Devil’s Rosary

“TEN THOUSAND LITTLE SMALL blue devils! It is annoying. I am vexed, I am harassed, I am exasperated!” Jules de Grandin felt successively in the pockets of his blue-flannel jacket, his oyster-white linen waistcoat and his pin-striped trousers, then turned such a woebegone face to me that I burst out laughing.

“Ha, sale bête, you laugh at my distress?” he demanded fiercely. “So. Parbleu, you shall pay dearly for your levity. I give you choice of three alternatives: Hand me a cigarette forthwith, convey me instantly where more can be purchased, or die by my hand within the moment. Choose!” He tweaked the tightly waxed ends of his diminutive wheat-blond mustache after the manner of the swashbuckling hero in a costume melodrama.

“I never smoked a cigarette in my life, so my first chance is gone,” I grinned, “and I’m too busy to have you kill me this afternoon, so I suppose I’ll have to cart you to a cigar store. There’s the railway station, shall we get them at the news stand?”

I maneuvered the car across the busy street and parked beside the station entrance. “Wait a minute,” I called as he leaped nimbly to the platform, “you’ve put bad ideas in my head. I think I’ll get a cigar here. I don’t usually smoke while driving, but—”

“Perfectly,” he interrupted with an impish grin, “and you shall buy me a packet of cigarettes when you purchase your cigar. I impose the penalty for laughing at my misfortune a moment since.”

The customary exsurgence which heralded the arrival of a train from the West was beginning as I paused beside the cigar counter. Red Caps moved leisurely toward the landing-platform, a baggage agent opened his book and drew the pencil from his cap band, one or two hotel runners showed signs of returning animation as they rose from the bench where they lounged.

I pocketed my change and turned to light my cigar as the locomotive snorted to a halt and passengers began alighting from the Pullmans, but a cheery hail brought me about as I was in the act of rejoining de Grandin. “Hullo there, Doctor Trowbridge—imagine running into you at the station—you’re a sight for tired eyes! Now it does seem like getting home!” Burned to a crisp by the Arizona sun, lean, but by no means emaciated, and showing no trace of the decline which had driven him from our damp Eastern climate three years before, young Ransome Bartrow shouldered his way through the crowd and took my hand in a bone-crushing grip. “By George, I’m glad to see you again, sir!” he assured me, grinding my knuckles till I was ready to roar with pain.

“And I’m glad to see you, Rance,” I answered. “It’s hardly necessary to ask how you feel, but—”

“No buts about it,” he returned with a laugh. “The doctors looked me over with a microscope—if I’d had anything from dandruff to flat feet they’d have found it—and pronounced me cured. I can live here the rest of my life, and needn’t get nervous prostration every time I’m caught in a rain storm, either. Ain’t that great?”

“It surely is,” I congratulated. “Got your baggage? Come on, then, I want you to meet—”

“Holy smoke, that reminds me!” he burst out. “I want you to meet—” He turned, dragging me after him to a modishly dressed young woman who mounted guard above an imposing pile of hand-luggage. “Sylvia, dear,” he announced, “this is Doctor Trowbridge. He’s had the honor of knowing your lord and master since he was one second old. Doctor Trowbridge, this is my wife.”

As I took the girl’s hand in mine I was forced to admit Ransome had made an excellent choice, if externals were to be trusted, for she was pretty in an appealing way, with large gray eyes, soft ash-blond hair and a rather sad mouth, and from the look she gave her husband there was no need to ask whether theirs had been a love match.

“And now to meet the stern parent,” young Bartrow proclaimed. “I wrote Dad I was bringing him a surprise, but I didn’t tell him what it was, and I didn’t tell what train I was coming on. Wanted to take him unawares, you know. I—oh, I say, Doctor Trowbridge, won’t you come up to the house with us? Maybe the pater will have a stroke or something when he meets Sylvia, and it’s only Christian for us to have a physician along to administer first aid and take his dying statement. Even if he doesn’t go into convulsions, it’ll be worth your trip to see his face when I say, ‘Meet the wife.’ What d’ye say?”

My commonplace reply was foreign to my thoughts, for there was more than a possibility the boy’s jesting prediction might be realized.

Ransome Bartrow was his father’s idol. He was his parents’ first and only child, born when both were well past forty, and his advent had led to complications which took his mother’s life within a year. His father had married relatively late in life, and with the passing of his adored wife had lavished all the affection of his lonely life upon his son. There was money in abundance, and nothing which could be bought had ever been denied the boy. Copybook maxims to the contrary notwithstanding, young Ransome had developed into a fine young man. He stood well in all his classes at school and excelled in most forms of athletics, rowing stroke on his varsity crew. Entering business with his father after graduation, he showed an aptitude for work which seemed to guarantee success to the newly formed firm of James Bartrow & Son, but before a year had passed the malady which strikes so many former oarsmen fastened on him, and only a hurried trip to Arizona saved his life. From the day his son departed to the West the father had counted the minutes of their separation like a rosary of sorrow, and now when his boy returned only to present a strange young woman who by the law of God and man had first claim on his affections—there might be need for digitalis when the bride was introduced.

JULES DE GRANDIN GREETED the youngsters with all the gay enthusiasm he always showed for lovers. Before we had traversed a dozen blocks toward the Bartrow mansion he was sitting with an arm about the shoulders of each, rattling off anecdote after droll anecdote, and Ransome Bartrow’s deep, booming laughter mingled with the silvery laugh of his bride as they listened to the witty little Frenchman’s sallies.

James Bartrow stood in the broad drawing-room of his big house, straining thoughtfully at the fireless hearth behind its fencing of polished brass fender. He was a big man, well over six feet tall, with a big head crowned with a mane of iron-gray hair and a trimly cut white beard. Something in the bigness and obvious power—physical and mental—of the man seemed to strike his son with awe, and as he tiptoed into the apartment, his bride’s hand in his, de Grandin and I at his elbow, his buoyant self-assurance deserted him for the first time.

“Dad?” the appellation was pronounced with questioning diffidence. “Oh, Dad?”

Bartrow wheeled with a nervous jerk, his big, florid face in its frame of white hair lighting up at sound of his son’s voice, and took a quick step forward.

“O-o-oh!” the exclamation was soft, scarcely audible, but freighted with sudden panic consternation, and the little bride cringed quickly against her husband’s arm. The half-nervous, half-playful smile froze on her lips, leaving her little white teeth partially exposed, as though ready to bite. The merry light in her gray eyes blurred to a set, fixed stare of horror as a convulsive shudder of abhorrence ran through her. It was as though, expecting to meet a friend, she had been suddenly confronted by a gruesome specter—an apparition she had reason to dread and hate.

“Oh, Rance,” she pleaded in a voice thick with terror. “Oh, Rance—please—” Pounding heart and laboring lungs choked her voice, but the wild, imploring glance she gave her husband pleaded for protection with an eloquence no words could equal.

Startled by the girl’s unreasoning fright, I glanced at Bartrow. He had paused almost in the act of stepping; his forward foot rested lightly on the floor, scarcely touching the polished boards, and in his face had come an expression I could not fathom. Astonishment, incredulous delight, something like exultation, shone in his steel-blue eyes, and the smile which came unbidden to his bearded lips was such as a fanatic inquisitor might have worn when some long-sought and particularly virulent heretic came into his power.

The tableau lasted but an instant, and for that fleeting second the sultry September air was charged with an electric thrill of concentrated terror and delight, panic fear and savage exultation of vengeance about to be fulfilled.

Then we were once more normal twentieth century people. With words of welcome and genial thumps upon the back and chest James Bartrow greeted his son, and he was the smiling, jovial, new-found father to the bride. But I noticed that the kiss he placed upon her dutifully upturned cheek was the merest perfunctory salutation, and as his lips came near her face the girl’s very flesh seemed to cringe from the contact, light as it was.

Bartrow’s heavy voice boomed out an order, and a cobweb-festooned bottle in a wicker cradle was brought from the cellar by the butler. The wine was ruby-red and ruby-clear, and Jules de Grandin’s small blue eyes sparkled appreciatively as they beheld the black-glass bottle. “Arcachon ’89!” he murmured almost piously as he passed the glass under his nostrils, savoring the wine’s aroma reverently before he drank. “Mordieu, it is exquisite!”

But while the rest of us drank deeply of the almost priceless vintage little Mrs. Bartrow scarcely moistened her lips, and at the bottom of her eyes when they turned toward her father-in-law was a look that made me shiver. And in her soft, low voice there came a thin, metallic rasp whenever she spoke to him which told of fear and abhorrence. By the way she sat, every nerve tense to the snapping-point, I could see she struggled mightily for self-control.

It made me ill at ease to watch this veiled, silent battle between James Bartrow and his son’s wife, and at the first opportunity I murmured an excuse that I had several calls to make and hastened to the outside air.

I shot the starter to my car and turned toward home, wondering if I had not imagined it all, but:

“Tiens, my friend, the situation, it is interesting, n’est-ce-pas?” remarked de Grandin.

“Ah bah, you do play the dummy merely for the pleasure of being stubborn! What should I mean? Does the welcomed-home bride customarily regard her hitherto unknown beau-père as a bird might greet a suddenly-met serpent? And does the father-in-law usually welcome home his son’s wife with an expression which might have done great credit to the wicked, so hungry wolf when la petite Chaperon Rouge came tap-tapping at her grandmamma’s cottage-door? I damn think not.”

“You’re crazy,” I assured him testily. “It’s unfortunate, I’ll admit; but there’s no ground for you to build one of your confounded mysteries on here.”

“U’m? And what is your explanation?” he returned in a flat, accentless tone.

“Why, I can only think that Bartrow reminds his daughter-in-law irresistibly of someone she fears and hates through and through, and—”

“Précisément,” he agreed with a vigorous nod, “and that someone she must have hated with a hate to make our estimates of hatred pale and watery. More, she must have feared him as a mediæval anchoret feared erotic dreams. Perhaps, also, since you are in explanatory mood at present, you will explain the look of recognition—of diabolic, devilish surprised recognition—which came upon Monsieur Bartrow’s face as he beheld the young Madame for the first time?

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered shortly. “It was queer, confoundedly queer, but—”

“But I have small doubt we shall learn more anon than we now know,” he interrupted complacently. “Me, I think we have not seen the last act of this so interesting little play, my friend.”

WE HAD NOT. THE sun had hardly commenced to stain the eastern sky next morning when the nagging chatter of my bedside telephone roused me and Ransome Bartrow’s frightened voice implored my services. “Sylvia—it’s Sylvia!” he told me breathlessly. “She’s in a dreadful state!” then crashed the ’phone receiver back into its hook before I had a chance to ask him what the trouble was.

Alert as a cat, however deeply he might seem immersed in sleep, de Grandin was at my side before I finished dressing, and when I told him Ransome wanted me he dashed back to his room, donned his clothes with more speed than a fireman responding to a third alarm and joined me at the curb as I made ready to dash across town to the Bartrow home.

The chill of early morning drove the last trace of sleep from our eyes as we rushed through the quiet streets, and we were efficiently awake when Ransome Bartrow met us at the door.

“I don’t know what it is—something’s frightened her terribly—a burglar, perhaps—I can’t get anything out of her!” he answered my preliminary questions as we trailed him up the stairs. “She’s almost in collapse, Doctor. For God’s sake, do something for her!”

Sylvia Bartrow was a pitiful figure as she lay in her bed. Her little, heart-shaped face seemed to have shrunk, and her big gray eyes appeared to have widened till they almost obscured her other features. Her cheeks were pale as the linen against which they lay, and her gaze was filmed with unspeakable horror. Without being told, I knew her whole being was vibrant with a desperate agony of terror, and I have never seen a glance more heartrending than the dumb, imploring look she cast on her husband as he entered.

“Shock,” I pronounced after a hurried look, and turned to my medicine kit to fill a syringe with tincture digitalis. Plainly this case was too severe for aromatic ammonia or similar simple remedies.

“Mais oui,” de Grandin explained patiently; “it is the relaxation of the controlling influence exercised by the nervous system on the vital organic functions of the body, my friend. Any extraordinary emotional stress may cause it, especially in women. What happened to affright Madame your wife? Surely, you were here?”

“No, I wasn’t,” Ransome confessed. “I couldn’t sleep, and I’d gone downstairs. It’s hot in Arizona, far hotter than here, but this damned damp heat is strange to me, and I couldn’t bear lying in bed any longer. I’d about made up my mind to go out on the front porch and lie in a hammock when I heard Sylvia scream, and rushed up here to find her like this.”

“No—er—yes; I did! As I dashed up the stairs, two at a time, I could have sworn I heard someone or something moving down the hall, but—”

“Well, it sounded as though it might have been a man in stocking feet or rubber-soled shoes or—once while I was in the West a fool puma got into the upper story of the shack where I was sleeping and dashed around like a crazy thing till it found the open window and jumped out again. That’s the way those footsteps—if they were footsteps—sounded. Like a great, soft-footed animal, sir.”

“Exactement,” the Frenchman nodded gravely. “And Monsieur your father, you did call him?”

“I did, but Dad sleeps on the floor above, and his door was locked. I could hear him snoring in his room, and I couldn’t seem to get any response to my knocking, so I telephoned Doctor Trowbridge.

“Will she recover—she’s not dying, Doctor?” he asked in terror, coming, to my side and looking at his wife with brimming eyes and quivering lips.

“Nonsense—of course, she’s not dying!” I answered, looking up from the watch by which I timed the girl’s pulse. “She’s been badly frightened by something, but her heart action is getting stronger all the time. We’ll give her a sedative in a little while, and she’ll he practically as well as ever when she wakes up. I’d advise her to stay in bed and eat sparingly for the next day or two, though, and I’ll leave some bromides to be taken every hour for the rest of today.”

“Hadn’t we better notify the police? It might have been a burglar she saw,” Ransome suggested.

Jules de Grandin walked to the window and thrust his head out. “It is twenty feet sheer to the ground with nothing a cat might climb,” he remarked after a brief survey. “Your burglar did not enter here.” Then: “You were on the lower floor when Madame alarmed you with her cry. Tell me, which way did the footsteps you heard seem to go?”

Ransome thought a moment, then: “It’s hard to say exactly, but they seemed to go up, though—”

“No, I don’t think so. The servants all sleep in the left wing on this floor, and I’m pretty sure none of ’em would have been up at that hour. But it might have been the burglar running toward the roof. Shall we look?”

We searched the third story of the house, with the exception of the chamber where James Bartrow lay in decidedly audible slumber, but nowhere did we find a trace of the intruder. At the stairway leading to the trap-door in the roof we paused, then turned away in disappointment. The door had long been secured by half a dozen twenty-penny nails driven through frame and casing. Nothing less than a battering-ram could have loosened it.

“You, perhaps, but not Jules de Grandin,” the Frenchman answered. “I am interested, I am intrigued; my curiosity is aroused. I shall seek an explanation.”

“Where but from Madame Sylvia? It was she who saw the intruder; who else can tell us more of him?”

“Assuredly; I would not harass her with questions at this time; but when she is recovered we shall learn from her what it was that came. Me, I have already an idea, but I should like her to confirm it. Then we can take such measures as may be needed to guard against a recurrence. Yes. Certainly.”

OFFICE HOURS WERE OVER and I was preparing to go upstairs and dress for dinner when James Bartrow stalked into my consulting-room. “See here, Trowbridge,” he announced in his customary brusque manner. “I feel like hell on Sunday; I want you to help me snap out of it.”

“All right,” I acquiesced, “I think that can be arranged. What seems to be the trouble?”

He bit the end from a cigar of man-killing proportions, set it alight with the flame from his hammered gold lighter and blew a cloud of smoke toward me across the desk. “Ever feel like kicking a cripple’s crutch out from under him?” he demanded. “Ever say to yourself when you were alone in the room with someone—especially if his back were turned to you—“It would take only one blow to knock him dead. Go on, hit him?” He exhaled another smoke-wreath and regarded me through the drifting white wreaths with an intent look which was almost a challenging glare.

Despite the man’s seriousness, I could not repress a grin. “Certainly, I have,” I answered. “Everybody has those inexplicable impulses to do mischief. Men are only little boys grown up, you know; the principal difference is the normal adult recognizes the childishness of these impulses and dismisses them from his mind. The child gives way to them, so does the subnormal adult whose mind has retained its infantile stature after his body had developed.

“You’ve been working pretty hard at the office lately, haven’t you?” I added, more as a peg on which to hang whatever treatment I recommended than as an actual question.

“No, I haven’t,” he assured me shortly. “I’ve been taking things devilish easy, and if you start any of that fool stuff about my needing to go away for a rest I’ll clout you on the head; but—”

He paused, drew a deep inhalation from his cigar and expelled the smoke almost explosively, then:

“I might as well get it out,” he exclaimed. “It’s my daughter-in-law, Sylvia. Never saw anything like it. The moment I met the girl yesterday afternoon something seemed to snap like a steel trap inside my head. ‘There she is,’ a voice inside me seemed to say, ‘you’ve got her at last; there she is, ready to your hand! Kill her, kill her; do it now!’ Hanged if I didn’t almost leap on the poor kid and strangle her where she stood, too. I know I frightened her, for I must have shown the insane impulse in my face as soon as my eyes lit on her. It was the scared look in her eyes that brought me to my senses. The impulse passed as quickly as it came, but for a moment I thought I was going to flop down in a faint; it left me weak as a cat.”

“H’m,” I murmured professionally. “You say this seizure came on you the moment you saw—”

“Yes, but that’s not all,” he interrupted. “I shouldn’t be here if it were. I managed to shake off the desire to injure her—perhaps I’d better say it left of its own accord in a second—but last night I’d no sooner fallen asleep than I began dreaming of her. Lord!” He passed a handkerchief over his face, and I saw his hands were trembling. I dreamed I was walking through a great, dark wood or grove of some sort. The biggest oak trees I’ve ever seen were everywhere about, their branches seemed to interlace overhead and shut out every vestige of light. Suddenly I came to the biggest tree of all, and as I halted a shaft of moonlight pierced through an opening in its foliage, letting a pencil of luminance down like a spotlight in a darkened theater. Before me, in the center of that beam of light, lay Sylvia, dressed in some sort of long, loose, flowing robe of thin white cloth, with a wreath of wild roses twined in her unbound hair. She was drawn back against the gnarled roots of the tree in a half-reclining position, her wrists and ankles fastened to them with slender wicker withes. As I stopped beside her she looked up in my face with such an expression of mingled pleading and fear that it ought to have melted my heart; but it didn’t. Not by a damn sight. Instead, it seemed to incense me—set me wild with a maniacal desire to kill—and I reached down, tore her dress away from her bosom and was about to plunge a knife into her breast when she screamed, and the dream winked out like an extinguished candle flame. Queer, too; I kept right on dreaming, realizing that I’d been dreaming of killing Sylvia and regretting that I hadn’t been able to finish the crime. In my second dream I seemed to be deliberately wooing the return of the murder-dream, so I could take it up where I left off, like beginning a new installment of a story which had been continued at an exciting incident. Man, I tell you I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted to kill that girl, and I’ve a feeling I shouldn’t have stopped at mere murder if I’d been able to finish that dream!”

“Pardonnez-moi, Messieurs,” de Grandin entered the consulting-room like an actor responding to a cue. “I was passing, I recognized Monsieur Bartrow’s voice; I could not help but hear what he said.

“Monsieur,” he directed a level, unwinking stare at the visitor, “what you dreamed last night was not altogether a dream. No, there was action, as well as vision there. This afternoon, because the good Trowbridge was overburdened with work, I took it on myself to call on Madame Sylvia. It is not the physician’s province to interrogate the servants, but this is more than a mere medical case. I felt it before, now I am assured of it. Therefore, I made discreet inquiries among your domestic staff, and from the laundress I did learn that a chemise de nuit of Madame Sylvia had been torn longitudinally—above the breast, even as you tore her robe in your dream, Monsieur.”

“Non, by no means, it is not well, my friend; it is very far otherwise. You are perhaps aware that Madame Sylvia’s indisposition arises from a fright she sustained, from some unknown cause—a burglar, the hypothesis has been thus far?”

“Monsieur, that burglar could not be found, neither hide nor hair of him could be discovered, though Doctor Trowbridge, your son and I did search your house with a comb of the fine teeth. No. For why?” He paused, regarding Bartrow and me alternately with his alert, cat-like stare.

“All right, ‘for why?’” Bartrow demanded sharply when the silence had stretched to an uncomfortable length.

“Because, Monsieur”—de Grandin paused impressively—“because you were that burglar!”

“Not at all, I was never more sane; it is you who stand upon the springboard above the pool of madness, Monsieur. For why you had this impulse to slay a wholly inoffensive young lady whom you had never seen before, neither you nor we can say at this time with any manner of assurance; but that you had it and that it was almost overwhelming in its strength, even at its first onset, you admit. Consider: You understand the psychologie?”

“Bien. You know, then, that our conscious mind—the mind of external things—acts as the governor of our actions as the little whirling balls control the engine’s speed. Do you also realize that it acts as a sort of mental policeman? Good, again.

“Now, when we wish to do a little naughty thing—or a great one, for that matter—and the sound common sense of this daytime conscious mind of ours overcomes the impulse, we say we have put it from our mind. Ah ha! It is there that we most greatly delude ourselves. Certainly. We have not put it from us; far otherwise; we have repressed it. As the businessman would say, we have ‘filed it for future reference.’ Yes. Often, by good fortune, the file is lost. Occasionally, it is found, only to be repressed once more by the conscious mind.

“But when normal conscious control is overthrown, one or all of these stored-away naughty desires come bubbling to the surface. Every surgeon has seen this demonstrated when nicely brought up young ladies or religious old gentlemen are recovering from anesthesia. Cordieu, the language they employ would put a coal-heaver to the blush!

“Attend me, if you please: The restraint of consciousness is entirely absent when we sleep—the policeman has put away his club and uniform and gone on a vacation. Then it is we dream all manner of strange, queer things. Then it is that a repressed desire, if it be strong enough, becomes translated into action while the dreamer is in a state of somnambulism. Then it was, Monsieur, you walked from out your room and would have done in earnest what you perpetrated in your dream had not Madame Sylvia’s scream summoned back some portion of the inhibitions of your waking self, so that you forbore to murder her, although the lingering remnant of your dream-desire stayed with you, and made you wish to do so.

The skeptical look on Bartrow’s face gave way to an expression of grudging belief as the little Frenchman expanded his theory. “Well, what’s to be done?” he demanded as de Grandin finished.

“I would suggest that you pack your golf clubs and go to Lake Hopatcong or the Kobbskill Club for a brief stay. There are certain matters we would attend to, and in the meantime you may recover from this so strange impulse to do your daughter-in-law an injury; I greatly fear you may do that for which you will be everlastingly sorrowful, should you remain.

“Do not mistake me,” he added as Bartrow was about to form a rebellious reply, “it is no matter of exiling you from your own house, nor yet of cutting you from all communication from your son and his wife always. Quite no. We would have you absent for only a little while—no longer than is absolutely necessary—while we make arrangements. Be assured we shall write you to return at the earliest possible moment.”

So it was arranged. Pleading frayed-out nerves and doctor’s orders, James Bartrow left for Hopatcong that evening, leaving Ransome and his wife in possession of the house.

“Well, everything’s satisfactorily arranged for a while, at least,” I remarked as we returned from the station after seeing Bartrow off. “A few days of golf and laziness will probably sweep those cobwebs from his mind, and he’ll he right as rain when he returns.”

The little Frenchman shook his head. “We have disposed of only half the problem, and that but temporarily,” he returned gloomily. “Why Monsieur Bartrow looked so strangely at his new daughter we know, though we do not know what caused the homicidal impulse which was behind the look; but why she regarded him with terror—ah, that is a far different matter, my friend, and one which needs explaining.”

“Nonsense!” I scoffed. “Why shouldn’t she be afraid? What girl wouldn’t be terrified if she saw a man look at her like that?”

“You do forget their recognition—and revulsion—was mutual and simultaneous,” he reminded.

SYLVIA BARTROW LAY IN a long wicker deck-chair in the cool angle of the piazza, an orchid negligée trimmed with marabou about her slender shoulders, an eiderdown rug gathered about her feet and knees. Though her improvement had been steady since her fright a week before, she was still pale with a pallor not to be disguised by the most skillfully applied cosmetics, and the dark violet circles still showed beneath her big, melancholy gray eyes. She greeted de Grandin and me with the faintest ghost of a smile as we mounted the porch steps.

“Madame, that we must trouble you thus drives us to the border of despair,” the Frenchman declared as he took her pallid fingers and raised them to his lips, “but there are several questions we must ask. Believe me, it is of importance, or we should not be thus disturbing you.”

The girl smiled at him with something like affection, for his uniform politeness endeared him to every woman from nine to ninety, and nodded amiably. “I’ll tell you anything I can, Doctor de Grandin,” she replied.

“Good. You are kind as you are beautiful, which is to say your generosity exceeds that of the good St. Nicholas,” he assured her as he drew up a chair, then:

“Tell us, Madame, just what it was that frightened you so terribly last week. Speak with confidence; whatever you may say is spoken under the seal of medical inviolability.”

She knit her brows, and her big eyes turned upward, like those of a little girl striving desperately to recall her seven-times table. “I—don’t—know,” she answered slowly. “I know it sounds silly—impossible, even—but I can’t remember a single thing that happened that night after I fell asleep. You’d think anything which frightened anyone as much as I was frightened would be impressed on him in all its detail till his dying day; but the truth is I only remember I was terribly, horribly afraid of something which came to my room, and that’s all. I can’t even tell you whether it was human or animal. Maybe it was just an awful dream, and I’m just a silly child afraid of something which never was.”

“U’m, perhaps,” de Grandin agreed with a nod. Then: “Tell me, if you please, Madame Sylvia, were you frightened before this so unfortunate occurrence? Did anything distress you at any time, or seem to—”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “When I first entered the drawing-room, I went nearly wild with fright. When I looked at Daddy Jim standing there by the fireplace everything seemed to go red-hot inside me from my toes to my throat; I wanted to scream, but couldn’t; I wanted to run away, but didn’t have the strength. And when he turned and looked at me—I thought I should die. Just imagine, and Daddy Jim’s such a nice old darling, too!”

“Yes—no; not immediately. After I’d met him I realized it couldn’t have been Daddy Jim who frightened me, really, but there was a feeling of malaise which clung to me till—”

“Ah, so. You had never, by any chance, known anyone whom you feared and hatred who resembled your so estimable father-in-law?”

“Why, no. I don’t think I was really afraid of anyone in my life—everyone has always been kind to me, you know, and as for hating anybody, I don’t think I could, really. I was just a little girl during the World War, and I used to try so hard to hate the Kaiser and von Hindenburg, but I never seemed able to do it as the other children could.”

“I congratulate you,” he commented non-committally. “This so strange feeling of uneasiness, you still have it?”

“No-o, I don’t. I did until—” She stopped, and her pale face suffused with a faint blush.

“Yes, ma petite, until?” he prompted softly, leaning forward and taking her fingers lightly in his hand. “I think I know what you would say, but I do desire confirmation from your own lips.”

“It’s no use,” she answered as tears welled in her eyes. “I’ve tried to down it, to say it wasn’t so for Rance’s sake, but it is—it is! It’s Daddy Jim—I’m afraid of him—terrified. There’s no earthly reason for it; he’s a dear, good, kind old man, and he loves Rance to distraction and loves me for Rance’s sake, but I live in constant horror of him. When he looks at me I go cold and tremble all over, and if he so much as brushes against my skirts as he passes I have to bite my lips to keep from screaming. When he kissed me that day I thought my heart would stop.

“I can’t explain it, Doctor de Grandin, but the feeling’s there, and I can’t overcome it. Listen:

“When I was a little girl we lived on the outskirts of Flagstaff, and I had a little Maltese kitten for pet. One day I saw Muff with her back up and every hair on her tail standing straight out and her eyes fairly blazing with rage and fright as she backed slowly away from something on the ground and spit and growled with every breath. When I ran up I saw she was looking at a young rattlesnake which had come out to sun itself. That kitten had never seen a rattler or any kind of snake in all her little life, but she recognized it as something to be feared and hated—yes, hated—the moment she laid eyes on it. Her instinct told her. That’s the way it is with me and my husband’s father. Oh, Doctor de Grandin, it makes me so unhappy! I want to love him and have him love me, and I don’t want to come between Rance and him, for they’re all the world to each other, but—” The tears which jeweled her eyelids gushed freely now, and her narrow shoulders shook with sobs. “I try to love him,” she wailed, “but I’m dreadfully afraid of him—I loathe him!”

“I knew as much already, ma pauvre,” the Frenchman comforted, “but be of cheer, already I think I have found a way to remove this barrier which stands between you and your father-in-law. Your fear of him is grown from something deep within you, a something which none of us can as yet understand, yet which must have its roots in reason. That reason we shall endeavor to find. If you will come to Doctor Trowbridge’s tonight, we shall probe the underlying causes for this feeling of revulsion which so greatly troubles you.”

“You—you won’t hurt me?” she faltered. Plainly terror and sustained mental tension had broken her nerve, and her only thought was to avoid pain at any cost.

“Name of a little blue man, I shall say otherwise!” he exclaimed. “You and Monsieur your husband shall come to dinner, and afterward we shall talk—that is all. You are not terrified of that?”

“Très bon, until tonight, then,” once more he raised her hand to his lips, then turned and left her with a smile.

“WHAT DO YOU MAKE of it?” I asked as we drove homeward. “Doesn’t it strike you she’s trying to evade a direct answer when she says she can’t remember what frightened her?”

“Not necessarily,” he returned thoughtfully. “She deceives herself, but she does so honestly, I think. Consider: She is of a decidedly neurotic type, you are agreed on that?”

“Very good. Like most of her kind, she is naturally very sensitive, and would suffer keenly were it not for the protective mental armor she has developed. The other night she had an experience which would have driven more matter-of-fact persons into neurasthenia, but not her. No. She said mentally to herself, ‘This thing which I have seen is dreadful, it is too terrible to be true. If I remember it I go mad. Alors, I shall not remember it. It is not so.’ And thereupon, as far as her conscious memory is concerned, it is not so. She does not realize she has given herself this mental command, nor does she know she has obeyed, but the fact remains she has. The extreme mental torture she suffered when the apparition appeared before her is buried deeply in her subconscious memory—mentally cicatrized, we might say, for she has protected her sanity by the sudden development of a sort of selective amnesia. It is better so; she might easily go mad otherwise. But tonight we shall open wide the secret storehouse of her memory, we shall see the thing which affrighted her in all its grisly reality, and we shall take it from her recollection forever. Yes. Never shall it trouble her again.”

“Humph, you talk as though you were going to exorcise a demon,” I commented.

He raised his shoulders and eyebrows in an eloquent shrug. “Who shall say otherwise?” he asked. “Long years ago, when the scientific patter we mouth so learnedly today had not been thought of, men called such things which troubled them by short and ugly names. She-devils which seduced the souls and bodies of men they called succubi; male demons which worked their will on women they denominated incubi. Today we talk of repressed desires, of unconscious libido, and such-like things—but have we gotten further than to change our terminology? One wonders. A tree you may denominate an oyster, and you may call an oyster a tree with equal ease, but all your new denominations to the contrary notwithstanding, the tree is still a tree, and the oyster nothing but an oyster. N’est-ce-pas?”

ADDED TO HIS NUMEROUS other accomplishments, Jules de Grandin possessed unquestioned talents as a chef. He was the only man Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, would permit in her kitchen for longer than five minutes at a time, for across the kitchen range they met and gossiped as fellow artists, and many were the toothsome recipes they traded. That afternoon he was long in conference with my gifted though temperamental cook, and the result was a dinner the like of which has seldom been served in Harrisonville. Shrimp gumbo preceded lobster Cardinal and caneton à la presse followed lobster, while a salad garnished with a sauce which surely came from fairyland accompanied the duckling. From heaven alone knew where, de Grandin procured a bottle of Mirandol ’93, and this, with one of Nora’s famous deep-dish apple tarts and fromage Suisse completed the perfect meal.

Coffee and cognac were served on the side veranda, and while we enjoyed the delightful sensation of the mingled processes of digestion and slow poisoning by nicotine de Grandin took possession of the conversation.

“Your estimable father.” he began, addressing Ransome, “he is a connoisseur of interior decoration; his drawing-room, it is delightful. That walnut wainscot, by example, it is—”

“Good Lord, you’d better not let Dad hear you call it walnut!” Ransome broke in with a laugh. “He’d have your life. That’s oak, man; he imported it especially from England, bought it standing in an old house in Kent, and it cost him almost its weight in gold to bring it over. Oak’s always been the passion of Dad’s life, it seems to me. He’s got a hundred or more pieces of antique oak—which is twice as rare as walnut, maple or mahogany—in the house, there are nothing but oak trees growing in the grounds, and every walking-stick he owns is carved from solid oak. He has to have ’em ’specially made, for they can’t be had in the shops. I’ve seen him pick up an acorn in the woods and fondle it as a miser might a diamond.”

“Eh, do you tell me so?” de Grandin’s fingers beat a quick devil’s tattoo on the arm of his chair. “This is of the interest. Yes. Is it that he also collects other objets d’art?”

“No-o, I couldn’t say that, though he has a small collection of curios in the place. There’s that old stone, for instance. He brought it from a place called Pwhyll-got in Wales years ago, and has it framed in native oak and hung up on the wall of his room. I never could see much sense in it; it looks pretty much like any other bit of flat, smooth rock to me, but Dad says it once formed part of a big ring of Cromlech and—”

“Mort d’un rat âgé, the light; I begin to commence to see!” exclaimed the Frenchman.

“Mille pardons, my friend, I did but think aloud, and all too often I think that way at random. You were saying—”

“Oh, that’s all there is to his collection, really. He’s got a few curious old arrowheads, and a stone knife-blade or two, but I don’t suppose a real collector would give him twenty dollars for the lot.”

Deftly he turned the talk to matters of psychology, detailing several interesting cases of split personality he had witnessed in the laboratories of the Sorbonne. “I have here, by happy chance, an interesting little toy which has of late received much use in the clinics,” he added, apparently as an afterthought. “Would not you care to see it?”

Prompted by a sharp kick on the shins, I declared that nothing would please me more, and Ransome and Sylvia assented, mainly for politeness’ sake.

“Behold it, is it not most innocent-looking?” he asked, proudly displaying an odd-looking contraption by means of which two circular looking-glasses, slightly smaller than shaving-mirrors, were made to rotate in opposing directions by means of a miniature motor.

“Not especially,” he returned, “but it gives one queer sensations if one watches it in motion. Will you try?”

Without awaiting their reply he set the machine on the study table, switched off all the lights save the central bulb which shed its beams directly on the mirrors, and pressed the switch.

A light sustained humming sounded through the room, and the mirrors began describing their opposing orbits round each other at ever-increasing speed. I watched their dazzling whirl for a moment, but turned my eyes away as de Grandin tweaked me gently by the sleeve. “Not for you, Friend Trowbridge,” he whispered almost soundlessly; then:

“Behold them, my friends, how they spin and whirl, is it not a pretty sight? Look carefully, you can distinguish the different speeds at which they turn. Closer, hold your gaze intently on them for a moment. Thus you may find—sleep—sleep, my friends, You are tired, you are fatigués, you are exhausted. Sleep is good—very good. Sleep—sleep—sleep!”

His voice took on a low, singsong drone as he repeated the admonition to repose again and yet again, finally: “That is well. Be seated, if you please.”

Like twin automata Ransome Bartrow and his bride sank into the chairs he hastily pushed forward. For a moment he regarded them thoughtfully, then snapped off the current from the motor and once more lit the lamps. Like a showman arranging his puppets, or a window-dresser disposing his figurines, he touched them lightly here and there, placing hands and feet in more restful positions, slipping cushions behind each reclining head. Then:

“Very good. Attend me carefully. It is the night of your arrival here. You have gone to bed. You are asleep. What transpires?”

“Très bon; all is yet quiet. It is two hours later. Do you see, do you hear anything?”

“Bien. It is the moment at which the intruder entered your chamber. What is it? Who is it? Whom do you see?” His final question came with sharp, sudden emphasis.

For a moment the girl reclined quietly in her easy-chair; then a light, moaning sound escaped her. She rolled her head restlessly from side to side, like a sleeper suffering a disagreeable dream, and her breathing came more quickly.

A quick, convulsive shudder ran through her, and with a sudden, writhing movement she slipped from her chair and lay supine on the floor. Her eyelids were slightly parted, but the eyeballs were so far rolled back that only a tiny glistening crescent of white showed between her lashes. Again she moaned softly; then the whole expression of her features changed. She thrust her head a little forward, her pale cheeks flushed red, her mouth half opened and a desirous smile lay upon her lips. She raised her hands, making little downward passes before her face, as though she stroked the cheeks of one who bent above her, and a gentle tremor ran through her as her slim bosom expanded slightly and her mouth opened and closed in a pantomime of kissing. A deep sigh of ardent ecstasy issued from between her white teeth.

“Grand Dieu, what have we here?” de Grandin muttered nervously. “C’est un incube! Behold, Friend Trowbridge, from feet to head she is a vessel that fills itself with the sweet pains of love! What does it mean?”

But even as he spoke the tableau changed. With a sudden wrench she moved to free herself from the bonds of an amorous embrace, and on her countenance, but lately beatified with passionate love, there came a look of stark and abject terror. One arm was thrown across her face, as if to ward away a blow, and her breast rose and fell in labored respiration. Her cheeks again were pale, as if every vestige of blood had left them, even her lips were grayish-blue.

She struggled to her knees, and crept writhingly away till the wall cut off her retreat, and then she groveled on the floor, her forehead lowered, hands clasped protectively upon the upturned nape of her neck, and all the while she shook and trembled like a palsied thing.

From her blenched lips came a spate of words, but strange, foreign words they were, seemingly all consonants, and in a language I could not identify.

Then, at de Grandin’s sharp command she turned to English, crying: “Mercy, my Lord! Is it sin that a woman young and fair should love? Look on this form, this body and these limbs—” She rose and faced an invisible accuser, her head thrown back, her hands outspread, as one who would display her charms to best advantage. “Was not I formed for loving and for love?” she asked. “How can I ever be the cold and stony-hearted servant of your order? ’Tis love that I was made for and love which I did crave. Can a woman’s soul be forfeit if she does listen to the prompting of her woman’s heart?

“O-o-h!” her shrill scream rent the quiet of the room. “Not that; not that, my Lord—anything but that! See”—she sank upon her knees and looked up pleadingly while with eloquent, outflung hands she made a gesture of supreme surrender—“see me as I kneel before thee! See this body, so soft, so tender, so full of delight; it is thine—all, all thine, if only thou wilt spare me—o-o-oh—o-o-o-oh—ai-ee!” Again her frantic scream set my nerves a-tingle, and I thanked the heavenly powers that cries of pain would cause less public comment coming from a doctor’s house than any other place.

She balled her fingers into diminutive fists and wrestled back and forth as though her wrists were in the vise-like grip of some grim, relentless captor.

Her eyes were open now, wide open, and filmed with horror indescribable. Her face was deathly pale, her whole body vibrant with an agony of desperate fear. In silence now she struggled, but how! She was like a madwoman, clawing, twisting, writhing. She turned her head and spat into an invisible face; she dug her feet into the rug, tried to fling herself prostrate, twined herself about her captor; once she bent swiftly and I heard the snap of her small, sharp teeth as she went through the dumb show of fleshing them in a man’s arm. Her face was livid, scarcely like a living thing.

Now her struggles lessened. Her shrieks subsided to weak whimpers, and she followed pitifully, though reluctantly, in the wake of her unseen conductor like a little broken-spirited child led out for punishment. Her arms were stretched before her, hands drooping, as though her wrists were held fast in a powerful grip. Her head bent listlessly, rolled and lolled from side to side, as if extremity of terror had sapped her last shred of vitality, leaving her scarcely strong enough to stand erect.

But once again she galvanized to action. Apparently they were come to their destination, for she halted, struggled backward a moment, then held one hand out from her side as though it were being made fast to something.

And I swear I could see the marks of the invisible ligature as the cord was tightly drawn about her wrist!

Now the other hand was pinioned and now her slender ankles were crossed one upon another, and one after another we saw the furrows form, saw the silk-meshed stockings sink in on the shrinking flesh as invisible bonds were cruelly tightened.

She half leaned, half lay across a chair-arm, her body taut and rigid as a drawn bow, white and still as a lovely Andromeda carven in marble, and in her misty, tear-gemmed eyes was such a look of tragic, mute appeal as nearly broke my heart. She held her fixed, unnatural pose until my muscles ached in sympathy. “Good heavens,” I exclaimed, “de Grandin, this is terrible, we must—”

“Observe, my friend, he comes, he is arrived, he is here!” the Frenchman’s shout drowned out my protest as he seized me by the elbow and swung me round.

My heart all but ceased to beat as I turned. Framed in the window of the study, like a portrait of incarnate evil and malevolence executed by a master craftsman, was the face of James Bartrow.

But such a face! Gone was every vestige of the urbane man of the world I knew, and in its place there was the very distillation of savagery, wild, insane rage and lust for killing. His matted hair lay on his forehead, his beard was fairly bristling with ferocity, and on his tight-drawn lips there sat a sneering smile of mingled hate and murderous blood-lustfulness.

“So,” he cried, and his voice was thin and cracked with madness, “so, I find ye, do I? Too long ye’ve robbed me of my vengeance, ye filth-filled vessel of pollution. The Gods cry out for sacrifice, and here am I, their servant and their priest, prepared to render them their due!”

With one gigantic heave he tore the copper screen from out the window and drew himself up to the sill. A moment he crouched there, like a great, savage cat about to spring; then with a leap he cleared the intervening space and towered over Sylvia. I started as I saw the gleam of something white in his right hand. It was a long and slender blade chipped from flint, the sort of weapon I’d seen in museums.

“I all but slew ye in the grove of Cambria,” he roared, “and by the heart I would have plucked from your breast I would have made my divinations; but ye did escape me then. This time I have ye fairly. Look on me, Cwerfa, and know your hour is come, for by the stone of Cromlech’s ring I brought across the seas, and by the holy mistletoe that grows upon the sacred oak, and by the mystic gem of serpents’ spew, I’m here to cut the heart from out your breast as I would have long ago!

“They thought they’d packed me off and gotten rid of me—ha, ha!—but I came back, and when I found ye’d fled the house wherein I kept the Cromlech stone, I knew ye must have sought protection from the Frankish outlander as once before ye found it with the Romans, and here I am to claim your forfeit life, and none shall say me nay!” With a wild, maniacal roar he leaned across the girl and wrenched the flimsy silken drapery from her bosom.

“Your pardon, Monsieur, but Jules de Grandin is here, and he does most emphatically say nay!” the Frenchman interrupted and struck the towering madman a stunning blow upon the head with the carafe of chilled water which stood beside the decanter of brandy on the study table.

The bludgeoned maniac fell crashing to the floor, and almost as he fell de Grandin was on him, wrenching the stone knife from his grasp, tearing a pongee curtain from its rods and twisting it into a rope with which he pinioned Bartrow’s wrists behind him and made them fast with double knots.

“And now, my friend, I would that you accompany me at once to this one’s residence,” he ordered, snatching down another curtain and fastening the prisoner’s feet together, then dragging him to the entrance of the study and tethering him securely to one of the white pillars which flanked the doorway. “Come, it is of the greatest import!” he urged. “We have no little moment to stand here stupidly and stare.”

Dazed, but goaded by his constant pleas for haste, I drove him to the Bartrow home, and waited while he clamored at the door. He had a brief parley with the servant who responded to his summons, disappeared within the house and emerged a moment later bearing a frame of ancient weathered oak in which was set an oblong of dull, grayish stone. In his left hand he swung a canvas sack like those used by banks for holding minor coins, and in it something clinked and jingled musically.

“I think I have them all,” he told me. “Rush hasten, fly back to your house, my friend. There is work ahead of us!”

He led me to the cellar as soon as we returned, and in the furnace we built a roaring fire of newspapers and stray bits of wood, and when we had it blazing we heaped a few shovelfuls of coal upon it. As soon as all was glowing he tossed the oak-framed stone and the collection of flint arrowheads into the fiery crater. Last of all he flung in the stone knife he had taken from Bartrow when he struck him down.

The oak frame of the stone burned furiously, and to my great surprise the stone itself and the arrowheads and knife seemed to offer small resistance to the fire, but turned into a sort of brittle and crumbling lime. We waited fifteen minutes or so, while the fire completed its work of destruction; then the Frenchman seized the heavy iron poker and mashed the burned stone relics into powder, dumped the clinkers into the ashpit and stirred them all together till none could tell which had been Pennsylvania coal and which the old stone curios which Bartrow prized so highly. “Come, let us see what passes up above,” he ordered when he had finished with the poker, and led the way to the study.

Sylvia had fallen to the floor, and de Grandin raised her and placed her comfortably in a chair, then, having rearranged the mutilated corsage of her dress, turned his attention to the still unconscious Bartrow. “I think we may release him, now,” he commented, and together we undid the knots and tugged and pulled until we had him in a chair.

“Revive him, if you please,” de Grandin ordered, and set the motors of his whirling mirrors going.

I dashed some water into Bartrow’s’ face and held a vial of ammoniated salts to his nostrils, and as his eyelids quivered de Grandin struck him lightly on the cheek. “Observe—look—see here!” he ordered.

Bartrow struggled half-way from his chair, gazed at the spinning mirrors a moment, then sat forward, his gaze riveted to the bright concentric circles they described.

Softly, carefully, forcefully, de Grandin ordered him to sleep, repeating his command until it was obeyed; then, when he had stopped the motor, he moved to the center of the room, and:

“My friends, I bid you listen to me carefully,” he ordered. “You, Monsieur Ransome, know nothing of that which has transpired. It is good. Very good. Continue in your ignorance. You, Madame Sylvia, have quite forgotten every fear of olden days, and of the present; to you your father-in-law is but a kindly old gentleman who loves you and whom you love in turn.

“And you, Monsieur Bartrow the elder,” he turned his piercing gaze on the older man, “whatever it was which did possess you is gone away. I have destroyed it utterly. No longer will the impulse to murder Madame Sylvia be with you. You hear me? You will—you must obey. She is to you the much-loved wife of your much-loved son; no more, no less, and as such you will give her your affection and make her welcome to your heart and home.”

He paused a moment, then continued: “You will rise up, go to the street, and in two minutes reappear at the front door of this house, nor will you know that you have called before or why you came. Go. En avant; allez-vous-en!

“Awake, my friends; wake Monsieur Ransome, wake Madame Sylvia; the experiment is done and you are sleeping long!” he cried gayly, snapping his fingers at Ransome and Sylvia in turn. “Parbleu, I did think these little dancing mirrors would have made you sleep the clock around!” he added as they opened heavy eyes.

“Did we really fall asleep? How stupid!” Sylvia exclaimed. “I don’t think it very nice of you to invite us to dinner, then put us to sleep with your horrid apparatus, Doctor de Grandin.”

“Ah, Madame, I am desolated that it should have happened thus,” he answered, “but you are doubtless rested by the nap; come, let us go upon the porch once more and smoke a cigarette.”

“Good evening, everyone,” James Bartrow sauntered out on the veranda, “hope I’m not intruding. I couldn’t stand it out at the lake any longer, so I hopped a train and came back to town. They told me you children had gone over here, so I came along to see you were all right. Did they give you a good dinner?”

“Why, Daddy Jim, how nice of you to come!” Sylvia jumped from her chair, threw her arms about her father-in-law’s neck and kissed him on both bearded cheeks. “I’ve been wishing you’d come back,” she added.

He patted her shoulder affectionately. “Great girl, eh, Trowbridge?” he asked pridefully as he sank into a chair beside me and lighted a cigar.

We chatted inconsequentially for an hour or so; then the Bartrows, on the best of terms with us and with each other, bade us good-night.

“NOW,” I THREATENED AS the echo of their laughing voices died away, “will you explain all this craziness I’ve seen tonight, or must I choke an explanation from you?”

He raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Le bon Dieu knows,” he confessed. “I hardly dare to venture an opinion.

“When first we entered Monsieur Bartrow’s house and saw the look of savage exultation on his face when he beheld the little bride, and the expression of stark terror with which she looked at him, I said to me, ‘Parbleu, Jules de Grandin, what are the meaning of this?’ And I replied:

“Your West; he is like our Foreign Legion, the port of men who would be forgotten, and that young Madame Bartrow came from there I knew. Was it that in his younger days the elder Bartrow had sojourned in that country and there had formed a feud with some member of her family? And did he recognize her as a foeman’s child the moment he put eyes on her? Perhaps. I could not be sure of anything, and so I waited and wondered.

“A little light came to us when he called here to consult you. He wished to kill her, he declared he had an impulse almost irresistible to do her injury, and yet he knew not why it was. Ah, but his dream—you do recall? He dreamed he trailed her through a deep, dark grove of oak trees, and there he found her, all bound and helpless, and robed in white. And white, my friend, has almost always been the color of the robe of sacrifice. What could this mean? I asked me. The holy angels only know.

“No, there was another one who knew, at least, in part, and Madame Sylvia was she. Held fast within the secret chamber of her mind there was a recollection of her father-in-law’s visit. Undoubtlessly he spoke when he accosted her; his words would surely give some clue to why he wished her injury. ‘Very well, then,’ I say to me. ‘If Madame Sylvia holds the answer, she shall tell us.’

“And so we did. With dinner I did bait my trap, and when she came I was prepared to make invasion of the secret kingdom of her mind. But first I asked a few small questions of her husband.

“While we were at his house I had noticed certain things concerning it. Within the lovely little park which stands about his home, I had seen nothing but oak trees, little oaks, great oaks, and oaks which were neither large nor small. That was unusual. Also I noticed much oaken furniture within the house, and the fine Tudor wainscot in the drawing-room.

“And so I asked about the wood, leading young Monsieur Ransome to correct what he thought my mistake, that he might speak more freely, and thus I learned of his father’s so strange passion for oak. Also he told me of the foolish whim which made his father import and keep a Druid stone from Wales. Ah, that also was important, but just why I could not say at that time. No, I needed further information.

“So I interrogated Madame Sylvia. Tiens, there I was like Monsieur Robin the tailor in your so droll nursery rime, he who …

… bent his bow,

Shot at a sparrow

And killed a crow.

For where I sought only to unlatch the darkened window and let in light upon her little fear, behold, I opened wide the door upon a fearsome memory so dreadful that almost countless generations had not been long enough to bury it beneath their years. Yes.”

“Why, I suppose you might call it an innate quality, apart from reason or experience, which prompts animals of the same species to react to certain definite stimuli in the same manner.”

“Very good,” he complimented. “The day-old chick needs no example to teach it to pick up grains of corn, the newborn infant needs not to be told to take the breast—Madame Sylvia’s little kitten required none to tell him that the serpent was his deadly foe. No.

“But why is instinct? What makes it? It is mass memory, transmitted from our earliest forebears, and stored up in our subconscious minds for use in emergency. Nothing less.

“But we have other memories from other times. Take, by example, the common dream of falling through space. Who has not had it? For why? Because it is a racial memory. It dates from the remote day when our ancestors dwelt in trees. With them the danger of death by falling was always present. Many died thus, all at one time or other fell and were injured more or less severely. Now, any serious injury produced shock, and shock in turn produced certain definite molecular changes in the tissues of the brain. These were transmitted to the fallers’ progeny. Voilà, we have the racial memory.

“Now, consider: Though everyone has dreamed he fell—and often wakened in an agony of terror—we never have this sense of falling while we are awake. No. Why is that? Because our waking, modern personality knows no such danger. Ah, then, you see? It must be another personality, distinct from that we have while waking, which dreams of falling, a personality which has a recollection of falling from a tree or over a great cliff.

“Very well. In everyday experience we meet with men who have extraordinary memories; they can remember accurately events which happened when they were but three or four years old. Such men are rare, yet they do exist.

“Very good. Why is it not then possible that there may live those who can remember the days of long ago—who can recall what happened to an ancestor of theirs as an individual, rather than to their whole ancestry as a group? I do not mean consciously remember. But no. I mean they have the memory latent, as we all have the falling-through-space memory when we are asleep.

“Place such a one as this in a state of hypnosis, where there is no interference from the conscious mind of the wake-a-day world, and that other, buried, memory might easily be resurrected. N’est-ce-pas?”

“But Bartrow and Sylvia seemed to recognize each other simultaneously, and they were wide awake when they did it,” I objected.

“Précisément. You have expressed it. It is strange, it is odd, it is almost unbelievable, but it is true. Of all the millions in the world, those two, the one with strange, uncanny memory of a thwarted vengeance, the other with the dreadful recollection of a terrible ordeal, were brought together. And as steel strikes sparks from flint, so did their personalities enkindle the light of memory in each, though the memory was vague, and he knew not the reason for his hatred of her and she could not find reason for her fear of him.

“But from what we saw and heard tonight we can piece the gruesome puzzle into something like the semblance of a picture. Long, long ago, an ancestor of Bartrow’s was a Druid, perhaps an Archdruid—one of those awful priests who served and worshiped nameless gods in groves of oak. Diodorus Siculus described their rites of divination by means of hearts and entrails plucked from living human sacrifices; Cæsar, in his De Bello Gallico, mentions the burning alive of human victims in cages made of wicker. They were a wicked, cruel, unclean hierarchy, my friend, and the noblest thing the Romans did was to destroy them, root and branch. Yes.

“Remember how Monsieur Bartrow, while in his fit of madness, swore by the gem of serpents’ spew? That is surely confirmation, for on his brow the Archdruid was wont to wear a glowing jewel—probably an opal—supposed to be made from crystallized spittle of serpents. Together with the oak, the mistletoe and the yew-bough, it was regarded as a thing of peculiar holiness by them.

“Très bon. We have now placed Monsieur Bartrow on the stage of olden days. What of Madame Sylvia? It seems her acting of the scene of sacrifice should tell the tale.

“Undoubtlessly she was a sort of priestess of the Druids, a kind of Vestal, vowed forever to virginity, and liable to horrid death if she committed any breach of discipline. But she was, as she did say, ‘formed for love,’ and she did listen to the dictates of her woman’s heart, only to be discovered by a Druid priest and led away to the great sacrificial oak to suffer death.

“And yet she must have lived—did not Monsieur Bartrow refer to her finding shelter with the Romans? Too, she must have had offspring, and to them given the curse of memory of the Druid’s shadow which lay across her path, and of that progeny, poor Madame Sylvia was one. Yes.

“And Monsieur Bartrow—in him there lived the memory of his ancestor, and of his thwarted vengeance. He was peculiarly sensitive to the influence of the old ones, as is evidenced by his love of oak and his collection of Druid relics. These relics, too, although he knew it not, were constant stimulants of his unrealized thirst for vengeance. When he and Madame Sylvia did confront each other—eh bien, we know the rest. He was the Druid priest once more and she the victim who escaped from sacrifice. Parbleu, he almost balanced the account tonight, I think!”

“But see here,” I asked, “isn’t there still danger that he’ll revert to that strange condition again? Is it safe for her to live near him?”

“I think so,” he returned. “Remember, my friend, mental sores are much like those of the body. Left to themselves they mortify and fester, but if we open them—pouf!—they vanish. So with this strange pair. Tonight we probed beneath the surface of their conscious minds, deep into those age-old memories which plagued them, and from him we did extract the lust for vengeance long unsatisfied, and from her the gnawing fear of retribution. Also, for added safety, we have destroyed the relics of the Druids which he kept in his house and which daily gave new energy to his desire to accomplish that deed of murder in which his ancestor of ancient times did fail. No, my friend, the ghosts of the old priest who was raised this night, and of her whom he would have made his victim, have been laid forever in quiet graves of forgetfulness, and the shadow of the Druid no more will fall across the paths of Monsieur Bartrow and Madame Sylvia. It is very well.”

“Ah bah, suppose you cease to guard that brandy bottle as a miser guards his gold,” he interrupted with a smile. “My throat is desert-dry from too much explanation, and I am weary with this tiresome business of pursuing long-dead Druids and their unfaithful priestesses. Give me to drink and let me go to bed.”