granted civil rights in England. Until that time they could not vote or hold a public office—yet the legislation to enfranchise them met with violent, bloody opposition. The soldiers had to be called out to put down ‘anti-Papist’ mobs. But we indulge in reminiscence unduly. It is with Monsieur Phipps’ problem we must deal.

“Tell me,” he turned to the visitor, “is this house of blood and sorrow where your wicked ancestor met death still standing, and if so, where?”

“Yes,” Phipps replied. “I’ve never been there, but it’s still owned by the family, though it’s been unoccupied for twenty-five years or more. I’m told it’s in remarkably good condition. It stands just outside the present city of Woolwich, Massachusetts.”

De Grandin drummed thoughtfully on the desk top. “I think it would be well for us to go there, my friend.”

“Précisément. When water is polluted one seeks the source of the stream. It seems to me the fountainhead of the doom resting on your menfolk may be that unhallowed grave where Marguerite DuPont lies buried without benefit of clergy or the tribute of a single tear, save such as your great-uncle Obediah may have shed for her in secret.”

“CAB, SIR? TAXI? TAKE you to the best hotel in town,” a lean, lank Yankee youth challenged as we alighted from the B. & M. train and lugged our handbags from the Woolwich station.

“Holà, mon brave,” de Grandin challenged in his turn, “you know the country hereabouts, I doubt not—and the old landmarks, yes?”

“Très bon. You are the man we seek, and none other. Can you deliver us in good condition at the old Phipps homestead—you know that place?”

An expression of blank amazement came to the Jehu’s lean, weather-stained face. The Frenchman’s request, it appeared, was comparable to that of a tourist in Naples asking to be driven to the rim of Vesuvius’ crater.

“But getting back is something else again, one is to understand? No matter. Do you transport us thither. We shall take responsibility for getting back.”

The youth led us to a dilapidated Ford which seemed in the last stages of paralysis agitans and took almost as much coaxing as a balky mule to get underway.

For half an hour we drove through wide well-kept streets and along a smooth highway, finally headed up a rutted clay road to the cedar-pillared entrance of a weed-choked park. “This is as far’s I go,” our driver announced as he brought the limping vehicle to a halt.

“But no, it is that we desire assistance with the luggage,” de Grandin protested, only to meet with a determined shake of the head.

“Not me, Mister. I contracted to bring ye here, an’ I done it, but nothin’ was said about my goin’ into that place, an’ I ain’t a-goin’—”

“Eh, what is it you tell me?” de Grandin tweaked the ends of his mustache. “Is it a place of evil reputation?”

“Is it? Say, brother, you couldn’t get th’ State Militia to camp there overnight. ’Course, I don’t believe in ghosts or nothin’ like that, but—”

“Mais certainement, so much is evident,” de Grandin’s features creased in one of his quick elfin smiles, “but you would not test your disbelief too strongly, is it not? Very well, we thank you for the transportation. As to that in which you disbelieve so staunchly, we shall endeavor to cope with it unaided, and with the burden of our luggage, also.”

The old Phipps mansion was, as Edwin Phipps had told us, in remarkably good repair for its age and the neglect it had suffered during the past quarter-century. The door that pierced the centre of the building was of adz-cut timber, roughly smoothed with a jack-plane and hung on massive “Holy Lord” hinges of hand-wrought iron. It seemed strong enough to withstand a siege supported by anything less than modern artillery.

Edwin produced a key of hammered brass massive enough to have locked the Bastille, fitted it to the iron-rimmed keyhole and shot back the bolts. Hardly conscious that I did so, I wondered that the lock should work so smoothly after years of disuse.

“Entrez,” de Grandin stood aside and waved us forward; “the great adventure is begun, my friends.”

The room we entered was like the setting of a stage. Obviously it was originally intended as both entrance-hall and living room, possibly as dining room as well. Lofty and paneled in some sort of age-darkened wood, with a fireplace large enough to drive a limousine through, it gave that impression of immensity and chill one gets in going through a Continental cathedral. A broad staircase, balustraded in hand-wrought oak, ran to a gallery whence three doors, one to the right, two to the left, gave off. There were also doors letting through the right wall of the hall, but none to the left. At the stairway’s foot, by way of newel post, stood a massive bronze cannon, muzzle down, evidently the spoil of some raid led by old Joshua against the French, for engraved on its breech were the Bourbon arms and a regal crown surmounting a flourishing capital L. In the centre of the hall was a great table of Flemish oak; several straight-backed chairs, faded and mouldering with age, stood sentry against the walls. Before the monstrous fireplace, almost on the hearthstone, yawned a massive armchair upholstered in tattered Spanish leather. I wondered if this could be the “great chair” in which old Joshua sat when the midwife came to call him to his son, and to the doom pronounced on him and his by Marguerite DuPont.

De Grandin glanced about the place and shook his shoulders as if a chill more bitter than that of the December day had pierced his fur-lined greatcoat. “Pour l’amour d’un bouc, a little fire would help this place immensely,” he murmured. “Phipps, my friend, do you dispose our belongings as seems good to you. Trowbridge, mon vieux, by your leave you and I will sally forth in search of fuel for yonder fireplace.”

We had included a pair of Boy Scout axes in our outfit, and in a few minutes cut a plentiful supply of dry wood from the fallen trees in the grove behind the house.

“How is it with your nose, my friend?” he asked as we stacked our forage by the rear door—the very door where Obediah Phipps had taken Marguerite DuPont’s burden on his shoulders.

“H’m. There’s that mingling of dust and dry leather, mildew and decay you always smell in old houses, particularly those that have been shut up a long—”

“Mais non, it was not that. I can not quite place it, and I am puzzled. It is a sort of blending of the odours of naphtha and linseed oil—”

“About the only place you’re likely to smell that would be a printshop. Printer’s ink is made of—”

“Mordieu!” he slapped me on the shoulder. “Tu parles, mon vieux! L’imprimerie—the printing-office, yes! The place where they spread ink containing linseed oil and naphtha and the good God knows what else on the type, then wash it off with benzine. Why should there be a smell like that in this old house, I ask to know?” He eyed me fiercely, almost accusingly.

“Haven’t the slightest idea. I hadn’t noticed it. Perhaps your nose played tricks on you. These old houses are as full of strange smells as—”

“As my poor head shall be of maggots until the mystery is solved,” he supplied. “No matter; we can give it our attention in the morning. Meanwhile we have our work to do, and me, I am most vilely hungry.

“Mille pardons, little one,” he murmured almost humbly as he crossed the wide slate hearthstone to lay logs in the fireplace, “we do not tread upon your grave with wanton feet.”

DINNER WAS A SIMPLE meal: Fried eggs and bacon and potatoes washed down with strong boiled coffee, tinned biscuit thickly spread with Camembert and a bottle of Saint Estephe which de Grandin had insisted on bringing. Camp cots were set up on the freestone floor of the great hall, and we rolled ourselves in several thicknesses of blankets before ten o’clock had sounded on de Grandin’s little travelling timepiece. “Bonne nuit, mes braves,” the little Frenchman murmured sleepily. “Let us sleep like the clear conscience; we have much to do tomorrow.”

The fire had died down to a sullen smouldering embers, and shadows once more held dominion in the great cold hall when I awakened with a start. Had I been dreaming, or had there been a Presence bending over me? I wondered as I opened sleepy eyes and looked about. Whatever it had been, it had not been hostile, I knew. Just for a moment I had sensed something, something white and misty, bending above me, a pleasant, comforting something like a mother soothing her child in the night—smooth, calming hands passing lightly over my features, a gentle murmuring voice, a faintly familiar scent breathed through the darkness.

“Trowbridge, mon ami,” de Grandin’s whisper came, “did you see—did you feel it?”

“Ye-es, I think so—” I began, but stopped abruptly at the sound from Edwin Phipps’s cot.

“Ug—ou!” Half exclamation, half frightened, strangling cry it was, and in the quarter-light we saw him rear upright in his blankets, wrestling with a thing invisible to us.

“It—something tried to choke me!” he gasped as de Grandin and I rushed to his aid. “I was asleep and dreamed someone—a woman, I think—bent over me, stroking my cheeks and forehead, then suddenly it—whatever it was—seemed to change, to go as savage as a lunatic, and grasped me by the throat. Lord, I thought I was a dead pigeon!”

He rose from his cot, accepted a sip of brandy from de Grandin’s flask, and felt his neck gingerly. “’Spect it was a dream,” he murmured with a shamefaced grin, “but ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ is mighty solid hereabouts if it were.”

I was about to make some soothing commonplace remark when de Grandin’s minatory hiss and upraised finger cut me short. Distinctly through the outside darkness came the echo of a shot, a second one, and a woman’s wailing, terrified scream, both curiously faint and far-away seeming.

We waited tensely a moment, then, as the woman’s cry repeated, de Grandin snatched up his coat and tiptoed to the front door. As he flung it open the muffled quality of the sounds was explained. While we slept before the fire a sleet-storm had come up, and though there was but little wind the icy dribble fell with a hiss almost menacing as that of a snake.

An indistinct form blundered through the sleet-stabbed dark; it was not well-defined—a sort of something mantled in light-colored draperies weaving to and fro as if it lacked the sense of sight, or followed a zigzagging trail. Now and again it stopped with raised arms, then bowed above the ice-glazed ground and criss-crossed back and forth, clashing into shrubs, caroming from tree to bush to broken garden ornament. “What is it?” I asked uneasily. There was that about the lurching form which made me unwilling to see it at close quarters.

“Parbleu, it is a woman!” Jules de Grandin exclaimed, and even as he answered came the faint, exhausted hail:

Together the Frenchman and I dashed into the storm, seized the half-fainting girl and dragged her to the shelter of the house.

“Thanks!” she gasped as we brought her into the hall. “I think I’d have been done for in another moment. If—you—hadn’t—” her voice broke, and she slumped down, an inert wet huddle on the freestone floor.

“Grand Dieu, Friend Trowbridge, see; it is that she is wounded!” cried de Grandin as he bent to raise her. “Assistez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”

On the left sleeve of her suede trench coat showed a spot of angry red, and as I helped him take away the garment I saw the leather was pierced by two small holes, one at the rear of the sleeve, the other at the front. Obviously, a bullet-wound.

Working quickly, we removed her overcoat and Fair Isle sports vest, then washed and bandaged the wound as best we could. For lack of better styptic we made a pack of boric acid powder, of which we fortunately had a small can, and crushed aspirin tablets, thus approximating Senn’s first-aid dressing. For bandages we requisitioned three clean handkerchiefs from de Grandin’s dressing-case, and tore a towel lengthwise to knot it round her neck for a sling.

“How comes it, Mademoiselle, that you flee wounded through the storm?” de Grandin asked as he lowered the glass of brandy-and-water from her lips. “What sacré bête has done this monstrous thing?”

The girl gave him a smile that was half grin, and wrinkled her nose at him. “I only wish I knew,” she answered. “If I could get him up my alley—” She broke off with a wince of pain, then took command of herself again.

“Joe Darnley and I were driving home from Branchmoore when this storm came down on us like a circus tent collapsing. Something went wrong with the gadget that works the jiggermacrank just as we came to the lane leading here. The storm had got us all confused, and neither of us knew just where we were, so while he got out to tinker with the thingununy in the engine I took the flash and looked for landmarks. Just as he got the doololly fixed and we were ready to start, another car came rushing down the road—no lights, either!—and someone in it shouted for us to get the hell out o’ there. Guess we didn’t move fast enough, for they started shooting, and I felt something like a blow from a fist, then a hornet-sting, on my left arm. It hurts like fury, too!” She made a little face, then turned to de Grandin with a brave effort at a smile.

“Joe Darnley’s a swine. The contemptible thing stepped on the gas and left me there, wounded and lost. I screamed for help and started to run—not in any special direction; just run, that’s all. Presently I saw your light and—here I am.” She gave the Frenchman another friendly smile, then seemed to stiffen with sudden frightened realization.

“I say, this is the old Phipps house, isn’t it? Who—who are you? I thought this place was deserted—I’ve always heard it was haunted by—” She broke off with another effort at a smile, but it was not highly successful.

“Eh bien,” de Grandin chuckled, “the story is a long one, Mademoiselle. However, we are here quite lawfully, I assure you. Permittez-moi. This is Monsieur Edwin Phipps, one of the owners of the property; this is Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, of Harrisonville, New Jersey. I am Jules de Grandin of Paris and elsewhere, and all of us are at your service.”

She nodded in frank friendliness. “It’s no mere figure of speech when I say I’m glad to meet you. My name’s DuPont—Marguerite DuPont, of Woolwich, Massachusetts. I’m assistant at the public library, and very much in debt to you gentlemen for services rendered.”

She looked at us with puzzled resentment. “What’s the matter? DuPont’s a good name, isn’t it?”

“Good?” de Grandin echoed. “O, la la! It is an excellent-good name, indeed!” Then:

“Your pardon, Mademoiselle. The name DuPont is intimately connected with the tragedy of this old house, and with the bloody doom that dogs the family that owns it. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day after that, when you are feeling stronger, we shall explain in detail. Now, if you please, you shall lie down and rest, and we shall take especial pains that no harm comes to one of your name in this place, of all others.”

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.

“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.”

“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 shrieks 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—”

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 shine 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.

“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.

“So to that old and very wicked house we went and on the very night of our arrival comes Mademoiselle Marguerite the second praying shelter from the storm and those miscreants who have wounded her.

“Anon there comes that Monsieur Claude intent on frightening us away, but I am not deceived and shoot him dead as a herring. He dies, and in that same hour his son is born. Thus by accident or design the old doom falls on him.

“What I did not know at the time was that the lady we had rescued was a lineal descendant of that Marguerite DuPont whose body we have come to accord Christian burial. Remember how it is recorded that she bore a son to wicked old Monsieur Joshua. That son assumed his mother’s name, since craven cowardice had caused his father to disown him.

“At first the scandal of his birth hung on him like a dirty cloak, but those were stirring times, the freedom of a people trembled in the balance, and men were measured more by deeds than by paternity. From out the crucible of war came Joshua DuPont a hero, and later he became a leading citizen of Woolwich. His progeny retained his virtues, and the family which he founded now ranks with that from which he sprang. DuPont is now an honoured name in Woolwich.

“This much I learned by discreet inquiry; what I could not know, because my eyes were everywhere but where they should have been, was that the hatred of the ancestors offered no bar to the love of their descendants, Parbleu, that Monsieur Cupid, he shoots his arrows where he damn pleases, and none may say him nay!

“Today, when the last gasp of dying hatred would have overwhelmed Friend Edwin, Mademoiselle Marguerite does battle with her ancestress for the life of him she loves and—how is it the Latin poet sings?—Amor omnia vincit—love conquers all, including family curses. Yes. I am very happy, me.” He drew a handkerchief from his cuff and dabbed at his eyes.

HALF AN HOUR AGO de Grandin and I returned from the pretty home Edwin and Marguerite Phipps have built in Harrisonville. This afternoon their first-born son, Edwin de Grandin Phipps, aetatis six months and five days, was christened with all the ceremony ordained by the Book of Common Prayer, with Jules de Grandin and me for godfathers. There was much to eat and more to drink attendant on the function, and I regret to say my little friend returned in a condition far removed from that approved by the good ladies of the W.C.T.U.

Seated on the bed, one patent leather shoe removed, he gazed with mournful concentration at the mauve-silk sock thus exposed. “I wonder if she sometimes thinks of me,” he murmured. “Does she dream within the quiet of her cloister of the days we wandered hand in hand beside the River Loire?”

“My friend,” he answered solemnly, “Je suis ivre comme un porc—me, I am drunk like a pig!”