The Burning Court (26 page)

“Well?” said Cross.

With the same air of gravity or cynicism he removed his hat and held it above his head. Though his hair was thick enough at the sides, this revealed a shrunken bald head with one hair standing up and waving above it. Oddly enough, the effect was not ludicrous; it may have been because the monkey-bright eyes were grim.

“Well what?”

“Are you still aflame with jealousy?” inquired Cross. “I refer to the fact that your wife, whom I never saw before in my life, drove innumerable miles last night in order to wake me up at a damned hour and ask me questions. Your wife slept in my house. But you should perceive now that it was no assignation. Altogether aside from the fact that I sleep with Mrs. Murgenroyd, my housekeeper, my age should be a good enough guarantee of that. I hope, sir, you guessed that your wife had gone to me. You will have done so if you have any intelligence, which I am inclined to doubt.”

“You have,” said the other, “aside from Ogden Despard, probably more unadulterated nerve than any person I know. And, since plain speaking seems to be in order, I’ll admit that you’re not exactly my idea of a dangerous co-respondent.”

“Ah, that’s better,” chuckled Cross. He added, sharply: “And yet why not? You have youth—yes. Health—I dare say. But I have intelligence. Did your editorial head—what’shis-name, Morley?—tell you anything about me?”

Stevens thought back. “No. He asked me if I’d met you, that’s all. Where is Marie now?”

“At your house. No, wait!” He shot his arm across towards the door of the car. “Don’t get out—not yet. Plenty of time.” Then Cross sat back, smoking his cigar thoughtfully, and his face grew less wizened. “Young man, I am seventy-five. I have studied more criminal cases than a man of a hundred and seventy-five ought to have studied. That was partly because I had a first-hand opportunity: I spent twenty years in prison. As a favor to your wife, I am here to advise you.”

“I thank you,” said his guest, in the same grave tone. “I shouldn’t have spoken as I did a minute ago. But in that case”—he took the photograph of Marie D’Aubray out of his pocket—“will you in the name of sanity tell me what this means? And why she went to you? And the origin of your name, or ancestry, if your name is really Gaudan Cross?”

Again the dry chuckle convulsed Cross before he became grave.

“Ah, so you have been attempting deduction. Your wife was afraid you had. Yes, my name is really Gaudan Cross, in the sense that I have a right to it. I changed it to that by deed-poll when I was twenty-one years old. I was born with the name of Alfred Mossbaum. Do not misunderstand me. I am a Jew, and, like all the great men of my race, I am proud to be one. If it were not for us you would live without foundations and I think your tidy world would go to hell. But I am also,” Cross said, rather superfluously, “an egotist. The name of Alfred Mossbaum was not euphonious enough to describe me. You agree?

“You had better know something about me. Crime was my hobby; it has always been my hobby since I was a young man. Of course I was in England when Cream was caught and tried. Of course I was in France when Pranzini was caught and tried. Of course I know the Borden case as few others know it. In my late thirties, in order to show that crime was a matter of simplicity, I committed a crime. You immediately retort: As a matter of demonstrating how simple it is to escape punishment for crime, you spent twenty years in prison. That is true. But I was detected in the only conceivable way I could have been detected—by detecting myself. I got drunk and I boasted.”

He blew out a cloud of smoke and brushed it away. Then he turned his monkey-bright eyes round again.

“But what an opportunity! In prison I became the warden’s right-hand man. Do you realize what that means? It means that I had direct access to the full records of every criminal case; not only of that place, but of every other place to which the warden chose to send for particulars. In some cases I knew the men themselves, better than the judges who tried them or the juries which condemned them. I knew the man-hunters who caught them. Consequently, I made no application for parole or shortening of sentence. Where could I live better? I lived at some one else’s expense while my money was being saved for me. When I came out I should be a rich man.”

“That,” said Stevens, “is undoubtedly one way of looking at it.”

“There was one drawback. It was, I think you will admit, a social hindrance afterwards, especially when I began to write. I had served my sentence under the—you acknowledge—unusual name of Gaudan Cross. I flew my own banner. I did not become Alfred Mossbaum again when it became necessary to hide my head. But the name was easily remembered. I did not wish too many people to connect Gaudan Cross, the new and brilliant literary figure, with the Gaudan Cross who had gone to prison for murder in the year 1895. That is why my age is firmly given as forty, and a photograph so early as to be indistinguishable is on every book.”

“It was murder, was it?”

“Naturally,” answered Cross, with a simplicity of evil which startled his guest. Cross’s gloved hand brushed ash off his coat. “But I wished you to understand why I wrote with authority. You ask me why your wife came to me? I will tell you. Because, as she was aware from a glance at the first chapter of my new book—there is not one paragraph which is not annotated with documentation—
I
knew the facts. And she did not.”

“The facts about what?”

“About Marie D’Aubray in 1676. About Marie D’Aubray in 1861. About her ancestry; or, more properly, what she thinks is her ancestry.”

“You seem to know, or to follow,” Stevens began, slowly, “a good deal of what I’m thinking. I am thinking something now… not only about the present, but about the past and the long past… about the dead and the non-dead. Is there any truth in it?”

“There is not—I regret to say,” snapped Cross. “At least, in her own case.”

Stevens’s thoughts were something like this: I am sitting in a comfortable limousine, smoking a very good cigar, with a self-confessed murderer whom I both trust and distrust. Yet the very presence of this engaging little mummy has done more to lift a weight off my mind, and make me see things in decent perspective, than all those explanations in the undertaker’s parlor. He looked out of the window of the car, where grey rain was beginning to shroud the Lancaster Highway.

“You have been married three years, I understand,” said Cross, blinking, “Do you know anything about her? No, you do not. Why don’t you? All women chatter. If you mention an uncle of yours, she mentions an uncle of hers. If you tell how a respected great-aunt of yours once threw a tomato at a cat and hit a policeman instead, she will reply with a family anecdote of a similarly improving nature. Why didn’t you hear any family anecdotes? Because she had something locked up inside. Why was she always condemning certain things as morbid? Because she was afraid of them herself. Bah!
I
got the whole story out of her in ten minutes. And I was naturally in a position either to confirm or dispel her notions.

“Listen to me. At a place called Guibourg, which is a dismal hole in north-western Canada, there really is a family of D’Aubrays which is remotely descended from the D’Aubrays who hatched the Marquise de Brinvilliers. They also hatched the Marie D’Aubray whose picture you have there. So far, so true. I know this because, in preparation for the essay in my new book, I underwent the martyrdom of spending two weeks in Guibourg, tracing the family records. I wished to see whether there were any more examples of this ‘non-dead’ legend. I do not listen to legends: I examine birth certificates and parish registers. Your esteemed wife is not even connected with the family, although she thinks she is. She was adopted, at the age of three, by Miss Adrienne D’Aubray, the sole remaining branch of a rotten tree. Her name is no more D’Aubray than mine is Cross. Her mother was a French Canadian and her father a Scotch laborer.”

“I don’t know,” muttered Stevens, “whether we’re now in the province governed by the laws of witchcraft or the laws of sense. But look at that picture. There’s an amazing resemblance, even to——”

“Why,” said Cross, “do you think she was adopted at all?”

“Adopted at all?”

“Yes. Because of that resemblance. No other reason. Because Miss Adrienne D’Aubray, figuratively speaking, is an old witch herself. If I lived all the year round in Guibourg, I should begin to believe she was a real one. Listen. In Guibourg the sky is dark, and it snows a good part of the year. Do you know where even the name Guibourg comes from? In the seventeenth century the Black Mass was known as
La messe de Guibourg.
The family lives in a long low house against a hill with fir trees on it. They own timber, and they are well-off, but they do not go out much even if there were anywhere to go. The weather shuts them in to look at pictures in the fire. Miss Adrienne D’Aubray adopted the child of a Scotch laborer for the sole purpose of bringing her up to think she had the blood of the non-dead, and that one day
the
non-dead would creep into her skin. She showed her pictures. She told her stories, and pointed out things among the fir trees. When the girl was punished, she was punished as her alleged ancestress was, with a funnel and water. She was burnt, to show what it would be like. Do I need to elaborate?”

“No,” said Stevens, and put his face in his hands.

Cross had an extraordinary animation, as though he admired all this as a work of art. Then he sat back and puffed his cigar complacently. The cigar was too big for him; it destroyed any effect at the Mephistophelian on his part.

“That, young man, is the girl you have been living with,” he said, more gently. “She kept the secret well. The trouble was… I gather it was this. Her marriage to you, it appears, almost succeeded in getting the past out of her system. Then, through your association with this Despard family, it seems that a few accidents began to bring it back again. Mrs. Mark Despard, one Sunday afternoon, started a conversation about poisons in the presence of a nurse who was taking care of a sick uncle—” Cross looked at him sharply.

“I know.”

“Oho! You know? Well, your spouse had been repressing the goblins too long, putting them in a box and shutting the lid on them; and all of a sudden they got out. The talk about poisons did it. In her own hardly descriptive phrase, ‘she felt queer all over.’ ‘The curse is come upon me, cried the Lady of Shalott,’ ” said Cross, disgustedly, and spat smoke at the glass partition. “Good God! She was even foolish enough to run out of the room after the nurse and gabble something about poison. She informs me that she can’t think why she did it. A brain specialist could tell her. Actually, there is nothing in the least the matter with her. She is too fundamentally normal and sound. If she had not been, I dare say Aunt Adrienne’s teaching might have produced a weird graduate. However, it appears that—not three weeks after this conversation about poisons—the old uncle of the family died. On top of that, you walked in with my manuscript and uttered sinister sounds. On top of
that,
this Mark Despard entered with a tame doctor, and informed you (while she was listening at the door), first, that he had positive proof his uncle was poisoned, second, that a woman in a Marquise de Brinvilliers dress had been seen in the uncle’s room. He didn’t do much explaining, but he hinted at many extra-normal things. If you are unable to imagine her state of mind at this point in the business, you are even duller than I think you are. She had to know the facts about her own ancestry.”

Stevens remained with his head between his hands, staring at the grey carpeting on the floor of the car.

“Tell the chauffeur to turn back, will you?” he requested, after a pause. “I want to get back to her. So help me God, I’ll see that she never has the hobgoblins again as long as I live.”

Cross gave an order into the mouthpiece, “This is a most interesting study,” he observed, with monkey-like lordliness. “The role of soother of the waters is new to me; and one, I may inform you, which pains my neck insufferably. However, I—a complete stranger—have been delegated to tell you all this before she faces you, because she does not seem to like the task. It seems, for some reason wholly inexplicable to me, that she loves you. Is there anything else you would like to ask?”

“Well, yes, if she said anything about it… did she say anything about morphia tablets?”

Cross was irritable. “Yes. I forgot that. Yes, she stole morphia. Do you know why? No, don’t answer; you do not know why. But carry your mind back. You and she were at this famous (and to me painful) Despard Park on a certain night. Do you remember the date?”

“Without any trouble. It was the night of Saturday, April 8th.”

“Yes. Do you remember what all of you were doing at Despard Park?”

“Why, we went up to play bridge, but—” He stopped. “But we didn’t. The evening was devoted to telling ghost stories.”

“That’s true. You were telling ghost stories, and I gather some highly unpleasant ones, in the dark, before a woman already half insane with a fear she could not reveal to anyone.

There was only one thing she wanted. She wanted sleep. She wanted sleep beyond the remote possibility of remaining awake an instant after she had gone to bed; she wanted to blot out dreams and hags as you turn out a light. I am not surprised
you
didn’t notice, but how it escaped the attention of the Despard family is beyond me. The Despards as an influence seem to be bad for both of you. They are great invokers of witches. …”

Outside a faint growl of thunder followed the smooth humming of the car. Rain began to tick more steadily on the windows. Cross, letting down one window to throw away his cigar, swore as the rain blew in. But Stevens felt that his mind had been cleaned and swept—of all except one thing. There remained the problem.

“Invokers of witches,” he repeated. “Yes, that’s just exactly true. Things seem in different focus now, somehow. But still there’s the round, flat, immovable fact of impossibility. A man’s body disappears from a crypt——”

“Oh, it does, does it?” demanded Cross, jumping like a monkey on a stick. He leaned forward. “That’s what I was coming to. I said I was here to advise you, as a favor to your wife, and I insist on knowing what happened. It will take ten minutes before we get back to your house. Tell me about it.”