“They shall not have you,” she breathed. “I am fighting. I am holding my own. There are eight of them—eight Assassins! My mind is in battle with theirs—fiercely in battle.... I hold my own! I am armed and waiting!”
With a convulsive movement she drew his head closer to her shoulder. “Eight of them!” she whispered,—“trying to entrap and seize my brain. But my thoughts are free! My mind is defending you—you, here in my arms!”
After a breathless silence: “Look out!” she whispered with terrible energy; “they are afteryourmind at last. Fix your thoughts on me! Keep your mind clear of their net! Don’t let their ghostly fingers touch it. Look at me!” She drew him closer. “Look atme! Believe inme! I can resist. I can defend you. Does your head feel confused?”
“Yes—numb.”
“Don’t sleep!Don’t close your eyes! Keep them open and look at me!”
“I can scarcely see you——”
“Youmustsee me!”
“My eyes are heavy,” he said drowsily. “I can’t see you, Tressa——”
“Wake! Look at me! Keep your mind clear. Oh, I beg you—I beg you! They’re after our minds and souls, I tell you! Oh, believe in me,” she beseeched him in an agonised whisper—“Can’t you believe in me for a moment,—as if you loved me!”
His heavy lids lifted and he tried to look at her.
“Can you see me?Canyou?”
He muttered something in a confused voice.
“Victor!”
At the sound of his own name, he opened his eyes again and tried to straighten up, but his pistol fell to the carpet.
“Victor!” she gasped, “clear your mind in the name of God!”
“I can not——”
“I tell you hell is opening beyond that door!—outside your bolted door, there! Can’t you believe me! Can’t you hear me! Oh, what will hold you if the love of God can not!” she burst out. “I’d crucify myself for you if you’d look at me—if you’d only fight hard enough to believe in me—as though you loved me!”
His eyes unclosed but he sank back against her shoulder.
“Victor!” she cried in a terrible voice.
There was no answer.
“If the love of God could only hold you for a moment more!”—she stammered with her mouth against his ear, “just for a moment, Victor! Can’t you hear me?”
“Yes—very far away.”
“Fight for me! Try to care for me! Don’t let Sanang have me!”
He shuddered in her arms, reached out and resting heavily on her shoulder, staggered to his feet and stood swaying like a drunken man.
“No, by God,” he said thickly, “Sanang shall not touch you.”
The girl was on her feet now, holding him upright with an arm around his shoulders.
“They can’t—can’t harm us together,” she stammered. “Hark! Listen! Can you hear? Oh, can you hear?”
“Give me my pistol,” he tried to say, but his tongue seemed twisted. “No—by God—Sanang shall not touch you.”
She stooped lithely and recovered the weapon. “Hush,” she said close to his burning face. “Listen. Our minds are safe! I can hear somebody’s soul bidding its body farewell!”
White-lipped she burst out laughing, kicked the shroud out of the way, thrust the pistol into his right hand, went forward, forcing him along beside her, and drew the bolts from the door.
Suddenly he spoke distinctly:
“Is there anything outside that door on the landing?”
“Yes.... I don’t know what. Are you ready?” She laid her hand on lock and knob.
He nodded. At the same instant she jerked open the door; and a hunchback who had been picking at the lock fell headlong into the room, his pistol exploding on the carpet in a streak of fire.
It was a horrible struggle to secure the powerful misshapen creature, for he clawed and squealed and bounced about on the floor, striking blindly with ape-like arms. But at last Cleves held him down, throttled and twitching, and Tressa ripped strips from the shroud to truss up the writhing thing.
Then Cleves switched on the light.
“Why—why—you rat!” he exclaimed in hysterical relief at seeing a living man whom he recognised there at his feet. “What are you doing here?”
The hunchback’s red eyes blazed up at him from the floor.
“Who—who is he?” faltered the girl.
“He’s a German tailor named Albert Feke—one of the Chicago Bolsheviki—the most dangerous sort we harbour—one of their vile leaders who preaches that might is right and tells his disciples to go ahead and take what they want.”
He looked down at the malignant cripple.
“You’re wanted for the I. W. W. bomb murder, Albert. Did you know it?”
The hunchback licked his bloody lips. Then he kicked himself to a sitting position, squatted there like a toad and looked steadily at Tressa Norne out of small red-rimmed eyes. Blood dripped on his beard; his huge hairy fists, tied and crossed behind his back, made odd, spasmodic movements.
Cleves went to the telephone. Presently Tressa heard his voice, calm and distinct as usual:
“We’ve caught Albert Feke. He’s here at my rooms. I’d like to have you come over, Recklow.... Oh, yes, he kicked and scuffled and scratched like a cat.... What?... No, I hadn’t heard that he’d been in China.... Who?... Albert Feke? You say he was one of the Germans who escaped from Shantung four years ago?... You think he’s a Yezidee! You mean one of the Eight Assassins?”
The hunchback, staring at Tressa out of red-rimmed eyes, suddenly snarled and lurched his misshapen body at her.
“Teufelstuck!” he screamed, “ain’t I tell efferybody in Yian already it iss safer if we cut your throat! Devil-slut of Erlik—snow-leopardess!—cat of the Yezidees who has made of Sanang a fool!—it iss I who haf said always, always, that you know too damn much!... Kai!... I hear my soul bidding me farewell. Gif me my shroud!”
Cleves came back from the telephone. With the toe of his left foot he lifted the shroud and kicked it across the hunchback’s knees.
“So you were one of the huns who instigated the massacre in Yian,” he said, curiously. At that Tressa turned very white and a cry escaped her.
But the hunchback’s features were all twisted into ferocious laughter, and he beat on the carpet with the heels of his great splay feet.
“Ja! Ja!” he shrieked, “in Yian it vas a goot hunting! English and Yankee men und vimmens ve haff dropped into dose deep wells down. Py Gott in Himmel, how dey schream up out of dose deep wells in Yian!” He began to cackle and shriek in his frenzy. “Ach Gott ja! It iss not you either—you there, Keuke Mongol, who shall escape from the Sheiks-el-Djebel! It iss dot Old Man of the Mountain who shall tell your soul it iss time to say farewell! Ja! Ja! Ach Gott!—it iss my only regret that I shall not see the world when it is all afire! Ja! Ja!—all on fire like hell! But you shall see it, slut-leopard of the snows! You shall see it und you shall burn! Kai! Kai! My soul it iss bidding my body farewell. Kai! May Erlik curse you, Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure—Sorceress of the temple!—”
He spat at her and rolled over in his shroud.
The girl looking down on him closed her eyes for a moment, and Cleves saw her bloodless lips move, and bent nearer, listening. And he heard her whispering to herself:
“Preserve us all, O God, from the wrath of Satan who was stoned.”
Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.’s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the “cohesive power of plunder” and the degeneration of cranial tissue.
All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.
To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.
But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of awar on human minds!
And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world’s destruction.
In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.
However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.
And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years’ absence in Asia.
And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow’s suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.
It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.
The bride’s lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom’s unsteady hand.
She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive “Thank you,” and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.
There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.
“Don’t worry,” replied Cleves dryly. “That’s why I married her.”
“Where are you going now?” inquired Recklow.
“Back to my apartment.”
“Why don’t you take her away for a month?”
Cleves flushed with annoyance: “This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.”
“I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She’s had nothing but trouble. She’s worn out.”
Cleves hesitated: “I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn’t it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?”
“In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it’s got to have a chance to rest.”
Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.
“Doyou, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?”
Recklow’s cool eyes measured him: “Doyou?”
“My God, Recklow, I don’t know—after what my own eyes have seen.”
“I don’t know either,” said the other calmly, “but I am taking no chances. I don’t attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife’s unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.”
The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.
“I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,” he said pleasantly, “—into the real country, somewhere,—a month’s quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn’t it appeal to you?”
Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.
“I should like it very much,” she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.
Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.
One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.
But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.
In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.
Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.
A fine rain was falling.
They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.
He said, politely: “In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn’t care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?”
“I like sunlight and green leaves,” she said in that odd, still voice.
“Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks’ rest——”
“Would it inconvenience you?”
Her manner touched him.
“My dear Miss Norne,” he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.
“I really can’t bring myself to realise that you and I are married,” he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.
Her smile became an endeavour. “I can’t believe it either, Mr. Cleves,” she said. “I feel rather stunned.”
“Hadn’t you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?” he suggested, striving to speak lightly.
“Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.”
“Tressa?”
“Yes.”
“Yes—what?”
“Yes—Victor.”
“That’s the idea,” he insisted with forced gaiety.
“The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You’ll have your freedom some day, you know.”
“Yes—I—know.”
“And we’re already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“It even seems to me,” he ventured, “it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.”
“Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.”
“In point of fact,” he concluded, surprised, “wearefriends—in a way. Wouldn’t you call it—friendship?”
“I think so, I think I’d call it that,” she admitted.
“I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.”
The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.
“You see,” he went on, “when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they’re likely to be afraid of being in each other’s way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other’s friendly consideration. Don’t you think so, Tressa?”
Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. “Yes,” she said. “And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.”
She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, “heavenly—azure.”
“Are we really going away together?” she asked timidly.
“Certainly, if you wish.”
“If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.”
He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:
“Youaretired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.”
“Tired, but not the—others.”
“Not unhappy?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“Not with you.”
The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.
“We’ll go South,” he said.... “I’m so glad that you don’t feel lonely with me.”
“Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?”
“Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don’t you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?”
“It was always June in Yian,” she said under her breath.
She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.
Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.
“It was very beautiful in Yian,” she said, “—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God’s skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!”
Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.
After a little, she went on dreamily:
“On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man should please us....”
“Free?” he repeated.
“To love,” she explained coolly.
“Oh.” He nodded, but his face became rather grim.
“There came to me at the yaïlak,” she went on carelessly, “one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold....
“He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: ‘Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?’—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.
“And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.
“‘Sou-sou! Squirrel!’ he cried angrily at me. ‘Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!’
“At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.
“I said to him: ‘You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!’
“And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?” She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:
“‘Squirrel!’ he cries—‘little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——’
“But I had had enough, Victor,” she added excitedly, “and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip!Whatdo you think of such a courtship?” she cried, laughing. But Cleves’s face was a study in emotions.
And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.
“I—I’m sorry——” she faltered.... “You’ll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——”
She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.
“We’ll go South together,” he said in an uncertain voice.... “I hope you will try to think of me as a friend.... I’m just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I’m—I’m troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?”
She nodded.
“I want to be your friend, always,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Cleves.”
It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.
It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.
Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.
For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.
It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.
And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.
Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton’s dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.
So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.
And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.
Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.
And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.
One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.
“You feel better—much better!” he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.
“Yes. Isn’t this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.”
She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.
“Is this dull for you?” she asked in a low voice.
“Not if you are contented, Tressa.”
“You’re so nice about it. Don’t you think you might venture a day’s real shooting?”
“No, I think I won’t,” he replied.
“On my account?”
“Well—yes.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right as long as you’re getting rested. What is that instrument?”
“My moon-lute.”
“Oh, is that what it’s called?”
She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.
“Shall I?” she inquired a little shyly.
“Go ahead. I’d like to hear it!”
“I haven’t touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer.” She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:
“Little Isle of Cispangou,Isle of iris, isle of cherry,Tell your tiny maidens merryClouds are looming over you!La-ē-la!La-ē-la!All your ocean’s but a ferry;Ships are bringing death to you!La-ē-lou!La-ē-lou!“Little Isle of Cispangou,Half a thousand ships are sailing;Captain Death commands each crew;Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!La-ē-la!La-ē-la!Clouds the dying moon are veiling,Every cloud a shroud for you!La-ē-lou!La-ē-lou!”
“Little Isle of Cispangou,Isle of iris, isle of cherry,Tell your tiny maidens merryClouds are looming over you!La-ē-la!La-ē-la!All your ocean’s but a ferry;Ships are bringing death to you!La-ē-lou!La-ē-lou!
“Little Isle of Cispangou,Half a thousand ships are sailing;Captain Death commands each crew;Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!La-ē-la!La-ē-la!Clouds the dying moon are veiling,Every cloud a shroud for you!La-ē-lou!La-ē-lou!”
“Cispangou,” she explained, “is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.”
“It’s not exactly a gay song,” he said. “What’s it about?”
“Oh, it’s a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.”
She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.
“I wish I could amuse you,” she said wistfully.
“Why do you think I’m bored, Tressa? I’m not at all.”
But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.
“I don’t know how young men in the Western world are entertained,” she remarked presently.
“You don’t have to entertain me,” he said, smiling.
“I should be happy to, if I knew how.”
“How are young men entertained in the Orient?”
“Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don’t think you do.”
He laughed in spite of himself.
“Do you really wish to entertain me?”
“I do,” she said seriously.
“Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.”
Her dawning smile faded a trifle. “I don’t—I haven’t——” She hesitated.
“You haven’t your professional paraphernalia with you,” he suggested.
“Oh—as for that——”
“Don’t you need it?”
“For some things—some kinds of things.... Icoulddo—other things——”
He waited. She seemed disconcerted. “Don’t do anything you don’t wish to do, Tressa,” he said.
“I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——”
“Well, for heaven’s sake don’t venture then!” he said with emphasis. “Don’t do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——”
“I am wondering,” she reflected, “just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.”
“Don’t bother about me. I wouldn’t have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!”
She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.
“I think I can amuse you,” she concluded, “without bringing any harm to myself.”
“Don’t try it, Tressa!—--”
“I’ll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.”
He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.
He heard her singing under her breath to herself:
“La-ē-la!La-ē-la!”
“La-ē-la!La-ē-la!”
and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.
Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.
“This is wonderful,” he whispered.
The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.
“This is nothing,” she said. “If I only dared—wait a moment!—--” And, to the Parula warblers:
“Go home, little friends of God!”
The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband’s neck.
“Look at the river,” she said.
“Good God!” he blurted out. And sat dumb.
For, over the St. John’s misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.
And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.
And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——
Her arm tightened around his neck.
He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.
She rested her face lightly against his cheek.
In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen’s cries, the creak of oars.
Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.
There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.
He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.
Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin’s cry: “There is no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!”
The girl’s arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.
There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.
“Have—have you been amused?” she asked.
“What did you do to me!” he demanded harshly.
She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.
“God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,” she said. “I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.”
“What was that bridge I saw!”
“The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.”
“And the city?”
“Yian.”
“You lived there?”
“Yes.”
He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.
“You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,” he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.
“Did youhearnothing?”
He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.
“And—there were the birds, too.” She added, with an uncertain smile: “I do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.”
“I don’t know how you did it,” he said harshly. “And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who turned and laughed at us—”
“That was Yulun.”
“Who?”
“Yulun. I taught her English.”
“A temple girl?”
“Yes. From Black China.”
“How could you makemeseeher!” he demanded.
“Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.”
“It’s a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!” he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl’s face went white.
“I don’t mean uncanny,” he hastened to add. “Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.”
She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.
“You mustn’t be so sensitive,” he added. “I’ve no doubt that it’s all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it’s no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.”
For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.
About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.
The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.
Tressa’s arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.
“You feel all right, don’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It’s really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,” she replied happily.
“You’re not much more,” he muttered.
She heard him: “Not very much more—in years,” she said.... “Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, startled.
After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:
“—And eight tall towersGuard the routeOf human life,Where at all hoursDeath looks out,Holding a knifeRolled in a shroud.For every man,Humble or proud,Mighty or bowed,Death has a shroud;—for every man,—Even for Tchingniz Khan!Behold them pass!—lancer.Baroulass,Temple dancerIn tissue gold,Khiounnou,Karlik bold,Christian, Jew,—Nations swarm to the great Urdu.Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,Warn your Khan that his hour is come!Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—”
“—And eight tall towersGuard the routeOf human life,Where at all hoursDeath looks out,Holding a knifeRolled in a shroud.
For every man,Humble or proud,Mighty or bowed,Death has a shroud;—for every man,—Even for Tchingniz Khan!Behold them pass!—lancer.Baroulass,Temple dancerIn tissue gold,Khiounnou,Karlik bold,
Christian, Jew,—Nations swarm to the great Urdu.Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,Warn your Khan that his hour is come!Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—”
“You know,” remarked Cleves, “that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.”
Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.
They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.
They went ashore.
It was at the sixth hole that they passed the man ahead who was playing all alone—a courteous young fellow in white flannels, who smiled and bowed them “through” in silence.
They thanked him, drove from the tee, and left the polite and reticent young man still apparently hunting for a lost ball.
Like other things which depended upon dexterity and precision, Tressa had taken most naturally to golf. Her supple muscles helped.
At the ninth hole they looked back but did not see the young man in white flannels.
Hammock, set with pine and palmetto, and intervals of evil-looking swamp, flanked the course. Rank wire-grass, bayberry and scrub palmetto bounded the fairgreen.
On every blossoming bush hung butterflies—Palomedes swallowtails—drugged with sparkle-berry honey, their gold and black velvet wings conspicuous in the sunny mist.
“Like the ceremonial vestments of a Yezidee executioner,” murmured the girl. “The Tchortchas wear red when they robe to do a man to death.”
“I wish you could forget those things,” said Cleves.
“I am trying.... I wonder where that young man in white went.”
Cleves searched the links. “I don’t see him. Perhaps he had to go back for another ball.”
“I wonder who he was,” she mused.
“I don’t remember seeing him before,” said Cleves.... “Shall we start back?”
They walked slowly across the course toward the tenth hole.
Tressa teed up, drove low and straight. Cleves sliced, and they walked together into the scrub and towards the woods, where his ball had bounded into a bunch of palm trees.
Far in among the trees something white moved and vanished.
“Probably a white egret,” he remarked, knocking about in the scrub with his midiron.
“It was that young man in white flannels,” said Tressa in a low voice.
“What would he be doing in there?” he asked incredulously. “That’s merely a jungle, Tressa—swamp and cypress, thorn and creeper,—and no man would go into that mess if he could. There is no bottom to those swamps.”
“But I saw him in there,” she said in a troubled voice.
“But when I tell you that only a wild animal or a snake or a bird could move in that jungle! The bog is one vast black quicksand. There’s death in those depths.”
“Victor.”
“Yes?” He looked around at her. She was pale. He came up and took her hand inquiringly.
“I don’t feel—well,” she murmured. “I’m not ill, you understand——”
“What’s the matter, Tressa?”
She shook her head drearily: “I don’t know.... I wonder whether I should have tried to amuse you this morning——”
“You don’t think you’ve stirred up any of those Yezidee beasts, do you?” he asked sharply.
And as she did not answer, he asked again whether she was afraid that what she had done that morning might have had any occult consequences. And he reminded her that she had hesitated to venture anything on that account.
His voice, in spite of him, betrayed great nervousness now, and he saw apprehension in her eyes, also.
“Why should that man in white have followed us, keeping out of sight in the woods?” he went on. “Did you notice about him anything to disturb you, Tressa?”
“Not at the time. But—it’s odd—I can’t put him out of my mind. Since we passed him and left him apparently hunting a lost ball, I have not been able to put him out of my mind.”
“He seemed civil and well bred. He was perfectly good-humoured—all courtesy and smiles.”
“I think—perhaps—it was the way he smiled at us,” murmured the girl. “Everybody in the East smiles when they draw a knife....”
He placed his arm through hers. “Aren’t you a trifle morbid?” he said pleasantly.
She stooped for her golf ball, retaining a hold on his arm. He picked up his ball, too, put away her clubs and his, and they started back together in silence, evidently with no desire to make it eighteen holes.
“It’s a confounded shame,” he muttered, “just as you were becoming so rested and so delightfully well, to have anything—any unpleasant flash of memory cut in to upset you——”
“I brought it on myself. I should not have risked stirring up the sinister minds that were asleep.”
“Hang it all!—and I asked you to amuse me.”
“It was not wise in me,” she said under her breath. “It is easy to disturb the unknown currents which enmesh the globe. I ought not to have shown you Yian. I ought not to have shown you Yulun. It was my fault for doing that. I was a little lonely, and I wanted to see Yulun.”
They came down the river back to the canoe, threw in their golf bags, and embarked on the glassy stream.
Over the calm flood, stained deep with crimson, the canoe glided in the sanguine evening light. But Tressa sang no more and her head was bent sideways as though listening—always listening—to something inaudible to Cleves—something very, very far away which she seemed to hear through the still drip of the paddles.
They were not yet in sight of their landing when she spoke to him, partly turning:
“I think some of your men have arrived.”
“Where?” he asked, astonished.
“At the house.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I think so.”
They paddled a little faster. In a few minutes their dock came into view.
“It’s funny,” he said, “that you should think some of our men have arrived from the North. I don’t see anybody on the dock.”
“It’s Mr. Recklow,” she said in a low voice. “He is seated on our veranda.”
As it was impossible to see the house, let alone the veranda, Cleves made no reply. He beached the canoe; Tressa stepped out; he followed, carrying the golf bags.
A mousy light lingered in the shrubbery; bats were flying against a salmon-tinted sky as they took the path homeward.
With an impulse quite involuntary, Cleves encircled his young wife’s shoulders with his left arm.
“Girl-comrade,” he said lightly, “I’d kill any man who even looked as though he’d harm you.”
He smiled, but she had not missed the ugly undertone in his words.
They walked slowly, his arm around her shoulders. Suddenly he felt her start. They halted.
“What was it?” he whispered.
“I thought there was something white in the woods.”
“Where, dear?” he asked coolly.
“Over there beyond the lawn.”
What she called the “lawn” was only a vast sheet of pink and white phlox, now all misty with the whirring wings of sphinx-moths and Noctuidæ.
The oak grove beyond was dusky. Cleves could see nothing among the trees.
After a moment they went forward. His arm had fallen away from her shoulders.
There were no lights except in the kitchen when they came in sight of the house. At first nobody was visible on the screened veranda under the orange trees. But when he opened the swing door for her a shadowy figure arose from a chair.
It was John Recklow. He came forward, bent his strong white head, and kissed Tressa’s hand.
“Is all well with you, Mrs. Cleves?”
“Yes. I am glad you came.”
Cleves clasped the elder man’s firm hand.
“I’m glad too, Recklow. You’ll stop with us, of course.”
“Do you really want me?”
“Of course,” said Cleves.
“All right. I’ve a coon and a surrey behind your house.”
So Cleves went around in the dusk and sent the outfit back to the hotel, and he himself carried in Recklow’s suitcase.
Then Tressa went away to give instructions, and the two men were left together on the dusky veranda.
“Well?” said Recklow quietly.
Cleves went to him and rested both hands on his shoulders:
“I’m playing absolutely square. She’s a perfectly fine girl and she’ll have her chance some day, God willing.”
“Her chance?” repeated Recklow.
“To marry whatever man she will some day care for.”
“I see,” said Recklow drily.
There was a silence, then:
“She’s simply a splendid specimen of womanhood,” said Cleves earnestly. “And intensely interesting to me. Why, Recklow, I haven’t known a dull moment—though I fear she has known many——”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, being married to a—a sort of temporary figurehead—shut up here all day alone with a man of no particular interest to her——”
“Don’t you interest her?”
“Well, how could I? She didn’t choose me because she liked me particularly.”
“Didn’t she?” asked Recklow, still more drily. “Well, that does make it a trifle dull for you both.”
“Not for me,” said the younger man naïvely. “She is one of the most interesting women I ever met. And good heavens!—what psychic knowledge that child possesses! She did a thing to-day—merely to amuse me——” He checked himself and looked at Recklow out of sombre eyes.
“What did she do?” inquired the older man.
“I think I’ll let her tell you—if she wishes.... And that reminds me. Why did you come down here, Recklow?”
“I want to show you something, Cleves. May we step into the house?”
They went into a little lamplit living-room. Recklow handed a newspaper clipping to Cleves: the latter read it, standing:
“Had Deadliest Gas Ready for Germans“‘Lewisite’ Might Have Killed Millions“Washington, April 24.—Guarded night and day and far out of human reach on a pedestal at the Interior Department Exposition here is a tiny vial. It contains a specimen of the deadliest poison ever known, ‘Lewisite,’ the product of an American scientist.“Germany escaped this poison by signing the armistice before all the resources of the United States were turned upon her.“Ten airplanes carrying ‘Lewisite’ would have wiped out, it is said, every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island. A drop poured in the palm of the hand would penetrate to the blood, reach the heart and kill the victim in agony.“What was coming to Germany may be imagined by the fact that when the armistice was signed ‘Lewisite’ was being manufactured at the rate of ten tons a day. Three thousand tons of this most terrible instrument ever conceived for killing would have been ready for business on the American front in France on November 1.“‘Lewisite’ is another of the big secrets of the war just leaking out. It was developed in the Bureau of Mines by Professor W. Lee Lewis, of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., who took a commission as a captain in the army.“The poison was manufactured in a specially built plant near Cleveland, called the ‘Mouse Trap,’ because every workman who entered the stockade went under an agreement not to leave the eleven-acre space until the war was won. The object of this, of course, was to protect the secret.“Work on the plant was started eighteen days after the Bureau of Mines had completed its experiments.“Experts are certain that no one will want to steal the sample. Everybody at the Exposition, which shows what Secretary Lane’s department is doing, keeps as far away from it as possible.”
“Had Deadliest Gas Ready for Germans
“‘Lewisite’ Might Have Killed Millions
“Washington, April 24.—Guarded night and day and far out of human reach on a pedestal at the Interior Department Exposition here is a tiny vial. It contains a specimen of the deadliest poison ever known, ‘Lewisite,’ the product of an American scientist.
“Germany escaped this poison by signing the armistice before all the resources of the United States were turned upon her.
“Ten airplanes carrying ‘Lewisite’ would have wiped out, it is said, every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island. A drop poured in the palm of the hand would penetrate to the blood, reach the heart and kill the victim in agony.
“What was coming to Germany may be imagined by the fact that when the armistice was signed ‘Lewisite’ was being manufactured at the rate of ten tons a day. Three thousand tons of this most terrible instrument ever conceived for killing would have been ready for business on the American front in France on November 1.
“‘Lewisite’ is another of the big secrets of the war just leaking out. It was developed in the Bureau of Mines by Professor W. Lee Lewis, of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., who took a commission as a captain in the army.
“The poison was manufactured in a specially built plant near Cleveland, called the ‘Mouse Trap,’ because every workman who entered the stockade went under an agreement not to leave the eleven-acre space until the war was won. The object of this, of course, was to protect the secret.
“Work on the plant was started eighteen days after the Bureau of Mines had completed its experiments.
“Experts are certain that no one will want to steal the sample. Everybody at the Exposition, which shows what Secretary Lane’s department is doing, keeps as far away from it as possible.”
When Cleves had finished reading, he raised his eyes in silence.
“That vial was stolen a week ago,” said Recklow gravely, “by a young man who killed one guard and fatally wounded the other.”
“Was there any ante-mortem statement?”
“Yes. I’ve followed the man. I lost all trace of him at Palm Beach, but I picked it up again at Ormond.And now I’m here, Cleves.”
“You don’t mean you’ve traced him here!” exclaimed Cleves under his breath.
“He’s here on the St. Johns River, somewhere. He came up in a motor-boat, but left it east of Orchard Cove. Benton knows this country. He’s covering the motor-boat. And I—came here to see how you are getting on.”
“And to warn us,” added Cleves quietly.
“Well—yes. He’s got that stuff. It’s deadlier than the newspaper suspects. And I guess—I guess, Cleves, he’s one of those damned Yezidee witch-doctors—or sorcerers, as they call them;—one of that sect of Assassins sent over here to work havoc on feeble minds and do murder on the side.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because the dirty beast lugs his shroud around with him—a bed-sheet stolen from the New Willard in Washington.
“We were so close to him in Jacksonville that we got it, and his luggage. But we didn’t get him, the rat! God knows how he knew we were waiting for him in his room. He never came back to get his luggage.
“But he stole a bed-sheet from his hotel in St. Augustine, and that is how we picked him up again. Then, at Palm Beach, we lost the beggar, but somehow or other I felt it in my bones that he was after you—you and your wife. So I sent Benton to Ormond and I went to Palatka. Benton picked up his trail. It led toward you—toward the St. Johns. And the reptile has been here forty-eight hours, trying to nose you out, I suppose——”
Tressa came into the room. Both men looked at her.
Cleves said in a guarded voice:
“To-day, on the golf links at Orchard Cove, there was a young man in white flannels—very polite and courteous to us—but—Tressa thought she saw him slinking through the woods as though following and watching us.”
“My man, probably,” said Recklow. He turned quietly to Tressa and sketched for her the substance of what he had just told Cleves.
“The man in white flannels on the golf links,” said Cleves, “was well built and rather handsome, and not more than twenty-five. I thought he was a Jew.”
“I thought so too,” said Tressa, calmly, “until I saw him in the woods. And then—and then—suddenly it came to me that his smile was the smile of a treacherous Shaman sorcerer.
“... And the idea haunts me—the memory of those smooth-faced, smiling men in white—men who smile only when they slay—when they slay body and soul under the iris skies of Yian!—O God, merciful, long suffering,” she whispered, staring into the East, “deliver our souls from Satan who was stoned, and our bodies from the snare of the Yezidee!”
The night grew sweet with the scent of orange bloom, and all the perfumed darkness was vibrant with the feathery whirr of hawk-moths’ wings.
Tressa had taken her moon-lute to the hammock, but her fingers rested motionless on the strings.
Cleves and Recklow, shoulder to shoulder, paced the moonlit path along the hedges of oleander and hibiscus which divided garden from jungle.
And they moved cautiously on the white-shell road, not too near the shadow line. For in the cypress swamp the bloated grey death was awake and watching under the moon; and in the scrub palmetto the diamond-dotted death moved lithely.
And somewhere within the dark evil of the jungle a man in white might be watching.
So Recklow’s pistol swung lightly in his right hand and Cleves’ weapon lay in his side-pocket, and they strolled leisurely around the drive and up and down the white-shell walks, passing Tressa at regular intervals, where she sat in her hammock with the moon-lute across her knees.
Once Cleves paused to place two pink hibiscus blossoms in her hair above her ears; and the girl smiled gravely at him in the light.
Again, pausing beside her hammock on one of their tours of the garden, Recklow said in a low voice: “If the beast would only show himself, Mrs. Cleves, we’d not miss him. Have you caught a glimpse of anything white in the woods?”
“Only the night mist rising from the branch and a white ibis stealing through it.”
Cleves came nearer: “Do you think the Yezidee is in the woods watching us, Tressa?”
“Yes, he is there,” she said calmly.
“Youknowit?”
“Yes.”
Recklow stared at the woods. “We can’t go in to hunt for him,” he said. “That fellow would get us with his Lewisite gas before we could discover and destroy him.”
“Suppose he waits for a west wind and squirts his gas in this direction?” whispered Cleves.
“There is no wind,” said Tressa tranquilly. “He has been waiting for it, I think. The Yezidee is very patient. And he is a Shaman sorcerer.”
“My God!” breathed Recklow. “What sort of hellish things has the Old World been dumping into America for the last fifty years? An ordinary anarchist is bad enough, but this new breed of devil—these Yezidees—this sect of Assassins——”
“Hush!” whispered Tressa.
All three listened to the great cat-owl howling from the jungle. But Tressa had heard another sound—the vague stir of leaves in the live-oaks. Was it a passing breeze? Was a night wind rising? She listened. But heard no brittle clatter from the palm-fronds.
“Victor,” she said.
“Yes, Tressa.”
“If a wind comes, we must hunt him. That will be necessary.”
“Either we hunt him and get him, or he kills us here with his gas,” said Recklow quietly.
“If the night wind comes,” said Tressa, “we must hunt the darkness for the Yezidee.” She spoke coolly.
“If he’d only show himself,” muttered Recklow, staring into the darkness.
The girl picked up her lute, caught Cleves’ worried eyes fixed on her, suddenly comprehended that his anxiety was on her account, and blushed brightly in the moonlight. And he saw her teeth catch at her underlip; saw her look up again at him, confused.
“If I dared leave you,” he said, “I’d go into the hammock and start that reptile. This won’t do—this standing pat while he comes to some deadly decision in the woods there.”
“What else is there to do?” growled Recklow.
“Watch,” said the girl. “Out-watch the Yezidee. If there is no night-wind he may tire of waiting. Then you must shoot fast—very, very fast and straight. But if the night-wind comes, then we must hunt him in darkness.”
Recklow, pistol in hand, stood straight and sturdy in the moonlight, gazing fixedly at the forest. Cleves sat down at his wife’s feet.
She touched her moon-lute tranquilly and sang in her childish voice: