The Burning Court Read Free Page A

a few street lamps shining on asphalt below.
    There was no possibility of coincidence or mistake. The name was hers: Marie D’Aubray. The features were hers, even to an expression he knew. The woman in the picture, the woman who had gone to the guillotine seventy years ago, had been a relation of his wife’s—say her great-grandmother, which would make the dates about right. But the throwback to her features was uncanny, when the great-grand-daughter even caught a shade of expression.
    It did not matter a tinker’s damn, of course. It would not have mattered if her fathers or mothers or uncles had themselves been tipped under that evil plank. And in this age seventy-year-old devilry has already a flavor of the historic: we are apt to take it with a sort of casual and indulgent approval, as unrelated to the business of ordinary life as a papier-mâché skull on a desk. Nevertheless, it was startling; because in the picture there was even indicated the very tiny mole just below the angle of the jaw, and the antique bracelet he had seen Marie wear a hundred times. Furthermore, it was not going to be very funny if his own publishing firm issued a book with his wife’s photograph plastered opposite the title-page in a gallery of poisoners. Was that what Morley had meant, “You might come in and see me first thing Monday morning?”
    No, it was of no consequence. All the same——
    Turning back to study the picture again, he detached it from the page to get a better look. Now, why should he have a queer feeling when he touched it? Actually, though he could not have analyzed it, the realization that came over him in such a rush was the realization of how thoroughly and violently he remained in love with her. The photograph was of very thick cardboard, its grey stiplings touched in places with brown. On the back, with letters indented in the cardboard, was the photographer’s name, “Perrichet et Fils, 12 rue Jean Goujean, Paris vii.” Sprawled across this in curly handwriting, the ink now faded to brown, someone had written, “Ma très, très chère Marie; Louis Dinard, le 6 ième Janvier, 1858.” Lover? Husband?
    But what really came up as though in a wave from this picture, what grotesquely mingled the old-fashioned and the modern, was the woman’s expression. It survived even the stilted photography. The picture was a large half-length, having for its background a landscape with trees—and doves. The woman stood unnaturally, as though she were about to wobble over to one side, and her left hand rested on the top of a little round table which was chastely draped with an antimacassar. Her high-necked dress was of some darkish taffeta material, which gleamed in bunches. And from this high collar the head was carried a little back.
    Even though the dark-golden hair seemed somewhat differently arranged (there were a couple of curls which gave it a stiff archaic look), still it was Marie’s. She faced the camera, but looked slightly past it. Her grey eyes, with the somewhat heavy lids, large pupils, and dead-black irises, wore what he had often called her “spiritual” expression. The lips were open and faintly smiling. The eyes fixed on you before you noticed it, like a painter’s trick. Framed in these surroundings of doves and trees and antimacassars, it had an almost unpleasantly sugary appearance. Yet to the senses it conveyed something altogether different. The thing was alive. It had become a sort of Monkey’s Paw in Stevens’s hand, and he found his wrist joggling.
    His eyes went back to the words, “guillotined for murder.” Women were very rarely guillotined for murder. If they were, it was because what they had done was such that no other course could be taken.
    Stevens said to himself: This whole business is a joke or a hoax of some kind. Damn it, this is Marie. Somebody is putting something over on me.
    He said this to himself, although he knew quite well it was not true. After all, these startling