Part 4

"It does not pierce--indeed, it rather weighs, Like lead, upon the face where it is fixed."

Followed the story, which I have outlined elsewhere, of the encounter with bandits and Ruthven's apparent sacrifice of himself to cover Aubrey's retreat. Then Martha Vining, as the maid Bridget, spoke to announce Ruthven's coming, and upon the heels of her speech Varduk moved stiffly toward us.

"Aubrey!" he cried, in a rich, ringing tone such as fills theaters, and not at all like his ordinary gentle voice. I made my due response:

"Have you lived, Ruthven? But the horde Of outlaw warriors compassed you and struck----"

In the rôle of Ruthven, Varduk's interruption was as natural and decisive as when, in ordinary conversation, he neatly cut another's speech in two with a remark of his own. I have already quoted this reply of Ruthven's:

"I faced them, and who seeks my face seeks death."

He was speaking the line, of course, without script, and his eyes held mine. Despite myself, I almost staggered under the weight of his glance. It was like that which Aubrey actually credits to Ruthven--lead-heavy instead of piercing, difficult to support.

The rehearsal went on, with Ruthven's seduction of Bridget and his court to the nervous but fascinated Malvina. In the end, as I have synopsized earlier, came his secret and miraculous revival from seeming death. Varduk delivered the final rather terrifying speech magnificently, and then abruptly doffed his Ruthven manner to smile congratulations all around.

"It's more than a month to our opening date in July," he said, "and yet I would be willing to present this play as a finished play, no later than this day week. Miss Holgar, may I voice my special appreciation? Mr. Connatt, your confessed fear of your own inadequacy is proven groundless. Bravo, Miss Vining--and you, Davidson." His final tag of praise to his subordinate seemed almost grudging. "Now for the second act of the thing. No verse this time, my friends. Finish the rehearsal as well as you have begun."

"Wait," I said. "How about properties? I simulated the club-stroke in the first act, but this time I need a sword. For the sake of feeling the action better----"

"Yes, of course," granted Varduk. "There's one in the corner dressing-room." He pointed. "Go fetch it, Davidson."

Davidson complied. The sword was a cross-hilt affair, old but keen and bright.

"This isn't a prop at all," I half objected. "It's the real thing. Won't it be dangerous?"

"Oh, I think we can risk it," Varduk replied carelessly. "Let's get on with the rehearsal. A hundred years later, in the same garden. Swithin and Mary, descendants of Aubrey and Malvina, on-stage."

* * * * *

We continued. The opening, again with Sigrid and myself a-wooing, was lively and even brilliant. Martha Vining, in her rôle of the centenarian Bridget, skilfully cracked her voice and infused a witch-like quality into her telling of the Aubrey-Ruthven tale. Again the entrance of Ruthven, his suavity and apparent friendliness, his manner changing as he is revealed as the resurrected fiend of another age; finally the clash with me, as Swithin.

I spoke my line--"My ancestor killed you once, Ruthven. I can do the same today." Then I poked at him with the sword.

Varduk smiled and interjected, "Rather a languid thrust, that, Mr. Connatt. Do you think it will seem serious from the viewpoint of our audience?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was afraid I might hurt you."

"Fear nothing, Mr. Connatt. Take the speech and the swordplay again."

I did so, but he laughed almost in scorn. "You still put no life into the thrust." He spread his hands, as if to offer himself as a target. "Once more. Don't be an old woman."

Losing a bit of my temper, I made a genuine lunge. My right foot glided forward and my weight shifted to follow my point. But in mid-motion I knew myself for a danger-dealing fool, tried to recover, failed, and slipped.

I almost fell at full length--would have fallen had Varduk not been standing in my way. My sword-point, completely out of control, drove at the center of his breast--I felt it tear through cloth, through flesh----

A moment later his slender hands had caught my floundering body and pushed it back upon its feet. My sword, wedged in something, snatched its hilt from my hand. Sick and horrified, I saw it protruding from the midst of Varduk's body. Behind me I heard the choked squeal of Martha Vining, and an oath from Jake Switz. I swayed, my vision seemed to swim in smoky liquid, and I suppose I was well on the way to an unmasculine swoon. But a light chuckle, in Varduk's familiar manner, saved me from collapsing.

"That is exactly the way to do it, Mr. Connatt," he said in a tone of well-bred applause.

He drew the steel free--I think that he had to wrench rather hard--and then stepped forward to extend the hilt.

"There's blood on it," I mumbled sickly.

"Oh, that?" he glanced down at the blade. "Just a deceit for the sake of realism. You arranged the false-blood device splendidly, Davidson." He pushed the hilt into my slack grasp. "Look, the imitation gore is already evaporating."

So it was, like dew on a hot stone. Already the blade shone bright and clean.

"Very good," said Varduk. "Climax now. Miss Holgar, I think it is your line."

She, too, had been horrified by the seeming catastrophe, but she came gamely up to the bit where Mary pleads for Swithin's life, offering herself as the price. Half a dozen exchanges between Ruthven and Mary, thus:

"You give yourself up, then?"

"I do."

"You renounce your former manners, hopes and wishes?"

"I do."

"You will swear so, upon the book yonder?" (Here Ruthven points to a Bible, open on the garden-seat.)

"I do." (Mary touches the Bible.)

"You submit to the powers I represent?"

"I know only the power to which I pray. 'Our Father, which wert in heaven----'"

Sigrid, as I say, had done well up to now, but here she broke off. "It isn't correct there," she pointed out. "The prayer should read, 'art in heaven.' Perhaps the script was copied wrongly."

"No," said Martha Vining. "It's 'wert in heaven' on mine."

"And on mine," I added.

Varduk had frowned a moment, as if perplexed, but he spoke decisively. "As a matter of fact, it's in the original. Byron undoubtedly meant it to be so, to show Mary's agitation."

Sigrid had been reading ahead. "Farther down in the same prayer, it says almost the same thing--'Thy will be done on earth as it was in heaven.' It should be, 'is in heaven.'"

I had found the same deviation in my own copy. "Byron hardly meant Mary's agitation to extend so far," I argued.

"Since when, Mr. Connatt," inquired Varduk silkily, "did you become an authority on what Byron meant, here or elsewhere in his writings? You're being, not only a critic, but a clairvoyant."

I felt my cheeks glowing, and I met his heavy, mocking gaze as levelly as I could. "I don't like sacrilegious mistakes," I said, "and I don't like being snubbed, sir."

Davidson stepped to Varduk's side. "You can't talk to him like that, Connatt," he warned me.

Davidson was a good four inches taller than I, and more muscular, but at the moment I welcomed the idea of fighting him. I moved a step forward.

"Mr. Davidson," I said to him, "I don't welcome dictation from you, not on anything I choose to do or say."

Sigrid cried out in protest, and Varduk lifted up a hand. He smiled, too, in a dazzling manner.

"I think," he said in sudden good humor, "that we are all tired and shaken. Perhaps it's due to the unintentional realism of that incident with the sword--I saw several faces grow pale. Suppose we say that the rehearsals won't include so dangerous-looking an attack hereafter; we'll save the trick for the public performance itself. And we'll stop work now; in any case, it's supposed to be unlucky to speak the last line of a play in rehearsal. Shall we all go and get some rest?"

He turned to Sigrid and offered his arm. She took it, and they walked side by side out of the stage door and away. Martha Vining followed at their heels, while Davidson lingered to turn out the lights. Jake and I left together for our own boathouse loft. The moon was up, and I jumped when leaves shimmered in its light--I remembered Jake's story about the amorphous lurkers in the thickets.

But nothing challenged us, and we went silently to bed, though I, at least, lay wakeful for hours.

_8. Pursuivant Again_

When finally I slept, it was to dream in strange, unrelated flashes. The clearest impression of all was that Sigrid and Judge Pursuivant came to lead me deep into the dark woods beyond the lodge. They seemed to know their way through pathless thickets, and finally beckoned me to follow into a deep, shadowed cleft between banks of earth. We descended for miles, I judged in my dream, until we came to a bare, hard floor at the bottom. Here was a wide, round hatchway of metal, like a very large sewer lid. Bidding me watch, Sigrid and the judge bent and tugged the lid up and away. Gazing down the exposed shaft, it was as if I saw the heavens beneath my feet--the fathomlessness of the night sky, like velvet all sprinkled with crumbs of star-fire. I did not know whether to be joyful or to fear; then I had awakened, and it was bright morning.

The air was warmer than it had been the day before, and I donned bathing-trunks and went downstairs, treading softly to let Jake snore blissfully on. Almost at the door of the boathouse I came face to face with Davidson, who smiled disarmingly and held out his hand. He urged me to forget the brief hostility that had come over us at rehearsal; he was quite unforced and cheerful about it, yet I surmised that Varduk had bade him make peace with me. However, I agreed that we had both been tired and upset, and we shook hands cordially.

Then I turned toward the water, and saw Sigrid lazily crawling out into the deep stretches with long, smooth strokes. I called her name, ran in waist-deep, and swam as swiftly as I could, soon catching up. She smiled in welcome and turned on her side to say good-morning. In her brief bathing-suit she did not look so gaunt and fragile. Her body was no more than healthily slim, and quite firm and strong-looking.

As we swam easily, I was impelled to speak of my dream, and she smiled again.

"I think that was rather beautiful, I mean about the heavens below your feet," she said. "Symbolism might have something to say about it. In a way the vision was prophetic--Judge Pursuivant has sent word that he will call on us."

"Perhaps the rest was prophetic, too," I ventured boldly. "You and I together, Sigrid--and heaven at our feet----"

"I've been in long enough," she announced suddenly, "and breakfast must be ready. Come on, Gib, race me back to shore."

She was off like a trout, and I churned after her. We finished neck and neck, separated and went away to dress. At breakfast, which Davidson prepared simply but well of porridge, toast and eggs, I did not get to sit next to Sigrid; Davidson and Jake had found places at her left and right hands. I paid what attentions I could devise to Martha Vining, but if Sigrid was piqued by my courtliness in another direction, she gave no sign.

* * * * *

The meal over, I returned to my room, secured my copy of _Ruthven_ and carried it outdoors to study. I chose a sun-drenched spot near the lodge, set my back to a tree, and leafed through the play, underlining difficult passages here and there. I remembered Varduk's announcement that we would never speak the play's last line in rehearsal, lest bad luck fall. He was superstitious, for all his apparent wisdom and culture; yet, according to the books Judge Pursuivant had lent me, so was Lord Byron, from whom Varduk claimed descent. What was the ill-omened last line, by the way?

I turned to the last page of the script.

The final line, as typewritten by Davidson, contained only a few words. My eyes found it:

"RUTHVEN (placing his hand on Mary's head):"

And no more than that. There was place for a speech after the stage direction, apparently the monster's involuntary cry for blessing upon the brave girl, but Davidson had not set down such a speech.

Amazed and in some unaccountable way uneasy, I walked around the corner of the lodge to where Martha Vining, seated on the door-step, also studied her lines. Before I had finished my first question, she nodded violently.

"It's the same way on my script," she informed me. "You mean, the last speech missing. I noticed last night, and mentioned it before breakfast to Miss Holgar. She has no last line, either."

A soft chuckle drifted down upon us. Varduk had come to the open door.

"Davidson must have made a careless omission," he said. "Of course, there is only one typescript of the play, with carbon copies. Well, if the last line is missing, isn't it a definite sign that we should not speak it in rehearsal?"

He rested his heavy gaze upon me, then upon Martha Vining, smiled to conclude the discussion, and drew back into the hallway and beyond our sight.

Perhaps I may be excused for not feeling completely at rest on the subject.

Judge Pursuivant arrived for lunch, dressed comfortably in flannels and a tweed jacket, and his performance at table was in healthy contrast to Varduk, who, as usual, ate hardly anything. In the early afternoon I induced the judge to come for a stroll up the slope and along the main road. As soon as we were well away from the lodge, I told him of Jake's adventure, the outcome of the sword-accident at rehearsal, and the air of mystery that deepened around the omitted final speech of the play.

"Perhaps I'm being nervous and illusion-ridden," I began to apologize in conclusion, but he shook his great head.

"You're being nothing of the sort, Connatt. Apparently my semi-psychic intuition was good as gold. I did perfectly right in following this drama and its company out here into the wilderness."

"You came deliberately?" I asked, and he nodded.

"My friend's cabin in the neighborhood was a stroke of good luck, and I more than half courted the invitation to occupy it. I'll be frank, Connatt, and say that from the outset I have felt a definite and occult challenge from Varduk and his activities."

He chopped at a weed with his big malacca stick, pondered a moment, then continued.

"Your Mr. Varduk is a mysterious fellow. I need not enlarge on that, though I might remind you of the excellent reason for his strange character and behavior."

"Byron's blood?"

"Exactly. And Byron's curse."

I stopped in mid-stride and turned to face the judge. He smiled somewhat apologetically.

"I know, Connatt," he said, "that modern men and women think such things impossible. They think it equally impossible that anyone of good education and normal mind should take occultism seriously. But I disprove the latter impossibility, at least--I hold degrees from three world-famous universities, and my behavior, at least, shows that I am neither morbid nor shallow."

"Certainly not," I assented, thinking of his hearty appetite, his record of achievement in many fields, his manifest kindness and sincerity.

"Then consent to hear my evidence out." He resumed his walk, and I fell into step with him. "It's only circumstantial evidence, I fear, and as such must not be entirely conclusive. Yet here it is:

"Byron was the ideal target for a curse, not only personally but racially. His forebears occupied themselves with revolution, dueling, sacrilege and lesser sins--they were the sort who attract and merit disaster. As for his immediate parents, it would be difficult to choose a more depraved father than Captain 'Mad Jack' Byron, or a more unnatural mother than Catherine Gordon of Gight. Brimstone was bred into the child's very soul by those two. Follow his career, and what is there? Pride, violence, orgy, disgrace. Over his married life hangs a shocking cloud, an unmentionable accusation--rightly or not we cannot say. As for his associates, they withered at his touch. His children, lawful and natural, died untimely and unhappy. His friends found ruin or death. Even Doctor Polidori, plagiarist of the _Ruthven_ story, committed suicide. Byron himself, when barely past his first youth, perished alone and far from home and friends. Today his bright fame is blurred and tarnished by a wealth of legend that can be called nothing less than diabolic."

"Yet he wasn't all unlucky," I sought to remind my companion. "His beauty and brilliance, his success as a poet----"

"All part of the curse. When could he be thankful for a face that drew the love of Lady Caroline Lamb and precipitated one of London's most fearful scandals? As for his poetry, did it not mark him for envy, spite and, eventually, a concerted attack? I daresay Byron would have been happier as a plain-faced mechanic or grocer."

I felt inclined to agree, and said as much. "If a curse exists," I added, "would it affect Varduk as a descendant of Byron?"

"I think that it would, and that his recent actions prove at once the existence of a curse and the truth of his claim to descent. A shadow lies on that man, Connatt."

"The rest of the similarity holds," I responded. "The charm and the genius. I have wondered why Miss Holgar agrees to this play. It is archaic, in some degree melodramatic, and her part is by no means dominant. Yet she seems delighted with the rôle and the production in general."

"I have considered the same apparent lapse of her judgment," said Pursuivant, "and came to the conclusion that you are about to suggest--that Varduk has gained some sort of influence over Miss Holgar."

"Perhaps, then, you feel that such an influence would be dangerous to her and to others?"

"Exactly."

"What to do, then?"

"Do nothing, gentlemen," said someone directly behind us.

We both whirled in sudden surprize. It was Elmo Davidson.

_9. Davidson Gives a Warning_

I scowled at Davidson in surprized protest at his intrusion. Judge Pursuivant did not scowl, but I saw him lift his walking-stick with his left hand, place his right upon the curved handle, and gave it a little twist and jerk, as though preparing to draw a cork from a bottle. Davidson grinned placatingly.

"Please, gentlemen! I didn't mean to eavesdrop, or to do anything else sneaking. It was only that I went for a walk, too, saw the pair of you ahead, and hurried to catch up. I couldn't help but hear the final words you were saying, and I couldn't help but warn you."

We relaxed, but Judge Pursuivant repeated "Warn?" in a tone deeply frigid.

"May I amplify? First of all, Varduk certainly does not intend to harm either of you. Second, he isn't the sort of man to be crossed in anything."

"I suppose not," I rejoined, trying to be casual. "You must be pretty sure, Davidson, of his capabilities and character."

He nodded. "We've been together since college."

Pursuivant leaned on his stick and produced his well-seasoned briar pipe. "It's comforting to hear you say that. I mean, that Mr. Varduk was once a college boy. I was beginning to wonder if he wasn't thousands of years old."

Davidson shook his head slowly. "See here, why don't we sit down on the bank and talk? Maybe I'll tell you a story."

"Very good," agreed Pursuivant, and sat down. I did likewise, and we both gazed expectantly at Davidson. He remained standing, with hands in pockets, until Pursuivant had kindled his pipe and I my cigarette. Then:

"I'm not trying to frighten you, and I won't give away any real secrets about my employer. It's just that you may understand better after you learn how I met him.

"It was more than ten years ago. Varduk came to Revere College as a freshman when I was a junior. He was much the same then as he is now--slender, quiet, self-contained, enigmatic. I got to know him better than anyone in school, and I can't say truly that I know him, not even now.

"Revere, in case you never heard of the place, is a small school with a big reputation for grounding its students hock-deep in the classics."

Pursuivant nodded and emitted a cloud of smoke. "I knew your Professor Dahlberg of Revere," he interjected. "He's one of the great minds of the age on Greek literature and history."

Davidson continued: "The buildings at Revere are old and, you might say, swaddled in the ivy planted by a hundred graduating classes. The traditions are consistently mellow, and none of the faculty members come in for much respect until they are past seventy. Yet the students are very much like any others, when class is over. In my day, at least, we gave more of a hoot for one touch-down than for seven thousand odes of Horace."

He smiled a little, as though in mild relish of memories he had evoked within himself.

"The football team wasn't very good, but it wasn't very bad, either. It meant something to be on the first team, and I turned out to be a fairish tackle. At the start of my junior year, the year I'm talking about, a man by the name of Schaefer was captain--a good fullback though not brilliant, and the recognized leader of the campus.

"Varduk didn't go in for athletics, or for anything else except a good stiff course of study, mostly in the humanities. He took a room at the end of the hall on the third floor of the men's dormitory, and kept to himself. You know how a college dorm loves that, you men. Six days after the term started, the Yellow Dogs had him on their list."

"Who were the Yellow Dogs?" I asked.

"Oh, there's a bunch like it in every school. Spiritual descendants of the Mohocks that flourished in Queen Anne's reign; rough and rowdy undergraduates, out for Halloween pranks every night. And any student, particularly any frosh, that stood on his dignity----" He paused and let our imagination finish the potentialities of such a situation.

"So, one noon after lunch at the training-table, Schaefer winked at me and a couple of other choice spirits. We went to our rooms and got out our favorite paddles, carved from barrel-staves and lettered over with fraternity emblems and wise-cracks. Then we tramped up to the third floor and knocked loudly at Varduk's door.

"He didn't answer. We tried the knob. The lock was on, so Schaefer dug his big shoulder into the panel and smashed his way in."

* * * * *

Davidson stopped and drew a long breath, as if with it he could win a better ability to describe the things he was telling.

"Varduk lifted those big, deep eyes of his as we appeared among the ruins of his door. No fear, not even surprize. Just a long look, traveling from one of us to another. When he brought his gaze to me, I felt as if somebody was pointing two guns at me, two guns loaded to their muzzles."

I, listening, felt like saying I knew how he had felt, but I did not interrupt.