He reached into an inner pocket and drew out an envelope. It was of soft gray paper, edged with silver-gilt, and the address was in tiny, almost unreadable script:
M. edouard Minton, 30 Rue Carteret 30, Harrisonville, N. J.
"U"m?" de Grandin commented as he inspected it. "It is addressed a la francaise. And the letter, may one read it?"
"Of course," Ned answered. "I"d like you to."
Across de Grandin"s shoulder I made out the hastily-scrawled missive:
_Adore_
_Remember your promise and the kiss of blood that sealed it.
Soon I shall call and you must come._
_Pour le temps et pour l"eternite_,
JULIE.
"You recognize the writing?" de Grandin asked. "It is----"
"Oh, yes," Ned answered bitterly, "I recognize it; it"s the same the other note was written in."
"And then?"
The boy smiled bleakly. "I crushed the thing into a ball and threw it on the floor and stamped on it. Swore I"d die before I"d keep another rendezvous with her, and----" He broke off, and put trembling hands up to his face.
"The so mysterious serpent came again, one may a.s.sume?" de Grandin prompted.
"But it"s only a phantom snake," I interjected. "At worst it"s nothing more than a terrifying vision----"
"Think so?" Ned broke in. "D"ye remember Rowdy, my airedale terrier?"
I nodded.
"He was in the room when I opened this letter, and when the cottonmouth appeared beside me on the floor he made a dash for it.
Whether it would have struck me I don"t know, but it struck at him as he leaped and caught him squarely in the throat. He thrashed and fought, and the thing held on with locked jaws till I grabbed a fire-shovel and made for it; then, before I could strike, it vanished.
"But its venom didn"t. Poor old Rowdy was dead before I could get him out of the house, but I took his corpse to Doctor Kirchoff, the veterinary, and told him Rowdy died suddenly and I wanted him to make an autopsy. He went back to his operating-room and stayed there half an hour. When he came back to the office he was wiping his gla.s.ses and wore the most astonished look I"ve ever seen on a human face. "You say your dog died suddenly--in the house?" he asked.
""Yes," I told him; "just rolled over and died."
""Well, bless my soul, that"s the most amazing thing I ever heard!" he answered. "I can"t account for it. That dog died from snake-bite; copperhead, I"d say, and the marks of the fangs show plainly on his throat.""
"But I thought you said it was a water moccasin," I objected. "Now Doctor Kirchoff says it was a copperhead----"
"_Ah hah_!" de Grandin laughed a thought unpleasantly. "Did no one ever tell you that the copperhead and moccasin are of close kind, my friend? Have not you heard some ophiologists maintain the moccasin is but a dark variety of copperhead?" He did not pause for my reply, but turned again to Ned:
"One understands your chivalry, _Monsieur_. For yourself you have no fear, since after all at times life can be bought too dearly, but the death of your small dog has put a different aspect on the matter. If this never-to-be-sufficiently-anathematized serpent which comes and goes like the _boite a surprise_--the how do you call him? Jack from the box?--is enough a ghost thing to appear at any time and place it wills, but sufficiently physical to exude venom which will kill a strong and healthy terrier, you have the fear for Mademoiselle Nella, _n"est-ce-pas_?"
"Precisely, you----"
"And you are well advised to have the caution, my young friend. We face a serious condition."
"What do you advise?"
The Frenchman teased his needlepoint mustache-tip with a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. "For the present, nothing," he replied at length. "Let me look this situation over; let me view it from all angles. Whatever I might tell you now would probably be wrong. Suppose we meet again one week from now. By that time I should have my data well in hand."
"And in the meantime----"
"Continue to be coy with Mademoiselle Nella. Perhaps it would be well if you recalled important business which requires that you leave town till you hear from me again. There is no need to put her life in peril at this time."
"If it weren"t for Kirchoff"s testimony I"d say Ned Minton had gone raving crazy," I declared as the door closed on our visitors. "The whole thing"s wilder than an opium smoker"s dream--that meeting with the girl in New Orleans, the snake that comes and disappears, the a.s.signation in the cemetery--it"s all too preposterous. But I know Kirchoff. He"s as unimaginative as a side of sole-leather, and as efficient as he is unimaginative. If he says Minton"s dog died of snake-bite that"s what it died of, but the whole affair"s so utterly fantastic----"
"Agreed," de Grandin nodded; "but what is fantasy but the appearance of mental images as such, severed from ordinary relations? The "ordinary relations" of images are those to which we are accustomed, which conform to our experience. The wider that experience, the more ordinary will we find extraordinary relations. By example, take yourself: You sit in a dark auditorium and see a railway train come rushing at you. Now, it is not at all in ordinary experience for a locomotive to come dashing in a theater filled with people, it is quite otherwise; but you keep your seat, you do not flinch, you are not frightened. It is nothing but a motion picture, which you understand. But if you were a savage from New Guinea you would rise and fly in panic from this steaming, shrieking iron monster which bears down on you. _Tiens_, it is a matter of experience, you see. To you it is an everyday event, to the savage it would be a new and terrifying thing.
"Or, perhaps, you are at the hospital. You place a patient between you and the Crookes" tube of an X-ray, you turn on the current, you observe him through the fluoroscope and _pouf_! his flesh all melts away and his bones spring out in sharp relief. Three hundred years ago you would have howled like a stoned dog at the sight, and prayed to be delivered from the witchcraft which produced it. Today you curse and swear like twenty drunken pirates if the Rontgenologist is but thirty seconds late in setting up the apparatus. These things are "scientific," you understand their underlying formulae, therefore they seem natural. But mention what you please to call the occult, and you scoff, and that is but admitting that you are opposed to something which you do not understand. The credible and believable is that to which we are accustomed, the fantastic and incredible is what we cannot explain in terms of previous experience. _Voila, c"est tres simple, n"est-ce-pas?_"
"You mean to say you understand all this?"
"Not at all by any means; I am clever, me, but not that clever. No, my friend, I am as much in the dark as you, only I do not refuse to credit what our young friend tells us. I believe the things he has related happened, exactly as he has recounted them. I do not understand, but I believe. Accordingly, I must probe, I must sift, I must examine this matter. We see it now as a group of unrelated and irrelevant occurrences, but somewhere lies the key which will enable us to make harmony from this discord, to gather these stray, tangled threads into an ordered pattern. I go to seek that key."
"Where?"
"To New Orleans, of course. Tonight I pack my portmanteaux, tomorrow I entrain. Just now"--he smothered a tremendous yawn--"now I do what every wise man does as often as he can. I take a drink."
Seven evenings later we gathered in my study, de Grandin, Ned and I, and from the little Frenchman"s shining eyes I knew his quest had been productive of results.
"My friends," he told us solemnly, "I am a clever person, and a lucky one, as well. The morning after my arrival at New Orleans I enjoyed three Ramos fizzes, then went to sit in City Park by the old Dueling-Oak and wished with all my heart that I had taken four. And while I sat in self-reproachful thought, sorrowing for the drink that I had missed, behold, one pa.s.sed by whom I recognized. He was my old schoolfellow, Paul Dubois, now a priest in holy orders and attached to the Cathedral of Saint Louis.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DR. DE GRANDIN.]
"He took me to his quarters, that good, pious man, and gave me luncheon. It was Friday and a fast day, so we fasted. _Mon Dieu_, but we did fast! On creole gumbo and oysters a la Rockefeller, and baked pompano and little shrimp fried crisp in olive oil and chicory salad and seven different kinds of cheese and wine. When we were so filled with fasting that we could not eat another morsel my old friend took me to another priest, a native of New Orleans whose stock of local lore was second only to his marvelous capacity for fine champagne.
_Morbleu_, how I admire that one! And now, attend me very carefully, my friends. What he disclosed to me makes many hidden mysteries all clear:
"In New Orleans there lived a wealthy family named d"Ayen. They possessed much gold and land, a thousand slaves or more, and one fair daughter by the name of Julie. When this country bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon and your army came to occupy the forts, this young girl fell in love with a young officer, a Lieutenant Philip Merriwell. _Tenez_, army love in those times was no different than it is today, it seems. This gay young lieutenant, he came, he wooed, he won, he rode away, and little Julie wept and sighed and finally died of heartbreak. In her lovesick illness she had for constant company a slave, an old mulatress known to most as Maman Dragonne, but to Julie simply as _grand"tante_, great-aunt. She had nursed our little Julie at the breast, and all her life she fostered and attended her. To her little white "_mamselle_" she was all gentleness and kindness, but to others she was fierce and frightful, for she was a "conjon woman,"
adept at obeah, the black magic of the Congo, and among the blacks she ruled as queen by force of fear, while the whites were wont to treat her with respect and, it was more than merely whispered, retain her services upon occasion. She could sell protection to the duelist, and he who bore her charm would surely conquer on the field of honor; she brewed love-drafts which turned the hearts and heads of the most capricious coquettes or the most constant wives, as occasion warranted; by merely staring fixedly at someone she could cause him to take sick and die, and--here we commence to tread upon our own terrain--she was said to have the power of changing to a snake at will.
"Very good. You follow? When poor young Julie died of heartbreak it was old Maman Dragonne--the little white one"s _grand"tante_--who watched beside her bed. It is said she stood beside her mistress"
coffin and called a curse upon the fickle lover; swore he would come back and die beside the body of the sweetheart he deserted. She also made a prophecy. Julie should have many loves, but her body should not know corruption nor her spirit rest until she could find one to keep his promise and return to her with words of love upon his lips. Those who failed her should die horribly, but he who kept his pledge would bring her rest and peace. This augury she made while she stood beside her mistress" coffin just before they sealed it in the tomb in old Saint Denis Cemetery. Then she disappeared."
"You mean she ran away?" I asked.
"I mean she disappeared, vanished, evanesced, evaporated. She was never seen again, not even by the people who stood next to her when she p.r.o.nounced her prophecy."