The Burning Court (2 page)

Gastro-enteritis gives no easy passing; Miles Despard, returned to his home after wandering the earth, had found a slow and cruel death which he bore with a stoicism that had roused the blubbering admiration of the cook. Mrs. Henderson—cook, general housekeeper, and tyrant—said that sometimes he had screamed, but not often. They buried him in the crypt under the private chapel, where nine generations of Despards had been set away in tiers like outworn books, and the stone slab which sealed the crypt had been put back into place again. But one thing seemed to have impressed Mrs. Henderson very deeply. Before he died, Miles Despard had in his hands an ordinary piece of string, tied at equal spacings into nine small knots. They found it under his pillow afterwards.

“I thought it was so nice,” Mrs. Henderson had confided to the Stevenses’ cook. “I suppose he thought it was a rosary, or something like that. Of course the family aren’t Catholics, but all the same I thought it was so nice.”

One other thing had induced in Mrs. Henderson a kind of hysteria, so that nobody had been able to straighten out the matter even yet. It was Mark Despard, the nephew, who had mentioned the matter to Stevens, with annoyed amusement.

Stevens had seen Mark only once since Miles’s death. The old man had died on the night of April 12th, a Wednesday: Stevens remembered the date particularly because he and Marie had spent that night at Crispen, and it was not usual for them to visit the cottage except at week-ends. They had driven back to New York next morning without hearing anything of the tragedy, and only learned of it through the newspapers. When they visited Crispen again on the week-end of the 15th, they had paid formal condolences at the house, but had not attended the funeral: Marie had an almost shuddering horror of death or the sights of death. And on the evening after the funeral Stevens had met Mark striding along in the gloom and emptiness of King’s Avenue.

“Our Mrs. Henderson,” Mark had said, abruptly, “has been seeing things.”

It was a raw and windy twilight, with the buds barely opening in the woodland through which King’s Avenue curved up to Despard Park. Nevertheless, the great trees seemed to shake and move over Mark’s head like shadows. Mark’s hook-nosed face was pale if boisterous under the light of a street lamp; he leaned against the lamp-post with his hands in his pockets.

“Our Mrs. Henderson,” he repeated, “has been seeing things. I’m not even quite certain what it was that she didn’t see, because she’s kept it to hints and prayers. But it would appear that on the night Uncle Miles died there was a woman in his room, talking to him.”

“A woman?”

“No, not what you’re thinking,” said Mark, formally. “I mean merely that a woman—in what Mrs. Henderson describes as ‘queer old-fashioned clothes’—was in his room, talking to him. Now that’s possible, of course. On that night several of us, Lucy and Edith and myself as well, went to a masquerade ball at St. Davids. Lucy was dressed as Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s favorite. Edith was somebody in bonnet and hoopskirts; Florence Nightingale, I believe. With my wife as a great courtesan and my sister as a great nurse, I was well protected.

“However,” he added, scowling, “it’s rather improbable. You didn’t know Miles very well, did you? He was an amiable old devil. He kept by himself in his own room, and wouldn’t let anybody go into it—you knew that—although he was always polite. He even had his meals sent up to him. When he was taken bad, of course, I had a trained nurse brought in. He kicked up a hell of a polite row about that. We put the nurse in the room next to his, and we had a lot of trouble preventing him from locking the communicating door so that
she
couldn’t come in whenever she liked. … Consequently, Mrs. Henderson’s vision of a woman in ‘queer old-fashioned clothes,’ though it’s possible——”

Stevens could not understand what was bothering him.

“Well, I don’t see anything particularly strange about it,” he said. “Have you asked Lucy or Edith about it? And, anyway, if nobody was allowed in the room, how did Mrs. Henderson see the woman at all?”

“Mrs. Henderson claims to have seen her through a window, which Miles usually kept curtained, giving on an upper sun porch. No; I haven’t mentioned it to Lucy or Edith.” He hesitated, and then laughed boisterously. “For a very good reason.
That
doesn’t bother me; I’m not trying to make any mystery of it. It’s the other part of Mrs. Henderson’s tale that puzzles me. According to her story, this woman in the old-fashioned clothes—now attend to me carefully—first had a little talk with Miles, and then turned round and went out of the room by a door which does not exist.”

Stevens looked at him. Mark Despard’s thin hook-nosed face wore a gravity which may or may not have been satirical.

“You don’t say so,” Stevens observed, with a noncommittal noise. “Ghosts?”

“I mean,” said Mark, frowning over a careful definition of terms, “a door which has been bricked up and panelled over for two hundred years. Mysterious visitor simply opens it and walks out. Ghosts? No; I doubt it very much. We’ve managed to struggle along for a very long time without producing any ghosts. We’ve been too cursed respectable. You can’t imagine a respectable ghost; it may be a credit to the family, but it’s an insult to guests. More likely it’s something wrong with Mrs. Henderson, if you ask me.”

Abruptly he had strode off down the avenue.

That was a week ago; and Stevens, thinking over the interview in the train that was carrying him to Crispen now, touched the puzzle-bits without much attention. He was considering merely isolated instances—the talk with Morley at the office, the talk with Mark Despard in the road—and wondering not how they could be explained, but how they could be fitted together in the form of a story. Granted that they bore no relation to each other, any more than separate newspaper items. But here they were: a recluse of an author, Gaudan Cross, who had a passion for seeing his own photograph, not from motives of vanity; a recluse of a millionaire, Miles Despard, dying of stomach inflammation, and under his pillow a piece of string tied into nine knots; finally, a woman in old-fashioned clothes (date not specified) who was alleged to have walked out of a room through a door that had been bricked up for two hundred years. Now, how would a skilled story-teller tie together those unrelated facts or fancies into one pattern?

Stevens gave it up. But, still curious about Cross, he opened the briefcase and drew out the manuscript in its container. It was fairly bulky; it would run, he estimated, about a hundred thousand words; and, like all Cross’s manuscripts, it was neat with an almost finicky preciseness. The chapters were punched together with brass fasteners; the prints, photographs, and drawings affixed with paper-clips. After running his eye down the table of contents, he glanced at the heading of the first chapter—but that was not what made his grip on the manuscript loosen, so that it almost slid off his knee.

Fastened to the page was an old but still very clear photograph of a woman. Under it in small neat letters had been printed:

Marie D’Aubray: Guillotined for Murder, 1861.

He was looking at a photograph of his own wife.

For a time he sat quiet, insistently examining the name, insistently examining the features. All the while that he went over and over them, he was hazily conscious that he still sat in the smoking-car of the 7:35 train for Crispen. But he still seemed to be in a great void.

Presently he looked up, settled the manuscript more firmly in his lap, and looked out of the window. His feeling (it was a commonplace one) was something like that of sitting up in a dentist’s chair after an extraction: a little light-headed, conscious of a little quicker heartbeat; nothing more. He was not even conscious of being startled now. He saw that they were flashing through Overbrook, with a clackety-roar of rails, and a few street lamps shining on asphalt below.

There was no possibility of coincidence or mistake. The name was hers: Marie D’Aubray. The features were hers, even to an expression he knew. The woman in the picture, the woman who had gone to the guillotine seventy years ago, had been a relation of his wife’s—say her great-grandmother, which would make the dates about right. But the throwback to her features was uncanny, when the great-grand-daughter even caught a shade of expression.

It did not matter a tinker’s damn, of course. It would not have mattered if her fathers or mothers or uncles had themselves been tipped under that evil plank. And in this age seventy-year-old devilry has already a flavor of the historic: we are apt to take it with a sort of casual and indulgent approval, as unrelated to the business of ordinary life as a
papier-mâché
skull on a desk. Nevertheless, it was startling; because in the picture there was even indicated the very tiny mole just below the angle of the jaw, and the antique bracelet he had seen Marie wear a hundred times. Furthermore, it was not going to be very funny if his own publishing firm issued a book with his wife’s photograph plastered opposite the title-page in a gallery of poisoners. Was that what Morley had meant, “You might come in and see me first thing Monday morning?”

No, it was of no consequence. All the same——

Turning back to study the picture again, he detached it from the page to get a better look. Now, why should he have a queer feeling when he touched it? Actually, though he could not have analyzed it, the realization that came over him in such a rush was the realization of how thoroughly and violently he remained in love with her. The photograph was of very thick cardboard, its grey stiplings touched in places with brown. On the back, with letters indented in the cardboard, was the photographer’s name, “Perrichet et Fils, 12 rue Jean Goujean, Paris vii.” Sprawled across this in curly handwriting, the ink now faded to brown, someone had written, “Ma très, très chère Marie; Louis Dinard, le 6
^ième
Janvier, 1858.” Lover? Husband?

But what really came up as though in a wave from this picture, what grotesquely mingled the old-fashioned and the modern, was the woman’s expression. It survived even the stilted photography. The picture was a large half-length, having for its background a landscape with trees—and doves. The woman stood unnaturally, as though she were about to wobble over to one side, and her left hand rested on the top of a little round table which was chastely draped with an antimacassar. Her high-necked dress was of some darkish taffeta material, which gleamed in bunches. And from this high collar the head was carried a little back.

Even though the dark-golden hair seemed somewhat differently arranged (there were a couple of curls which gave it a stiff archaic look), still it was Marie’s. She faced the camera, but looked slightly past it. Her grey eyes, with the somewhat heavy lids, large pupils, and dead-black irises, wore what he had often called her “spiritual” expression. The lips were open and faintly smiling. The eyes fixed on you before you noticed it, like a painter’s trick. Framed in these surroundings of doves and trees and antimacassars, it had an almost unpleasantly sugary appearance. Yet to the senses it conveyed something altogether different. The thing was alive. It had become a sort of Monkey’s Paw in Stevens’s hand, and he found his wrist joggling.

His eyes went back to the words, “guillotined for murder.” Women were very rarely guillotined for murder. If they were, it was because what they had done was such that no other course could be taken.

Stevens said to himself: This whole business is a joke or a hoax of some kind. Damn it, this
is
Marie. Somebody is putting something over on me.

He said this to himself, although he knew quite well it was not true. After all, these startling resemblances of descendants to their forebears did crop up sometimes; there was nothing strange in that; it was a fact. Her great-grandmother had been executed, but what of it?

After all, he knew very little about her, although they had been married for three years. He had not been particularly curious. He knew that she came from Canada, out of a moldering house rather like Despard Park. They had met in Paris and had been married in a fortnight. They had met (with a sort of accidental romance) in the courtyard of an old empty
hôtel
near the cabbage-stalls of the rue St. Antoine. What he could not remember was the name of the street, or why be had strayed there during some explorations through Old Paris. It was the rue… the rue… Hold on! He associated it somehow with a suggestion made by his friend Welden, who held a chair in English at the College, and was also a murder-trial-fancier. Over three years ago Welden had said:

“You’ll be in Paris this summer? Then, if you’re interested in scenes of violence, look up number blank in the rue Blank.”

“What’s there?”

“See,” said Welden, “if anyone in the neighborhood can tell you. Or there’s a puzzle; work it out.”

He had never found out, and he had forgotten to ask Welden since; but he had met Marie there, apparently roving like himself. She said that she did not know what the place was. She said that she had seen doors half open into a curious Old World court, and she had gone in. When he first saw her, she was sitting on the rim of a dead fountain in the centre of the court, where rank grass grew. Round her on three sides were the railings of the galleries, and the chipped stone faces carved on the walls. Though she did not look French, still he was surprised to hear her address him in vigorous and ordinary English, and to see how her rather “spiritual” good looks were made suddenly vigorous by her own smile. It was, in a way, an allure of sheer health.

But why hadn’t she ever told him? Why the unnecessary secrecy? That house, probably, was where the Marie D’Aubray of 1858 had lived. Afterwards the family must have gone out to Canada; and now Marie, a descendant, was revisiting evil scenes with a natural curiosity about the elder Marie. Her life had been humdrum enough, to judge by the occasional letter she received from Cousin This or Aunt That. She sometimes supplied an anecdote of her family; but, to tell the truth, he had never very much thought about it. There were odd corners and unexpected ideas in her nature: why, for instance, could she never bear the sight of a funnel, an ordinary kitchen funnel? Then again——