Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (23 page)

The judge ran downstairs in pursuit of the doctor but it was too late;
he had disappeared. In the afternoon, he called on Madame Frogère, to
ask her whether she could tell him anything about the matter. She,
however, did not know the negro doctor in the least, and was even able
to assure him that he was a fictitious personage, for, as she was well
acquainted with the upper classes in Hayti, she knew that the Academy
of Medicine at Port-au-Prince had no doctor of that name among its
members. As Monsieur de Vargnes persisted, and gave descriptions of the
doctor, especially mentioning his extraordinary eyes, Madame Frogère
began to laugh and said:

"You have certainly had to do with a hoaxer, my dear monsieur. The eyes
which you have described are certainly those of a white man, and the
individual must have been painted."

On thinking it over, Monsieur de Vargnes remembered that the doctor had
nothing of the negro about him, but his black skin, his woolly hair and
beard, and his way of speaking, which was easily imitated, but nothing
of the negro, not even the characteristic, undulating walk. Perhaps,
after all, he was only a practical joker, and during the whole day,
Monsieur de Vargnes took refuge in that view, which rather wounded his
dignity as a man of consequence, but which appeased his scruples as a
magistrate.

The next day, he received the promised letter, which was written, as
well as addressed, in letters cut out of the newspapers. It was as
follows:

"MONSIEUR: Doctor James Ferdinand does not exist, but the man whose
eyes you saw does, and you will certainly recognize his eyes. This
man has committed two crimes, for which he does not feel any
remorse, but, as he is a psychologist, he is afraid of some day
yielding to the irresistible temptation of confessing his crimes.
You know better than anyone (and that is your most powerful aid),
with what imperious force criminals, especially intellectual ones,
feel this temptation. That great poet, Edgar Poe, has written
masterpieces on this subject, which express the truth exactly, but
he has omitted to mention the last phenomenon, which I will tell
you. Yes, I, a criminal, feel a terrible wish for somebody to know
of my crimes, and when this requirement is satisfied, my secret has
been revealed to a confidant, I shall be tranquil for the future,
and be freed from this demon of perversity, which only tempts us
once. Well! Now that is accomplished. You shall have my secret;
from the day that you recognize me by my eyes, you will try and
find out what I am guilty of, and how I was guilty, and you will
discover it, being a master of your profession, which, by the by,
has procured you the honour of having been chosen by me to bear the
weight of this secret, which now is shared by us, and by us two
alone. I say, advisedly,
by us two alone
. You could not, as a
matter of fact, prove the reality of this secret to anyone, unless
I were to confess it, and I defy you to obtain my public
confession, as I have confessed it to you,
and without danger to
myself
."

Three months later, Monsieur de Vargnes met Monsieur X— at an
evening party, and at first sight, and without the slightest
hesitation, he recognized in him those very pale, very cold, and very
clear blue eyes, eyes which it was impossible to forget.

The man himself remained perfectly impassive, so that Monsieur de
Vargnes was forced to say to himself:

"Probably I am the sport of an hallucination at this moment, or else
there are two pairs of eyes that are perfectly similar in the world.
And what eyes! Can it be possible?"

The magistrate instituted inquiries into his life, and he discovered
this, which removed all his doubts.

Five years previously, Monsieur X— had been a very poor, but very
brilliant medical student, who, although he never took his doctor's
degree, had already made himself remarkable by his microbiological
researches.

A young and very rich widow had fallen in love with him and married
him. She had one child by her first marriage, and in the space of six
months, first the child and then the mother died of typhoid fever, and
thus Monsieur X— had inherited a large fortune, in due form, and
without any possible dispute. Everybody said that he had attended to
the two patients with the utmost devotion. Now, were these two deaths
the two crimes mentioned in his letter?

But then, Monsieur X— must have poisoned his two victims with the
microbes of typhoid fever, which he had skilfully cultivated in them,
so as to make the disease incurable, even by the most devoted care and
attention. Why not?

"Do you believe it?" I asked Monsieur de Vargnes.

"Absolutely," he replied. "And the most terrible thing about it is,
that the villain is right when he defies me to force him to confess his
crime publicly, for I see no means of obtaining a confession, none
whatever. For a moment, I thought of magnetism, but who could magnetize
that man with those pale, cold, bright eyes? With such eyes, he would
force the magnetizer to denounce himself as the culprit."

And then he said, with a deep sigh:

"Ah! Formerly there was something good about justice!"

And when he saw my inquiring looks, he added in a firm and perfectly
convinced voice:

"Formerly, justice had torture at its command."

"Upon my word," I replied, with all an author's unconscious and simple
egotism, "it is quite certain that without the torture, this strange
tale will have no conclusion, and that is very unfortunate, as far as
regards the story I intended to make out of it."

The good ship sped on her way across the calm Atlantic. It was an
outward passage, according to the little charts which the company had
charily distributed, but most of the passengers were homeward bound,
after a summer of rest and recreation, and they were counting the days
before they might hope to see Fire Island Light. On the lee side of the
boat, comfortably sheltered from the wind, and just by the door of the
captain's room (which was theirs during the day), sat a little group of
returning Americans. The Duchess (she was on the purser's list as Mrs.
Martin, but her friends and familiars called her the Duchess of
Washington Square) and Baby Van Rensselaer (she was quite old enough to
vote, had her sex been entitled to that duty, but as the younger of two
sisters she was still the baby of the family)—the Duchess and Baby Van
Rensselaer were discussing the pleasant English voice and the not
unpleasant English accent of a manly young lordling who was going to
America for sport. Uncle Larry and Dear Jones were enticing each other
into a bet on the ship's run of the morrow.

"I'll give you two to one she don't make 420," said Dear Jones.

"I'll take it," answered Uncle Larry. "We made 427 the fifth day last
year." It was Uncle Larry's seventeenth visit to Europe, and this was
therefore his thirty-fourth voyage.

"And when did you get in?" asked Baby Van Rensselaer. "I don't care a
bit about the run, so long as we get in soon."

"We crossed the bar Sunday night, just seven days after we left
Queenstown, and we dropped anchor off Quarantine at three o'clock on
Monday morning."

"I hope we shan't do that this time. I can't seem to sleep any when the
boat stops."

"I can; but I didn't," continued Uncle Larry; "because my state-room
was the most for'ard in the boat, and the donkey-engine that let down
the anchor was right over my head."

"So you got up and saw the sunrise over the bay," said Dear Jones,
"with the electric lights of the city twinkling in the distance, and
the first faint flush of the dawn in the east just over Fort Lafayette,
and the rosy tinge which spread softly upward, and—"

"Did you both come back together?" asked the Duchess.

"Because he has crossed thirty-four times you must not suppose that he
has a monopoly in sunrises," retorted Dear Jones. "No, this was my own
sunrise; and a mighty pretty one it was, too."

"I'm not matching sunrises with you," remarked Uncle Larry, calmly;
"but I'm willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise
against any two merry jests called forth by yours."

"I confess reluctantly that my sunrise evoked no merry jest at all."
Dear Jones was an honest man, and would scorn to invent a merry jest on
the spur of the moment.

"That's where my sunrise has the call," said Uncle Larry, complacently.

"What was the merry jest?" was Baby Van Rensselaer's inquiry, the
natural result of a feminine curiosity thus artistically excited.

"Well, here it is. I was standing aft, near a patriotic American and a
wandering Irishman, and the patriotic American rashly declared that you
couldn't see a sunrise like that anywhere in Europe, and this gave the
Irishman his chance, and he said, 'Sure ye don't have 'em here till
we're through with 'em over there.'"

"It is true," said Dear Jones, thoughtfully, "that they have some
things over there better than we do; for instance, umbrellas."

"And gowns," added the Duchess.

"And antiquities,"—this was Uncle Larry's contribution.

"And we do have some things so much better in America!" protested Baby
Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete
monarchies of despotic Europe. "We make lots of things a great deal
nicer than you can get them in Europe—especially ice-cream."

"And pretty girls," added Dear Jones; but he did not look at her.

"And spooks," remarked Uncle Larry casually.

"Spooks?" queried the Duchess.

"Spooks. I maintain the word. Ghosts, if you like that better, or
spectres. We turn out the best quality of spook—"

"You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine, and the Black
Forest," interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency.

"I remember the Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts of
elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good honest spooks there is
no place like home. And what differentiates our spook—
Spiritus
Americanus
—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds
to the American sense of humour. Take Irving's stories for example.
The Headless Horseman
, that's a comic ghost story. And Rip Van
Winkle—consider what humour, and what good-humour, there is in the
telling of his meeting with the goblin crew of Kendrick Hudson's men! A
still better example of this American way of dealing with legend and
mystery is the marvelous tale of the rival ghosts."

"The rival ghosts?" queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer
together. "Who were they?"

"Didn't I ever tell you about them?" answered Uncle Larry, a gleam of
approaching joy flashing from his eye.

"Since he is bound to tell us sooner or later, we'd better be resigned
and hear it now," said Dear Jones.

"If you are not more eager, I won't tell it at all."

"Oh, do, Uncle Larry; you know I just dote on ghost stories," pleaded
Baby Van Rensselaer.

"Once upon a time," began Uncle Larry—"in fact, a very few years
ago—there lived in the thriving town of New York a young American
called Duncan—Eliphalet Duncan. Like his name, he was half Yankee and
half Scotch, and naturally he was a lawyer, and had come to New York to
make his way. His father was a Scotchman, who had come over and settled
in Boston, and married a Salem girl. When Eliphalet Duncan was about
twenty he lost both of his parents. His father left him with enough
money to give him a start, and a strong feeling of pride in his Scotch
birth; you see there was a title in the family in Scotland, and
although Eliphalet's father was the younger son of a younger son, yet
he always remembered, and always bade his only son to remember, that
his ancestry was noble. His mother left him her full share of Yankee
grit, and a little house in Salem which has belonged to her family for
more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had
been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather
of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem
witchcraft craze. And this little old house which she left to my friend
Eliphalet Duncan was haunted."

"By the ghost of one of the witches, of course," interrupted Dear
Jones.

"Now how could it be the ghost of a witch, since the witches were all
burned at the stake? You never heard of anybody who was burned having a
ghost, did you?"

"That's an argument in favour of cremation, at any rate," replied
Jones, evading the direct question.

"It is, if you don't like ghosts; I do," said Baby Van Rensselaer.

"And so do I," added Uncle Larry. "I love a ghost as dearly as an
Englishman loves a lord."

"Go on with your story," said the Duchess, majestically overruling all
extraneous discussion.

"This little old house at Salem was haunted," resumed Uncle Larry. "And
by a very distinguished ghost—or at least by a ghost with very
remarkable attributes."

"What was he like?" asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with a premonitory
shiver of anticipatory delight.

"It had a lot of peculiarities. In the first place, it never appeared
to the master of the house. Mostly it confined its visitations to
unwelcome guests. In the course of the last hundred years it had
frightened away four successive mothers-in-law, while never intruding
on the head of the household."

"I guess that ghost had been one of the boys when he was alive and in
the flesh." This was Dear Jones's contribution to the telling of the
tale.

"In the second place," continued Uncle Larry, "it never frightened
anybody the first time it appeared. Only on the second visit were the
ghost-seers scared; but then they were scared enough for twice, and
they rarely mustered up courage enough to risk a third interview. One
of the most curious characteristics of this well-meaning spook was that
it had no face—or at least that nobody ever saw its face."