The Dark Angel Page 8

  “Hélas, I can not tell you with assurance,” he replied. “I have only what you call a hunch to go on; but this so attractive lady with her ill-at-ease manner, and that old-young one who watched her so intently, they intrigue me. I damn think we shall hear more of them, and meantime I would keep in touch with the situation—”

  “Well, here’s your chance,” I interrupted as I brought the car to a halt. “Here we are.”

  The wide front door of Breakstone’s house swung back as we mounted the porch steps, letting a path of warmth and lamplight stream out across the snow. Idris himself let us in and hurried us across the hall with its pavement of turf-soft rugs. “It happened half an hour ago,” he told, us, and from the way his lips trembled and his firm, deft chin quivered, we could see that panic fear was tugging at his nerves. “We were out late tonight, and stayed up talking after we got back. We went to bed only a little while ago, and I don’t think either of us had more than just gone to sleep when—come up and see her, gentlemen. Do what you can for her—then I’d like to talk with you.”

  I glanced curiously at his stooped shoulders as we followed him up the stairs. I’d known Idris from his first second of life, and this nervous, trembling, incoherent man was a stranger to me.

  A bandeau of black lace held Muriel Breakstone’s smoothly, shingled and marcelled blond hair in place, and her diaphanous black lace-and-chiffon night-robe disclosed low breasts and arms and shoulders white and dimpled as a baby’s. I bent to feel her pulse, and noted with a start that it was weak and feeble. Her flesh was cold as clay, despite the double blanket of thick camel’s hair and the down-filled comforter upon the bed, and all along her hands and forearms there showed the tiny hummocks of horripilation. Her eyes were wide and glassy, and about her nose where it joined the cheeks were the faint-drawn lines of exhaustion. As I leaned forward to listen at her heart her breath struck my cheek, cold and damp as a draft from a cellar—or a mausoleum.

  “Pain?” I asked sententiously, laying my left hand palm-down across her right iliac fossa and tapping its back gently with the fingers of my right. To de Grandin I muttered: “Subnormal temperature, light, increased pulsation, low vitality. Almost too soon for para-appendicitis, but—”

  “No,” the patient answered feebly, fumbling listlessly with the hemstitched edge of the pale-pink linen sheet, “I’m not suffering any, only—terribly—frightened—Doctor. Please—” her voice trailed off to an inaudible whisper, and again a light shudder ran through her, while the goose-flesh on her arms became more pronounced.

  “She woke up screaming something had her by the throat,” Idris broke in. “At first she was hysterical, but she’s been like this since just before I called you, and—”

  “Get me an electric pad, or a hot water bottle, if you haven’t that,” I interrupted. “What d’ye say, de Grandin? Shock?”

  “Mais oui,” he agreed with a nod. “I concur. External heat, a little ether, some brandy later, perhaps, then a sedative. Undoubtlessly it is shock, as you say, my friend. Yes.”

  We gave our treatment quickly, and when the patient rested in a light, calm sleep, trooped down the stairs to the library.

  “Now, what’s the cause of this?” I asked as Idris preceded us into the luxurious room and switched on the lights. “What did she eat at the Pantoufle Dorée tonight? I’m convinced this comes from a nightmare induced by indigestion, though I’m willing to admit I found no evidences of dyspepsia. Still—”

  “Zut, my old one, we are here to listen, not to talk,” de Grandin reminded. Then, to Idris:

  “You wished to speak with us, Monsieur?”

  The young man took a turn across the room, lighted a cigarette, crushed its fire out against the bottom of a cloisonné ash-tray, then snapped his lighter as he set a second one aglow. “Doctor Trowbridge,” he began, expelling a twin column of smoke from his nostrils, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Eh, do I believe in—Lord bless my soul!” I answered.

  “Monsieur,” de Grandin added, “despite the admonitions of the elder churchmen, that man is a fool who states his implicit belief in anything—likewise his unqualified disbelief—we have the open mind. What is it you would tell us?”

  Idris tossed his cigarette aside half smoked, then mechanically lit another. He studiously avoided glancing at us as he replied slowly:

  “I think this house is haunted.”

  “Eh?” de Grandin answered sharply. “Do you say it?”

  “Nonsense!” I scoffed. “That’s just silly, boy. For one thing, the place isn’t old enough. It hasn’t been finished more than half a year, has it?”

  “All right,” the young man answered with a trace of dogged stubbornness in his voice, “let’s put it another way. Suppose I say we—Muriel and I—are haunted?”

  “Oh—” I began, but Jules de Grandin’s quick reply cut through my mocking rejoinder:

  “How is that, Monsieur? We are interested. Tell us everything. There are no unconsidered trifles in cases such as this.”

  Idris dropped into an easy-chair, crossed his left knee over his right leg, then his right knee over his left, lifted the top from a cigarette box and replaced it slightly awry, then straightened it with meticulous care. “Do you remember Marjorie?” he asked irrelevantly.

  “Humph!” I grunted. Was I likely to forget the sweet, old-fashioned girl he married on his return from France, the joy I’d wished them on their wedding day and the pang his marriage to the exotic creature lying upstairs had caused me when all my skill proved unavailing to keep Marjorie alive? “Yes, I remember her,” I answered shortly.

  “And who was she?” de Grandin asked, leaning slightly forward in his chair and fixing a level, unwinking stare on Idris.

  “My wife.”

  “Ah? And—”

  “Anything I say tonight is told you under the seal of your profession?” Idris asked.

  “But certainly, in strictest confidence. Say on, Monsieur.”

  “Marjorie Denham and I were born within a city block and a single month of each other. Right, Doctor Trowbridge? You ought to know, you officiated at both our—”

  “Get on with it,” I ordered with a curt nod. “You’re right.”

  “We grew up together,” he continued listlessly, “made mud-pies together, played together. I never teased her or pulled her hair, or hurt her in any way, for even as a savage little brat of a boy I was too fond of her for that. We went to school together, and I carried her books back and forth. We went to our first party together, and it was I she went out with when she wore her first long dress and put her hair up for the first time. She never had a beau, I never had a sweet heart—we weren’t lovers, you see, just good, intimate friends, but each filled the other’s needs for comradeship so fully that the want of other companions never seemed to enter our thoughts.

  “I joined up early when the war broke out, made the first training-camp and went across in the fall of ’17. Marjorie came round to the house to see me off and brought me a sweater and helmet. She cried a little, and I was pretty close to tears myself, but we didn’t kiss. It just didn’t occur to us—to me, at any rate.

  “Every mail—every mail that was delivered, that is—brought me news of home from Marjorie. They weren’t love letters; just good, long, gossipy letters of happenings around town, and they were like visits home to me.

  “I got it in the lungs at Saint-Mihiel when we wiped out the salient—good stiff dose of chlorine gas that almost did me in. It put me in hospital and a convalescent home at Biarritz for almost a year. They thought I’d turn out to be a lunger, after all, but I fooled ’em—worse luck.

  “It was while I was convalescing at the home I heard—through Marjorie, of course—of my parents’ death. Flu sent Dad west just after the Armistice, and Mother went early in ’19. Broken heart, I guess. There are such things, you know.

  “There wasn’t any reception committee or brass band waiting at the station when I came back to Harrisonville. E
verybody was too busy making money while the chance was good to care about a demobbed soldier then, and besides, no one knew I was coming, for I hadn’t written. The camp surgeon’s office—out at Dix didn’t make up its mind to give me a discharge till the last minute, and I didn’t know whether it would be Harrisonville, New Jersey, or Nogales, Arizona, I’d be headed for an hour before my papers came through the personnel adjutant’s office.

  “I was in civvies, and no one seemed to notice me when I got off the train. You can’t imagine how strange the town where I’d been born seemed as I stood in the station that afternoon, gentlemen,” he continued, “and when I realized my home was closed, and no one there to welcome me, I felt like lying down and crying, right there on the platform.”

  “Mon pauvre!” de Grandin murmured sympathetically.

  Idris turned his head aside and winked his eyes several times, as though to clear them of a film of tears. “There was just one place I wanted to go—one place that seemed like home,” he continued, lighting a cigarette and puffing it slowly. “That was our family plot in Shadow Lawns. So I jumped in a taxi and went out there.

  “It was something after four o’clock in a November afternoon, and dusk was already settling when I walked up the drive leading to their graves—my father’s and mother’s. I wanted to tell them, ‘I’m here at last, dear old people,’ and maybe kneel in the grass and whisper something intimate in Mother’s grave. But—”

  He paused again and drew a handkerchief from the pocket of his lounging-robe, dabbed unashamed at his eyes, and continued: “But there was some one already there when I arrived. It was Marjorie, and she’d brought two bouquets of fresh-cut flowers, one for Mother’s grave, one for Dad’s.

  “Then, gentlemen, I knew. Just as Saul of Tarsus saw the light when the scales dropped from his eyes at the house of Judas in the street called Straight, I saw Marjorie as she really was. I’d always thought her a nice-looking girl with fine eyes and a clear skin, but from that moment she has seemed beautiful to me. All the happiness I’d had from her companionship, all the unvarying kindness she’d shown me throughout our lives, all the dear things she’d meant to me since we were babies suddenly came home to me as I stood beside my parents’ graves that afternoon.

  “There wasn’t any formal proposal. I just opened my arms to her and said, ‘My dear!’ and:

  “‘I’ve always loved you, Idris, and I always shall,’ she told me as I held her in my arms and she turned her lips up to mine and gave and took the first kiss of her life—the first kiss she’d ever had from any man outside her family.

  “We were married the next week, you remember, Doctor Trowbridge.

  “Poor Marjorie! I hadn’t much but love to give her. The war that made ’most everybody rich had ruined my father. He was an importer of aniline dyes, and war with Germany killed his business. All he left me, except a few receipted bills, was something like a hundred dollars cash and a formula he’d worked out for making dyes. He’d died just after perfecting it; they said he’d have had more chance with the flu if he hadn’t weakened himself working nights in his little laboratory on that formula.

  “I got a job and Marjorie and I set up housekeeping. Dad’s old place had been sold to pay his debts, so we started living in a three-room flat. Between times, when I wasn’t working in the company’s laboratory, I tried to market Dad’s dye formula, but nobody seemed interested. The German patents had been sequestered anyway, and with the treaty signed new importations were coming in from Europe, so no one had much time for home-made products in the dye industry.

  “Then the baby—little Bobby, named for Dad, you know—came, and we had it harder than ever. Marjorie—God rest her soul!—even took in sewing to help ends meet, but—well, you know what happened, Doctor Trowbridge. Tuberculosis wouldn’t touch these gas-burned lungs of mine, but it fastened on my wife like a wolf upon a lamb. Sending her away was out of the question. We didn’t have carfare to take us west of Camden! Marjorie wouldn’t hear of leaving me, anyway; ‘We’ve waited so long for each other, Idris,’ she told me, ‘please let me have you till the last moment.’

  “We’d been married with a double-ring ceremony, and on the inside of her ring and mine was engraved ‘Forever.’ A few days before she died she asked me, ‘Idris, dear, you’ll always love me, always love me more than anyone, and never, never forget me?’

  “I could hardly answer for the sobs that filled my throat, but I put my lip against her ear and told her, ‘Always, dear love; always and forever.’

  “You know what happened, Doctor Trowbridge. All my love and all hers, and all your years of experience couldn’t keep her, so she left me, and her last words were: ‘Promise you’ll remember, Idris.’

  “The irony of it! Marjorie had hardly been buried in the Breakstone plot—certainly the funeral bill was nowhere near paid—when I struck it. The Clavender Company, that had turned me down cold two years before, bid in my patent formula and gave me such a royalty contract as I’d never had the nerve to think of asking. I’ve had more money than I’ve known what to do with ever since, and when Bobby grows up he’ll be one of the richest young men in the state. And half, a tenth, a twentieth of the money I get for doing nothing every half-year now would have kept her with me!

  “I haven’t known what to do with either my money or myself these last few years. I’ve given away more than I ever hoped to own, splashed it around like dishwater, squandered it; still it kept coming in faster than I could spend it. I bought a hundred thousand shares of wildcat mining stock at two dollars. The stuff looked so worthless it wouldn’t even do for wallpaper. I forgot it, but it didn’t forget me. Within a year it shot up to a hundred, and, of course, I sold. Next month the bottom fell out, and the stock became utterly worthless, but I’d made a fortune in it. That’s the sort of luck I’ve had—now that it doesn’t matter any more.

  “Last winter I met Muriel Maidstone on a Mediterranean cruise. You’ve seen her; you know her appeal. I was lonesome as Lucifer cast out of heaven, and—well, we were married. That’s that.

  “It wasn’t long before I realized what a fool I’d been. She came from a good Southern family; poor as church mice. Like so many old families with fine traditions and scarcely any money to carry them on, they’d come to worship wealth as Deity. The mere possession of money seemed to them—and her—an end in itself. Wealth was its own justification, and luxury the only thing worth while. A racketeer with unlimited money at his disposal was greater in their estimation than Galileo and Darwin and Huxley, all together.

  “Fool! I married her because she set my blood on fire and stole my thought and made me forget the emptiness of life with her Circe-lure. I learned later I could have had all she had to give—to sell, rather—without the formality of marriage, provided I’d been willing to pay enough. It was for that I took off the little, cheap, plain-gold ring with ‘Forever’ written in it, that Marjorie had put upon my finger when we married! God pity me!

  “I said money was Muriel’s god, but that’s only half the truth. Money’s first, of course, but power’s a close second. When her arms are round a man she can make him swear his soul away and never know it. And she loves to use that power. She kept at me everlastingly, making me vow my love for her, swear I loved her more than anything, finally, declare I loved her above everything in this world or the next.

  “I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I took that perjured oath. My conscience has tormented me unceasingly, for I’ve felt I’ve been untrue to Marjorie—and Marjorie knows!

  “I’ve felt her near me, felt her presence, just as I used to in the old, poor, happy days together, while I shave or dress, or sit here reading in the library, and Muriel’s felt it, too. She says the house is spooky and uncanny and wants to sell it; but she feels a queer, pursued sensation even when she’s away. It’s always with her, it’s almost always with me.

  “Muriel hasn’t much use for Bobby, you know. She hardly ever sees him and never speaks a word to him
when she can avoid it. Two nights ago we went out, and, though I didn’t know it, she gave the servants the night off. Bobby was left here alone. I was nearly frantic with remorse when we got back, and rushed up to the nursery to apologize to him and say I hadn’t realized he was deserted that way.

  “‘Oh, that’s all right, Daddy,’ he answered. ‘Mother’s been here. She often is.’

  “No amount of argument could make him change his story. I tried to tell him Mother was in heaven, and folks up there don’t come back to earth, but he persisted.

  “‘She comes to see me nearly every night,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she holds me in her lap and sings to me; sometimes she just sits by the bed and holds my hand until I go to sleep. One time a noise outside frightened me, and I cried, and she bent over me and smoothed my hair and kissed me and told me, “Don’t be afraid, Bobbycums. Mother won’t ever let anything hurt you; anything or anyone!”’

  “I didn’t tell you this upstairs; I couldn’t; but tonight when we came home from the theater and the supper club Bobby was restless. He called me several times, and finally I went into the nursery and sat with him. Muriel was furious. She called me once or twice, then came after me. When Bobby protested at my leaving she slapped his face. An hour later she woke up screaming something had her by the throat, went into hysterics, then fell into that semi-coma in which you found her.

  “No, Doctor Trowbridge,” he concluded, “it wasn’t anything she’d eaten that caused that nightmare-fright. I know what—who—it was. So does Muriel!”

  I forbore to look at Idris. Obviously the youngster was convinced of everything he told us, and to remonstrate with him would have been as unkind as arguing a child out of his belief in Santa Claus.

  Jules de Grandin suffered no such reticence. “What you tell us is entirely credible, my friend,” he assured young Breakstone. “As to any dereliction of faith on your part, do not reproach yourself too harshly. The weakness of men where women are concerned is equaled only by the weakness of women where men are involved. Madame, your cidevant wife, she understands and makes allowances, I am sure. Love may transcend death, but jealousy? I do not think so; for perfect understanding and jealousy can not exist together. No.”