Ancient Fires

“TIENS, Friend Trowbridge, this is interesting.” Jules de Grandin passed the classified page of the Times across the breakfast table and indicated one of the small advertisements with the polished nail of his well-groomed forefinger. “Regard this avis, if you please, and say if I am not the man.”

Fixing my reading glasses firmly on my nose, I perused the notice he pointed out:

WANTED—A man of more than ordinary courage to undertake confidential and possibly dangerous mission. Great physical strength not essential, but indomitable bravery and absolute fearlessness in the face of seemingly supernatural manifestations are. This is a remarkable work and will require the services of a remarkable man. A fee up to $10,000 will be paid for the successful prosecution of the case. X. L. Selfridge, Attorney, Jennifer Building.

De Grandin’s round blue eyes shone with elated anticipation as I put down the paper and regarded him across the cloth. “Morbleu, is it not an apple from the tree of Divine Providence?” he demanded, twisting the ends of his diminutive blond mus tache ferociously. “A remarkable man for a remarkable work, do they say? Cordieu, but Jules de Grandin is that man, nor do I in any wise im ply perhaps! You will drive me down to that so generous soliciteur. Friend Trowbridge, and we shall together collect from him this ten thou sand dollars, or may I never hear the blackbirds whistle in the trees of St. Cloud again.”

“Sounds like some bootlegger advertising for a first lieutenant,” I discouraged, but he would not be gainsaid.

“We shall go, we shall most cer tainly go to see this remarkable law yer who offers a remarkable fee to a remarkable man,” he insisted, rising and dragging me from the table.

“Morbleu, my friend, excitement is good, and gold is good, too; but gold and excitement together—to, to, they are a combination worthy of any

“This seems incredibly good, gen tlemen,” the little lawyer assured ns when he had finished examining the credentials de Grandin showed. “I had hoped to get some ex-service man —some youngster who hadn’t gotten his fill of adventure in the great war, perhaps—or possibly some student of psychic phenomena—but—iny dear sir!”—he beamed on my friend—“to secure a man of your standing is more than I had dared hope. Indeed, I did not suspect such characters existed outside book covers.”

“Parbleu, Monsieur l’Avoué,” de Grandin replied with one of his imp ish smiles, “I have been in what you Americans call some tight places, but never have I been shut up in a book. Now, if you will be so good as to tell us something of this so remarkable mission you wish undertaken-” He paused, voice and eyebrows raised interrogatively.

“To be sure”—the attorney passed a box of cigars across the desk— “you’ll probably consider this a silly sort of case for a man of your talents, but—well, to get down to brass tacks, I’ve a client who wants to sell a house.”

“Ah?” de Grandin murmured noncommittally. “And we are to be come indomitably fearless real estate brokers, perhaps?”

“Not quite,” the lawyer laughed, “nothing quite as simple as that. You see, Redgables is one of the finest properties in the entire lake region. It lies in the very heart of the moun tains, with a commanding view, eontains nearly three thousand acres of good land, and, in fact, possesses

TALES nearly every requisite of an ideal country estate or a summer hotel or sanitarium. Normally, it’s worth between three and four hundred thou sand dollars; but, unfortunately, it possesses one drawback—a drawback which makes its market value prac tically nil. It’s haunted.”

“Eh, do you say so?” De Grandin sat up very straight in his chair and fixed his unwinking stare on the attor ney. “Parbleu, it will be a redoubtable ghost whom Jules de Grandin cannot eject for a fee of two hundred thousand francs! Say on, my friend; I bum with curiosity.”

“The house was built some seventyfive years ago when that part of New York State was little better than a wilderness,” the attorney resumed.

“John Aglinberry, son of Sir Rufus Aglinberry, and the great-uncle of my client, was the builder. He came to this country under something of a cloud—pretty well estranged from his family—and built that English manor house in the midst of our hills as a refuge from all mankind, it “As a young man he’d served with the British army in India, and got mixed up in rather a nasty scandal. Went ghazi —fell in love with a na tive girl and threatened to marry her. There was a devil of a row. His folks used influence to have him dismissed from the service and cut off his allowance to force him back to England. After that they must have made life pretty uncomfortable for him, for when he inherited a pile of money from a spinster aunt, he packed up and came to America, building that beautiful house out there in the woods and living like a hermit the rest of his life.

“The girl’s family didn’t take mat ters much easier than Aglinberry’s, it seems. Something mysterious hap pened to her before he left India—I imagine he’d have stayed there in

spite of hell and high water, if she’d lived.

“Somehow, the Aglinberry fortune petered out. John Aglinberry’s younger brothers both came to this country and settled in New York, working at one thing and another till he died. They inherited the property share and share alike under our law; but it never did them any good. Neither of them was ever able to live in it, and they never could sell it. Some thing—mind you, I’m not saying it was a ghost—but something damned unpleasant, nevertheless, has run off every tenant who’s ever attempted to occupy that place.

“My client is young John Aglin berry, great-nephew of the builder, and last of the family. He hasn’t a cent to bless himself with, except the potential value of Redgables.

“That’s the situation, gentlemen; a young man, heir to a baronetcy, if he wished to go to England to claim it, poorer than a church mouse, with a half-million dollar property eating itself up in taxes and no way to con vert it into a dime in cash till he can find someone to demonstrate that the place isn’t devil-ridden. Do you understand why we’re willing to pay a ten thousand dollar fee—contingent on the success of re-establishing Redgables’ good name?”

“Tiens, Monsieur,” de Grandin ex claimed, grinding the fire from his half-Bmoked cigar, “we do waste the time. I am all impatience to try con clusions with this property-destroying ghost who keeps your so deserving client out of the negotiation of his land and me from a ten thousand dol lar fee. Morbleu, this is a case after my own heart! When Bhall we start for this so charming estate whieh is to pay me ten thousand dollars for ridding it of its specter tenants?” J OHN agunberet, chiefly distin guished by a wide, friendly grin, met us at the railway station which

PIKES 347 lay some five miles from Redgables, and extended a warm handclasp in greeting. “It’s mighty good of you gentlemen to come up here and give me a lift,” he exclaimed as he shep herded us along the platform and helped stow our traps into the un kempt tonneau of a Ford which might have seen better days, though not recently. “Mr. Selfridge’shoned me yesterday morning, and I hustled up here to do what I could to make you comfortable. I doubt you’d have been able to get any of the village folks to drive you over to the place— they’re as frightened of it as they would be of a mad dog.”

“But, Monsieur,” de Grandin ex postulated, “do you mean to say you have been in that house by yourself this morning?”

“Uh-huh, and last night, too,” our host replied. “Came up here on the afternoon train yesterday and tidied things up a hit.”

“And you saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing?” de Grandin persisted.

“Of course not,” the young man answered impatiently. “There isn’t anything to see or feel, or hear, either, if you except the usual noises that go with a country place in springtime. There’s nothing wrong with file property, gentlemen. Just a lot of silly gossip which has made one of the finest potential summer resorts in the county a drug on the market. That’s why Mr. Selfridge and I are so anxious to get the statement of gen tlemen of your caliber behind us. One word from you will outweigh all the silly talk these yokels can blab in the next ten years.” De Grandin cast me a quick smile.

“He acknowledges our importance, my friend,” he whispered. “Truly, we shall have to walk fast to live up to such a reputation.” Further conversation was cut short by our arrival at the gates of our fu ture home. The elder Aglinberry had

spared no expense to reproduce a bit of England in the Adirondacks. Tall posts of stone flanked the high iron gate which pierced the ivy-mantled wall surrounding the park, and a wide graveled driveway, bordered on each side by a wall of cedars, led to the house, which was a two-story Tudor structure with shingles of natural red cedar from which the place de rived its name. Inside, the house bore out the promise of its exterior. The hall was wide and stone-paved, wain scoted with panels of walnut and with a beamed ceiling of adz-hewn cedar logs and slabs. A field-stone fireplace, almost as large as the average subur ban cottage’s garage, pierced the north wall, and the curving stairs were built with wide treads and balustraded with hand-carved walnut. A single oil painting, that of the elder John Aglinberry, relieved the dark ness of the wall facing the stairway.

“But, Monsieur, this is remarkable,” de Grandin asserted as he gazed upon the portrait. “From the resemblance you bear your late kinsman you might easily be taken for hi3 son—yes, pardieu, were you dressed in the archaic clothes of his period, you might be himself!”

“I’ve noticed the resemblance, too,” young Aglinberry smiled.

“Poor old Uncle John, gloomy-looking cove, wasn't he? Anyone would think all his friends were dead and he was making plans to visit the vil lage undertaker himself.” The Frenchman shook his head reprovingly at the younger man’s fa cetiousness. “Poor gentleman,” he murmured, “he had cause to look sad. When you, too, have experienced the sacrifice of love, you may look sad dened, my friend.” We spent the remainder of the afternoon surveying the house and sur rounding grounds. Dinner was cooked on a portable camp outfit over blazing logs in the hall fireplace, and about 9 o’clock all three of us

TALES mounted the stairs to bed. “Remem ber,” de Grandin warned, “if you hear or see the slightest intimation of anything which is not as it should be, you are to ring the bell beside your bed, my friend. Dr. Trowbridge and I shall sleep like the cat, with one eye open and claws alert.”

“Not a chance,” our host scoffed.

“I slept here last night and never saw or heard anything more supernat ural than a stray rat, and mighty few of those.” T might have slept half an hour or twice that long when a gentle nudge brought me wide awake and sitting bolt upright in bed. “Trow bridge, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin’s voice came through the darkness from across the room, “rise and follow; I think I hear Monsieur Aglinberry’s alarm bell!” I slipped a bathrobe over my pa jamas and took the loaded automatic and flashlight from under my pillow.

“All fright,” I whispered, “I’m We stole down the hall toward our host’s room, and de Grandin paused beside the door. Clearly we made out the sound of an untroubled sleeper’s heavy breathing. “Guess you’ve been hearing things, de Grandin,” I chuckled in a low voice, but he held up one slender hand in warning.

“P-s-st, be still!” he commanded.

“Do not you hear it, too, my friend? Hark!” I listened with bated breath, but no sound save the occasional ghostly creak of a floor-board came to my ears, thenFaint, so faint it might have been mistaken for the echo of an imagined sound, had it not been for its insist ence, I heard the light, far-awaysounding tinkle-tinkle of bells. “Tinkn-tink, a-fink-a-tink; tink-a-ftnk, afinfc-a-tink” they sounded, scarcely louder than the swishing of silk,

every third and fifth beat accentuated in an endless “circular” rhythm; but their music did not emanate from the room beyond the door. Bather, it seemed to me, the tiny, fairylike ring ing came up the stairway from the hall below. My companion seemed struck by the same thought, for he crept past me toward the stairhead, his softsoled slippers making no more noise against the hardwood floor than the beating of a moth’s wings against the night air. Close behind him I slipped, my gun and flashlight held in instant readi ness, but at sight of his eager, strained face as he paused at the top of the stair I forgot my weapons and stole forward to peep over his skoulA shutter must have eome unfas tened at one of the small, high win dows in the hall, for a patch of dim moonlight, scarcely more than three feet in diameter, lay upon the floor directly beneath the portrait of the elder Aglinberry, and against the cir cle of luminance a thin, almost impal pable wreath of smoke seemed drift ing before a draft of air from the fire place. I looked again. No, it was not smoke, it was something with a de fined outline. It was—it was a wisp of muslin, air-light and almost color less in its sheerness, but cloth, nevertheless. And now, as I gazed unbe lievingly, something else seemed slowly taking form in the moonlight. A pair of narrow, high-arched feet and tapering, slender ankles, un clothed except for a double loop of bell-studded chains, were mincing and gyrating on flexible toes, while, faint er than the feet, but still perceptible, the outline of a body as fair as any that ever swayed to the tempo of musie showed against the black background of the darkened hall like a fig ure dimly suggested in an impression istic painting. Bound and round, in a dazing hut incredibly graceful

FIBES dance the vision whirled, the hem of the muslin skirt standing outward with the motion of the pirouetting feet, the tiny, golden bells on the chain anklets sending out their faerie ‘•Morblev,!” de Grandin whispered softly to himself. “Do you see it, also. Friend Trowbridge?”

“I-” I began in a muted voice, hut stopped abruptly, for a puff of passing breeze must have closed the shutter, cutting off the moonbeam as a theatrical spotlight is shut off by a stage electrician. The illusion van ished instantly. There was no elfin, dancing form before the painted like ness of old John Aglinberry, no sound of clinking anklets in the old house. We were just a pair of sleepdisheveled men in bathrobes and pa jamas standing at a stairhead and staring foolishly into the darkness of a deserted hallway.

“I thought I saw-” I began again, but again I was interrupted, this time by the unmistakable clatter of the hand-bell in Aglinberry’s room. We raced down the corridor to him and flung open the door. “Monsieur Aglinberry!” de Grandin gasped, “did it—did anything come into your room? Dr. Trowbridge and I-” The young man sat up in bed, grinning sheepishly at us in the dou ble beam of our flashlights. “I must be getting a case of nerves,” he con fessed. “Never had the jumps like this before. Just a moment ago I fancied I felt something touch my lips —like the tip of a bat’s wing, it was, soft as velvet, and so light I could scarcely feel it; hut it woke me up, and I grabbed the hell and began ringing, like a fool. Funny, too”— he glanced toward the window—“it couldn’t have been a bat, for I took particular pains to nail mosquitonetting over that window this morning. It’s—why, it’s tom!” Sure enough, the length of strong

netting which our host had thought fully tacked across the windows of both our room and his as a precaution against early spring insects, was rent from top to bottom as though by a knife. “H’m,” he muttered, “it might have been a bat, at that.”

“To be sure,” de Grandin agreed, nodding so vigorously that he resembled a Chinese mandarin, “it might, as you say, Monsieur, have been a bat. But I think you would sleep more safely if you closed the window.” Crossing the room he drew the casement to and shot the forged iron bolt into place. “Ron soir, my friend”—he bowed formally at the doorway—“a good night, and be sure you leave your window closed.”

"TX/ould you gentlemen like to ' ' look at the property down by the lake?” Aglinberry asked as we finished our breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee and fried potatoes the following morning.

“Assuredly,” de Grandin replied as he donned topcoat and cap, slip ping his ever-ready automatic pistol into his pocket, “a soldier’s first cau tion should be to familiarize himself with the terrain over which he is to fight.” We marched down a wide, curving drive bordered by pollarded willows, toward the smooth sheet of water flashing in the early morning sunlight.

“We have one of the finest stands of native hardwood to be found anywhere in this part of the country,” Aglinberry began, waving his stick toward an imposing grove to our right. “Just the timber alone is worth—well, of all the copper-riveted nerve!” he broke off angrily, hasten ing his pace and waving his cane bel ligerently. “See there? Some fool camper has started a fire in those woods. Hi, there, you! Hi, there; what’re you doing?”

Hurrying through the trees we came upon a little clearing where a decrepit, weather-blistered van was drawn up beside a small spring, two moth-eaten-appearing horses tethered to a near-by tree and several incredi bly dirty children wrestling and fight ing on the short grass. A man in greasy corduroys lay full length on the ground, a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, while another lounged in the doorway of the van. Two women in faded shawls and headkerchiefs and an amazing amount of pinchbeck jewelry were busily en gaged, one in hewing down underbrush to replenish the campfire, the other stirring some sort of savory mess in a large, smoke-blackened kettle which swung over the blazing “What the devil do you mean by building a fire here?” Aglinberry de manded angrily as we came to a halt.

“Don’t you know you’re likely to start a blaze in these woods? Go down to the lake if you want to camp; there’s no danger of burning things up there.” The women looked at him in sullen silence, their fierce black eyes smol dering angrily under their straight black brows; but the man lying beside the fire was not minded to be hustled from his comfortable couch.

“Too mucha stone by da lake,” he informed Aglinberry lazily, raising the hat from his face, but making no other move toward obeying the sum mons to quit. “Too mucha stone an’ sand. I lika dissa grass to lay on. I stay here. See?”

“By George, we’ll see about that!” replied our irate host. “You’ll stay here, will you? Like hell you will!” Stepping quickly to the fire, he shoul dered the crouching woman out of his path and scattered the blazing sticks from under the kettle with a vigorous kick of his heavy boot, stamping the flame from the brands and kicking

earth over the embers. “Stay here, will you?” he repeated. “We’ll see about that. Pull your freight, and pull it in a hurry, or I’ll have the whole gang of you arrested for trespass.”

The reclining gipsy leaped to his feet as though propelled by a spring.

“You tella me pulla da freight? You keek my fire out? You? Ha, I show you somet ’ing!” His dirty hand flew to the girdle about his greasy trou sers, and a knife’s evil flash showed in the sunlight. “You t’ink you make da fool of Nikolai Brondovitch? I show you! ’ ’ Slowly, with a rolling tread which reminded me of a tiger preparing to leap, he advanced toward Aglinberry, his little, porcine eyes snapping vin dictively, his bushy eyebrows bent into an almost straight line with the ferocity of his scowl.

"Eh bien. Monsieur le Bohemien,” Jules de Grandin remarked pleasant ly, “were I in your shoes—and very dirty shoes they are, too—I would consider what I did before I did it.” The gipsy turned a murderous scowl on him and stopped short in his tracks, his narrow eyes contracting to mere slits with apprehension. The Frenchman had slipped his pistol from his pocket and was pointing its uncompromising black muzzle straight at the center of the Romany’s checked shirt.

“Meester,” the fellow pleaded, sheathing his knife hurriedly and forcing his swarthy features into the semblance of a smile, “I maka da joke. I not mean to hurt your friend. I poor man, trying to make honest living by selling horses. I not mean to scare your friend. We taka da camp offa hees lan’ right away.”

"Pardieu, my friend, I think you will,” de Grandin agreed, nodding approvingly. “You will take your so filthy wagon, your horses, your women and your brats from off this

property. You leave at once, immediately, right away!” He waved his blue steel pistol with an authoritative gesture. “Come; I have already waited too long; try not my patience, I beseech you.” Muttering imprecations in their unintelligible tongue and showering us with looks as malignant as articu late curses, the gipsies broke camp under our watchful supervision, and we followed them down the grassgrown drive toward the lake front. We watched them off the land, then proceeded with our inspection of the R edo abides was an extensive prop erty and we spent the better part of the day exploring its farther cor ners. By nightfall all three of us were glad to smoke a sociable pipe and turn in shortly after dinner. I was lying on my back, staring straight upward to the high ceiling of our chamber and wondering if the vision of the night before had been some trick of our imaginations, when de Grandin’s sharp, strident whisper cut through the darkness and brought me suddenly wide-awake. “Trow bridge,” he murmured, “I hear a sound. Someone is attempting enI lay breathless a moment, strain ing my ears for any corroboration of his statement, but only the soughing of the wind through the evergreens outside and the occasional rasp of a bough against the house rewarded my vigil. “Rats!” I scoffed. “Who’d try to break into a house with such a reputation as this one’s? Why, Mr. Selfridge told us even the tramps avoided the place as if it were a plague-spot.”

“Nevertheless,” he insisted as he drew on his boots and pulled a top coat over his pajamas, “I believe we have uninvited guests, and I shall en deavor to mend their manners, if such they be.”

There was nothing to do but follow him. Downstairs, tiptoe, our flashlights held ready and our pistols pre pared for emergency, we stole through the great, dark hall, undid the chain-fastener of the heavy front door, and walked softly around the angle of the house. At de Grandin’s direction, we kept to the shadow of the tall, blackbranched pine trees which grew near the house, watching the moonlit walls of the building for any evidence of a housebreaker.

“It is there the young Aglinberry sleeps,” de Grandin observed in a low voice as he indicated a partly opened casement on the second floor, its small panes shining like nacre in the rays of the full moon. “I observe he has not obeyed our injunctions to close his sash in the night-time. Morbleu, that which we did see last night might have been harmless, my friend, but, again, it might have been—ah, my friend, look; look!” Stealthily, silently as a shadow, a stooped form stole around the comer of the wall, paused huddled in a spot of darkness where the moonbeams failed to reach, then slowly straight ened up, crept into the light, and be gan mounting the rough rubblestone side of the house, for all the world like some great, uncanny lizard from the preadamite days. Clinging to the protuberances of the rocks with claw like hands, feeling for toeholds in the interstices where cement had weath ered away, the thing slowly ascended, nearer and yet nearer Aglinberry’s unlatched window.

“Dieu de Dieu,” de Grandin mut tered, “if it be a phantom, our friend Aglinberry is in misfortune, for ’twas he himself who left his window unfastened. If it be not a ghost— parbleu, it had better have said its paternosters, for when he puts his head in that window, I fire!” I saw the glint of moonlight on the blue

TALES steel of his pistol barrel as he trained it on the climbing thing. Inch by inch the creature—man or devil—crept up the wall, reached its talon hands across the stone sill, be gan drawing itself through the case ment. I held my breath, expecting the roar of de Grandin’s pistol each second, but a sudden gasp of astonish ment beside me drew my attention from the creeping thing to my com panion.

“Look, Friend Trowbridge, regard^ ez, s’il vous plait!” he bade me in a tremulous whisper, nodding speech lessly toward the window into which the marauder was disappearing like a great, black serpent into its lair. I turned my gaze toward the window again and blinked my eyes in unbe lief. An odd luminescence, as if the moon’s rays had been focused by a lens, appeared behind the window opening. It was like a mirror of dull silver, or a light faintly reflected from a distance. Tiny bits of impalpable dust, like filings from a silversmith's rasp, seemed floating in the air, whirling, dancing lightly in the con verging moon rays, circling about each other like dust-motes seen in a sun-shaft through a darkened room, driving together, taking form. later ally out of moonlight, a visible, discernible something was being made. Spots of shadow appeared against the phosphorescent gleam, alternate high lights and shadows became apparent, limning the outlines of a human face, a slender, oval face with smoothlyparted hair sleekly drawn across a high, broad forehead; a face of proud-mouthed, narrow-nosed beauty such as the highest-caste women of the Rajputs have. A moment it seemed suspended there, more like the penumbra of a shadow than an actual entity, then seemed to surge forward, to lose its sharpness of outline, and blend, mysteriously, with the darkness of the night-prowler’s form, as though a splash of mercury were suddenly thrown upon a slab of carbon.

A moment the illusion of light-on-darkness held, then a scream of wireedged terror, mingled with mortal pain, shuddered through the quiet night as a lightning flash rips across a thunder cloud. The climber loosed both hands from the window sill, clawed frantically at the empty air above him, then hurtled like a plum met to the earth, almost at our feet. Our flashlights shot their beams simultaneously on the fallen man’s face as we reached his side, revealing the features of Nikolai Brondovitch, the gipsy Aglinberry had ordered off the place that morning. But it was a different face from that the Romany had displayed when threatening Aglinberry or attempting to conciliate de Grandin. The eyes were starting from their sockets, the mouth hung open with an imbecile, hang-jawed flaeeidity. And on the gipsy’s lean, corded throat was a knotted swelling, as though a power ful clamp had seized and crushed the flesh together, shutting off breath and blood in a single mighty grasp. Both de Grandin and I recognized the thing before us for what it was—trust a physician to reeognize it! Death is unique, and nothing in the world counterfeits it. The scoundrel had died before his body touched the ground.

“Nom d’un nom!” de Grandin murmured wonderingly. “And did you also see it, Friend Trowbridge?”

“I saw something,” I answered, shuddering at the recollection.

“And what did you see?” his words came quickly, like an eager lawyer cross-examining a reluctant witness.

“It—it looked like a woman’s face,” I faltered, “but-”

“Nom de Dieu, yes,” he agreed, almost hysterically, “a woman’s face— a face with nobody beneath it! Farbleu, my friend, I think this adven ture is worthy of our steel. Come, let us see the young Aglinberry.” We hurried into the house and up the stairs, hammering on our host’s door, calling his name in frenzied “Eh, what’s up?” his cheery voice responded, and next moment he un fastened the door and looked at us, a sleepy grin mantling his youthful face. “What’s the idea of you chaps breaking a fellow’s door down at this time o’ night?” he wanted to know.

“Having bad dreams?”

“Mon Monsieur!” de Grandin — stammered, his customary aplomb de serting him. “Do you mean—have you been sleeping t”

“Sleeping?” the other echoed.

“What do you think I went to bed for? What’s the matter, have you caught the family ghost?” He grinned at us again.

“And you have heard nothing, seen nothing—you do not know an en trance to your room was almost forced?” de Grandin asked incredu- “An entrance to my room?” the other frowned in annoyance, looking quizzically from one of us to the other. “Say, you gentlemen had bet ter go back to bed. I don’t know whether I’m lacking in a sense of humor or what my trouble is, but I don’t quite get the joke of waking a man up in the middle of the night to tell him that sort of cock-and-bull story.”

“Nom d’un chou-fleur!” De Gran din looked at me and shook his head wonderingly. “He has slept through it all. Friend Trowbridge!” Aglinberry bristled with anger.

“What’re you fellows trying to do, string me?” he demanded hotly.

“Your hat, your coat, your boots,

“Monsieur,” de Grandin assured him with injured dignity, “it is that you speak out of the conceit of bound less ignorance. When you have seen one-half— pardieu, one-quarter or one-eighth—the things I have seen, you will learn not to sneer at whatever you fail to understand. As that so magnificent Monsieur Shakespeare did say, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.”

“Probably,” our host interrupted, smothering a yawn, “but I’m content to let ’em stay there. Meantime, I’m going to bed. Good night. ’ ’ And up the stairs he marched, leaving us to share the warmth of the crackling pitch-pine fire.

TALES De Grandin shook his head pitying ly after the retreating youngster.

“He is the perfect type of that Mon sieur Babbitt,” he confided. “World ly, materialistic, entirely devoid of imagination. Parbleu, we have them in France, too! Did they not make mock of Pasteur, le grand, when he announced his discoveries to a skep tical world? Most assuredly. Like the poor, the materialist we have always with us. — Ha! what is that? Do you hear it, Trowbridge, my friend?” Faintly, so faintly it was like the half-heard echo of an echo, the fine, musical jangle of tiny bells wafted te us through the still, cold air of the dark old house.

“In there, ’twas in the library it sounded!” the Frenchman insisted in an excited whisper as he leaped to his feet and strode across the hall. ‘ ‘ Your light, Friend Trowbridge; quick, your light!” I threw the beam of my electric torch about the high-walled, somber old reading room, but nothing more ghostly than the tall walnut book cases, empty of books and laden only with dust these many years, met our eyes. Still the soft, alluring chime sounded somewhere in the shadows, vague and indefinite as the cobwebbed darkness about us, but insistent as a trumpet call heard across uncounted miles of night.

“Morbleu, but this is strange!” de Grandin asserted, circling the room with quick, nervous steps. “Trow bridge, Trowbridge, my friend, as we live, those bells are calling us, calling —ah, cordieu, they are here!” He had halted before a carved panel under one of the old bookcases and was on his hands and knees, ex amining each figure of the conven tionalized flowers and fruits which adorned its surface. With quick, questing fingers he felt the carvings, like a cracksman feeling out the combination of a safe. “Nom d’un fromage, I have it!’’ he called in lilting triumph as he bore suddenly down upon a bunch of carved grapes and the panel swung suddenly inward upon invisible hinges. “Trowbridge, mon ami, regardez vous!” Peering into the shallow opening left by the heavy, carved plank, we beheld a package carefully wrapped in linen, dust-covered and yellowed with age.

“Candles, if you please, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin command ed as he bore our find in triumph to the hall. “We shall see what secret of the years these bells have led us to.” He sank into his armchair and began unwinding the linen bands.

“Ah? And what is this?” He unreeled the last of the bandages and displayed a small roll of red morocco leather, a compact little case such as an elder generation of men carried with them for supplying needles, buttons, thread and other aids to the womanless traveler. Inside the wallet was a length of tough, age-tanned parchment, and attached to it by a loop of silk was a single tiny hawk-bell of gold, scarcely larger than a bead, but capable of giving off a clear, penetrating tinkle as the parchment shook in de Grandin’s impatient hands. I looked over his shoulder in fascinated interest, but drew back with disappointment as I saw the vellum was covered with closely-written characters somewhat resembling shorthand. "U’m?” de Grandin regarded the writing a moment, then tapped his even, white teeth with a meditative forefinger. “This will require much study, Friend Trowbridge,” he murmured. “Many languages have I studied, and my brain is like a room where many people speak together— out of the babel I can distinguish but few words unless I bend my attention

“E'H BIEN, my friend, you do sleep like the dead—the righteous dead who have no fear of purga tory!” de Grandin’s voice roused me the following morning. The bright spring sunshine was beating into our chamber through the open casement, and a puff of keen breeze fluttered the trailing bed clothes, but my friend’s face rivaled the brilliance of the breaking day.

“Triomphe!” he exclaimed, bran dishing a sheaf of papers above his blond head. “It is finished, it is com plete, it is done altogether entirely. Attend me, my friend, listen with care, for you are not like to hear such a tale soon again: Lord of my life and master of my heart: This day is the fulfilment of the fate overhanging the wretched woman who has unworthily been honored by your regard, for this night I was bidden by my father to choose whether I would be mar ried by the priests to the god Khandoka and become a temple bayadere—and my lord well knows what the life of such an We have sinned, thou against thy people and I against mine, in that we did dare defy vama and love, when such a love is forbidden between the races. Varna forbids

it, the commands of thy people and mine forbid it, and yet we loved. Now our brief dream of kailas is broken as the mists of morning break and fly before the scarlet lances of the sun, and thou returnest to thy people! Amari goes to her fate. By the leap 1 assure my sinful spirit of a resting place in kailas, for to the kurban. all sins are forgiven, even unto that of tak ing the life of a Brahmin or giving herself in love to one of another race! but she who retreats from the leap commits a sin with each step so great that a thousand reta in this life the walls of vama stand bewomau of the^ sahibj^race, ot my lord and of Amari’a people. These things it is not given Amari to know, but this she knowB full well: Throughout the seven cycles of time which shall endure through all the worlds and through all eternity, when worlds and the gods themselves shall have shuddered into dust, Amari’s heart is ever and always inclined to the sahib, and the walls of death or the force of life shall not keep her from him. Farewell, master of Amari's breath, perchance we shall meet again upon some other star, and our wak ing spirits may remember the dream of this unhappy life But ever, and always, Amari loves thee, sahib John.

“Yes?” I asked as he finished reading. “And then?”

“Parbleu, my friend, there was no then!” he answered. “Listen, you do not know India. I do. In that so depraved country they do consider that the woman who goes to the bloody shrine of the god Omkar and hurls herself down from a cliff upon his bloody altar attains to sainthood. It was that which this poor one meant when she did speak of ‘the leap’ in her farewell note to her white lover. Kurban is the word in their so detestable language for human sacrifice, and when she speaks of attaining kailas she refers to their heathenish word for heaven. When she says varrut stood between them she did mean caste. Cordieu —you English, you Americans! Always you drive yourselves crazy with thoughts of what should and what should not be

TALES done. Norn d’un cog! Why did not this Monsieur Aglinberry the elder take this Hindoo woman to wife, if he loved her, and thumb his nose at her brown-skinned relatives and his fair-eyed English kin as well? ’Tia what a Frenchman would have done in like case. But no, he must needs allow the woman he loved to hurl herself over a cliff for the edification of a crowd of monkey-faced heathen who are undoubtedly stewing in hell at this moment, while he ran overseas to America and built him a mansion in the wilderness. A mansion, pardieu! A mansion without the light of love in its rooms or the footfalls of little children on its floors. Norn de Dieu da rum de Dieu, a mansion of melan choly memories, it is! Abas such a people 1 They deserve la prohibition, nothing better!” He walked back and forth across the room in a fury of disgust, snapping his fingers and scowling ferociously.

“All right,” I agreed, laughing in spite of myself, “we’ll grant all you say; but where does that get us as re gards Redgables? If the ghost of this Hindoo girl haunts this house, how are we going to lay it?”

“How should I know?” he re turned peevishly. “If the ancient fires of this dead woman’s love bum on the cold hearth of this sacra house, who am I to put them out? Oh, it is too pitiful, too pitiful; that such a love as theirs should have been sacri ficed on the altar of varna —caste!”

“Hullo, hullo, up there!” came a cheery hail from the hall below. “You chaps up yet? Breakfast is ready, and we’ve got callers. Come down.”

“Breakfast!” de Grandin snorted disgustedly. “He talks of breakfast in a house where the ghost of mur dered love dwells! But”—he turned an impish grin on me—."I hope he has compounded some of those so de licious flap-the-jacks for us, even so.”

“Dr. de Grandin, this is Dr. Wiltsie,” Aglinberry introduced as we descended to the hall. “Dr. Trow bridge, Dr. Wiltsie. Wiltsie is super intendent of a sanitarium for the feeble-minded over there”—he waved his arm in a vague gesture—“and when he heard Dr. de Grandin was in the neighborhood, he came over for a consultation. It seems—oh, you tell him your troubles, 'Wiltsie.” Dr. Wiltsie was a pleasant-looking young man with a slightly bald head and large-lensed, horn-rimmed specta cles. He smiled agreeably as he has tened to comply with Aglinberry’s suggestion. “Fact is, doctor,” he be gan as de Grandin piled his plate high with “flap-the-jacks,” “we’ve got a dam’ peculiar case over at Thomwood. It’s a young girl who’s been in our charge for the past twelve years—ever since she was ten years old. The poor child suffered a terri ble fright when she was about six, ac cording to the history we have of her case—horses of the carriage in which she and her mother were riding ran away, threw ’em both out, killed the mother and—well, when they picked the youngster up she was just one of God’s little ones. No more reason than a two-months-old baby.

"Her family’s rich enough, but she has no near relatives, so she’s been in our care at Thomwood, as I said, for the past twelve years. She’s always been good as gold, scarcely any trouble at all, sitting on the bed or the floor and playing with her fingers or toes, like an infant, most of the time; but lately she’s been acting up like the devil. Fact. Tried to brain the nurse with a cup three nights ago, and made a break at one of the ma trons yesterday morning. From a simple, sweet-tempered little idiot she’s turned into a regular hell-cat. Now, if she’d been suffering from or dinary dementia, I’d-”

“Very good, very good, my friend,” de Grandin replied as he

FIEES handed his plate to Aglinberry for further replenishment. “I shall be delighted to look at your patient this morning. Parbleu, a madhouse will be a pleasant contrast to this never enough to be execrated place!”

“He likes my house,” Aglinberry commented to Dr. Wiltsie with a sar donic grin as we rose and prepared to go to tile sanitarium. T hornwood sanitarium was a beautiful, remodeled private country home, and differed in no wise from the near-by estates except that the park about the house was enclosed in a high stone wall topped with a chevaux-de-frise of barbed wire.

“How’s Mary Ann, Miss Under wood?” Wiltsie asked as we entered the spacious central hall and paused at the door of the executive office.

“Worse, doctor,” replied the com petent-looking young woman in nurse’s uniform at the desk. “I’ve sent Mattingly up to her twice this morning, but the dosage has to be in creased each time, and the medicine doesn’t seem to hold as well.”

“H’m,” Wiltsie muttered noncommitally, then turned to us with an anxious look. “Will you come to see the patient, gentlemen? You, too, Aglinberry, if you wish. I imagine this’ll be a new experience for you.” Upstairs, we peered through the small aperture in the door barring the demented girl’s room. If we had not been warned of her condition, I might easily have taken the young woman asleep on the neat, white cot for a person in perfect health. There was neither the emaciation nor the obesity commonly seen in cases of dementia, no drawing of the face, not even a flaccidity of the mouth as the girl lay asleep. Her abundant dark hair had been clipped short as a discouragement to the vermin which seem naturally to gravitate to the insane in spite of

their keepers’ greatest care, and she was clothed in a simple muslin night dress, cut modestly at the neck and without sleeves. One cheek, pale from confinement, but otherwise flaw less, lay pillowed on her bent arm, and it seemed to me the poor girl smiled in her sleep with the wistful ness of a tired and not entirely happy child. Long, curling lashes fringed the ivory lids which veiled her eyes, and the curving brows above them were as delicately penciled and sharp ly defined as though drawn on her white skin with a camel’s hair brush.

“La pauvre enfant!” de Grandin murmured compassionately, and at the sound of his voice the girl awoke. Gone instantly was the reposeful beauty from her face. Her Ups stretched into a square like the mouth of one of those old Greek tragic masks, her large, brown eyes glared fiercely, and from her gaping red mouth issued such a torrent of abuse as might have brought a blush to the face of the foulest fishwife in Billingsgate. Wiltsie’s face showed a dull flush a; he turned to us. “I’m dashed if I can understand it,” he admitted “She goes on this way for hours on cud, now.”

“Eh, is it so?” de Grandin re sponded. “And what, may I ask, have you been doing for this condi tion? It appears more like delirium than like dementia, my friend.”

“Well, we’ve been administering small doses of brandy and strychnin, but they don’t seem to have the de sired effect, and the doses have to be increased constantly.”

“Ah?”—de Grandin’s smile was slightly satirical—“and has it never occurred to you to employ hypnotics? Hyoscin, by example?”

“By George, it didn’t!” Wiltsie confessed. “Of course, hyoscin would act as a cerebral sedative, but we’d never thought of using it.”

TALES “Very well, I suggest you employ a hypodermic injection of hyoscin hypobromid,” de Grandin dismissed the case with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders, but Aglinberry, moved by that curiosity which is akinto fascination felt by the normal person regarding the insane, looked past him at the raving girl inside the cell. An instant change came over her. From a cursing, blaspheming maniac, the girl became a quiet, sorrowfullooking child, and on her suddenly calmed face was such a look of long ing as I have seen children undergo ing strict diet give some particularly toothsome and forbidden dainty. Young Aglinberry suppressed a shudder with difficulty. “Poor child,” he muttered, “poor, poor lit tle girl, to be so lovely and so hope less!”

“Out, Monsieur,” de Grandin agreed moodily as we went down the stairs, “you do well to pity her, for the intelligence—the very soul of her —has been dead these many years; only her body remains alive, and— pitie de Dieu —what a life it is! Ah, if only some means could be found to graft the healthy intelligence animat ing a sick body into that so healthy body of hers, what an economy!” He lapsed into moody silence, which re mained unbroken during our drive back to Redgables. T he sun had gone down in a blaze of red against the western sky, and the pale new moon was swim ming easily through a tumbling surf of a bank of foaming cirrus clouds when the deep-throated, belling bay of a hound came echoing to us from the grounds outside the old house.

“Grand Dieu!” de Grandin leaped nervously from his chair. “What is that? Do they hunt in this country while the mating season is but blos soming into flower among the wild things?”

“No, they don’t,” Aglinberry an swered testily. “Someone has let his dogs out on my land. “Come on; let’s chase ’em off. I won’t have ’em poaching on the game here like that.” We trailed out of the hall and walked quickly toward the sound of the baying, which rose fuller and fuller from the region of the lake. As we neared the dogs, the sound of hu man voices became audible. “That you, Mr. Aglinberry?” a man called, and the flash of an electric torch showed briefly among the new-leafed thickets by the waterfront.

"Yes,” our host answered shortly.

“Who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?”

“We’re from Thornwood, sir,” the man answered, and we saw the gleam of his white hospital uniform under his dark topcoat. “The crazy girl, Mary Ann, got away about an hour ago, and we’re trailing her with the hounds. She went completely off her head after you left this morning, and fought so they couldn’t give her the hypo without strapping her. After the injection she quieted down, but when the matron went to her room with dinner she suddenly woke up, threw the woman against the wall so hard she almost cracked her ribs, and got clean away. She can’t have gotten far, though, running over this broken country in her bare feet.”

“Oh, hell!” Aglinberry stormed, striking a bush beside the path a vi cious slash with his stick. “It’s bad enough to have my place overrun with gipsies and gossiped about by all the country yaps in the county, but when lunatics get to making a hang out of it, it’s too much!

“Hope you find her,” he flung back over his shoulder as he turned toward the house. “And for the Lord ’s sake, if you do get her, keep her at Thornwood. I don’t want her chasing all over this place!”

“Monsieur -” de Grandin be gan, but Aglinberry cut him short.

“No, my friend,” de Grandin be gan with surprizing mildness, “I do not think you need protection from the poor mad one, but—. ’ ’ He broke off with his sentence half spoken as he stared intently at an object hurry ing toward us across a small clearing.

“Good God!” Aglinberry ex claimed. “It’s she! The crazy girl!” Seemingly gone mad himself, he rushed toward the white-robed figure in the clearing, brandishing his heavy stick. “I’ll handle her,” he oalled back, “I don’t care how violent she is; I’ll handle her!” In another moment he was half-way across the cleared space, his thick walking stick poised for a blow which would render the maniac unconscious. Any medical student with the most elementary knowledge of insanity could have told him a lunatic is not to be cowed by violence. As though the oaken cudgel had been a wisp of straw, the maniac rushed toward him, then stopped a scant dozen feet away and held out her tapering arms.

“John,” she called softly, a puz zling, exotic thickness in her pronun ciation. “John, sahib, it is II” Aglinberry’s face was like that of a man suddenly roused from sound slumber. Astonishment, incredulity, joy like that of a culprit reprieved as the hangman knots the noose about his neck, shone on his features. The threatening club fell with a soft thud to the turf, and he gathered the mad woman’s slender body to his breast, covering her upturned face with " Amari, my Amari; Amari, my be loved!” he crooned in a soft, sobbing voice. “Oh, my love, my precious, precious love. I have found you; I have found you at last!”

The girl laughed lightly, and in her laughter there was no hint or taint of madness. “Not Amari, Mary Ann in this life, John,” she told him, “but yours, John sahib, whether we stand beside the Ganges or the Hud son, beloved through all the ages.”

“Ah, got her, sir?” The hospital attendants, a pair of bloodhounds tugging at the leash before them, broke through the thicket at the clear ing ’s farther side. “That’s right, sir; hold her tight till we slip the straitjacket on her.” Aglinberry thrust the girl behind him and faced the men. “You can’t have her,” he announced uncom promisingly. “She’s mine.”

“Wha—what?” the attendant stammered, then turned toward the underbrush and called to some invisi ble companion. “Hey, Bill, come ’ere; there’s two of ’em!”

“You can’t have her,” Aglinberry repeated as two more attendants re inforced the first pair. “She’s going to stay with me—always.”

“Now, look here, sir,” the leader of the party argued, “that girl’s a dan gerous lunatic; she nearly killed a matron this evenin’, an’ she’s been regularly committed to Thornwood Sanitarium. We’ve tracked her here, an’ we’re goin’ to take her back.”

“Over the dead corpse of Jules de Grandin,” the Frenchman interrupt ed as he pressed forward. “Parbleu, me, I am in authority here. I shall be responsible for her conduct.” The man hesitated a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s your funeral if anything happens on ac count o’ this,” he warned. “Tomor row Dr. Wiltsie will start legal pro ceedings to get her back. You can’t win.”

“Ha, can I not?” the little French man’s teeth gleamed in the moonlight.

“My friend, you do not know Jules de Grandin. There is no lunacy com mission in the world to which I cannot prove her sanity. I do pronounce

TALES her cured, and the opinion of Jules de Grandin of the Sorbonne is not to be lightly sneezed upon, I do assure To Aglinberry he said: “Pick her up, my friend; pick her up and bear her to the house, lest the stones bruise her tender feet. Dr. Trowbridge and I will follow and protect you. Par bleu”—he glared defiantly about him—“me, I say nothing shall sep arate you again. Lead on!”

“For heaven’s sake, de Grandin,” I besought as we followed Aglin berry and the girl toward the house, “what does this all mean?”

“Morbleu,” he nodded solemnly at me, “it means we have won ten thou sand dollars, Friend Trowbridge. No more will the ghost of that so pitiful Hindoo woman haunt this house. We have earned our fee.”

“Yes, but-” I pointed mutely toward our host as he strode through the moonlight with the girl in his arms.”

“Ah—that?” he laughed a silent, contented laugh. “That, my friend, is a demonstration that the ancient fires of love die not, no matter how much we heap them with the ashes of hate and death.

“The soul of Amari, the sacrificed Hindoo girl, has come to rest in the body of the lunatic, Mary Ann, just as the soul of John Aglinberry the elder was reborn into the body of his namesake and double, John Aglin berry the younger. Did not the de ceased Indian girl promise that she would some day come back to her for bidden lover in another shape? Par bleu, but she has fulfilled her vow! Always have the other members of Aglinberry’s family been unable to live in this house, because they were of the clan who had helped separate the elder lovers.

“Now, this young man, knowing nothing of his uncle’s intimate af fairs, but bearing in his veins the

blood of the elder Aglinberry, and on his face the likeness of the uncle, too, must have borne within his breast the soul of the disappointed man who ate out his heart in sorrow and loneliness in this house which he had builded in the American woods. And the spirit of Amari, the Hindoo, who has kept safe the house from alien blood and from the members of her soulmate’s family who would have robbed him of his inheritance, did find near at hand the healthy body of a lunatic whose soul—or intelligence, if you please— had long since sped, and entered thereinto to dwell on earth again. Did you not see sanity and longing looking out of her eyes when she be held him in the madhouse this morning, my friend? Sanity? But yes, it was recognition, I tell you!

“Her violence? ’Twas but the clean spirit of the woman fighting for mastery of a body long untenanted by an intelligence. Were you to attempt to play a long-disused musical instru ment, Trowbridge, my friend, you THE By MARC R. SCHORER HE dark figure of a man slunk silently through the byways and alleys of Florence. He kept to the clutching shadows, avoid ing the moonlight as much as possi ble. Once, when he unwittingly stepped into a bright patch of light, the rays of the moon Reamed bright ly on something visible below the belt of his doublet. But he hastily drew baelc into the shadows and the gleam vanished. Once he halted and lis tened attentively because he thought

could make but poor work of it at first, but eventually you would be able to produce harmony. So it was in this case. The spirit sought to use a long-disused brain, and at first the music she could make was nothing but noise. Now, however, she has secured mastery of her instrument, and henceforth the body of Mary Ann will function as that of a healthy, sane woman. I, Jules de Grandin, will demonstrate her sanity to the world, and you, my friend, shall help me. Together we shall win, together we shall make certain that these lovers, thwarted in one life, shall complete this cycle in happiness.

“Eh bien,” he twisted the ends of his blond mustache and set his hat at a rakish angle on the side of his head, “it is possible that somewhere in space there waits for me the spirit of a woman whom I have loved and lost in another life. I wonder, when she comes, if I, like the lucky young Aglinberry yonder, shall ‘wake, and remember, and understand’?”