The jailhouse lawyer, p.2
Witch House, page 2
But soon strange rumours began to drift about. It was told how in Boston the captain who had brought him thither had, in his cups, told strange tales of him: how, when the ship lay at anchor in a French port, this man, a stranger to him, had been rowed out to it after dark, and had offered him twice the usual passage-money.
That was the night before the ship’s sailing. Next morning, as the captain prepared to weigh anchor, he heard an uproar in the town, and was told that the hunt was up for a fleeing wizard who had been traced thither. In a town to the South, near the Pyrenees, a coven of those lost souls who worship Satan had lately been discovered. Thirty wizards and full twice as many witches had been burnt. But the chief warlock, he who had been their Devil, robed and wearing the horns of Satan at the Black Mass, and sacrificing cocks and beasts and even little children to that Evil One whom he impersonated, had escaped. Though taken and tortured and condemned with his dreadful flock, he had, by his infernal enchantments, filled the prison with phantom flames and fled whilst the gaolers fought them, forgetful of all else.
The captain, being asked why he had then proceeded with his passenger, said that he had not meant to; he had gone below to question him, but when he met his passenger’s eyes a strange confusion came over him: he thought what a fool he should look if he gave up the wrong man. More dreadfully, of the suspicion that might come upon himself, an Englishman and held a heretic, in this Papist country, should his passenger prove to be that dreaded warlock. And it may be, also, that the golden glitter of the passage-money blinded him. At all events, he said nothing; he weighed anchor and set sail, as quick as might be, from those shores of France.
He had sailed again from Boston ere those words of his came to Harperstown. Yet having come, they grew and multiplied like corn in a field. And at last the man Joseph de Quincy was summoned before the magistrates and elders to give answer to the gossip concerning him. He faced them without fear. All that had been told them by himself and others was true, he said, save that the crimes to which he had confessed had been lies wrung from him under the torture. He was indeed a Huguenot and a leech, and his papist neighbours, being wrought to frenzy by fear of that witchcraft which naturally flourished in their ungodly midst, had taken the skill which God in His goodness had vouchsafed him and the cures he had been permitted to effect, for works of the Devil.
And on the rack he had confessed, thus, in his weakness, perjuring himself and imperilling the salvation of his immortal soul to save his mortal body. But in spite of this fall from grace God had vouchsafed him mercy in his sin: on the very night before the day set for his burning fire, whether miraculous or otherwise, had delivered him from prison. And now he sought opportunity to atone his sins by a life of service in a new and godlier land.
He spoke with the tongues of men and angels; his voice was golden and his words were good. There was not an eye that was not wet for his sufferings, or else burning with ire against the papist wickedness. A woman screamed and sobbed and cried out that she beheld a halo about his head. (And mayhap there may have been one, but if so it was of the flames of hell.) All united in a prayer of thanksgiving for his deliverance, the while he knelt with upraised arms and rapt eyes that it seemed must look indeed on God.
His honor was greater than ever after that. Many held him a martyr, and indeed he walked somewhat lame and stiffly from the rack, to his life’s end. He did more cures. So, for awhile, he did all good and seemingly no harm.
Then it fortuned that Elizabeth Harper, daughter of that wealthy and godly elder from whom the town now takes its name, sickened of a strange malady. De Quincy tended her. It was told later by her mother’s gossips that Mistress Harper said that once she heard the French leech’s voice flowing on and on, softly as the waters of a brook, in her daughter’s chamber, and found him holding the girl’s hands and staring deep into her eyes that, even on days when she knew no other, would seem fixed unwaveringly, fast as steel to a magnet, upon his face.
But the maid recovered, and thereafter held de Quincy as her saviour. Indeed, she affectioned him strangely and violently, with a passion which should be reserved for God. He made suit for her hand. Her parents liked not the match over-much, but the maid languished and sickened again, and, since she was their one living child, and they feared she might die as her brothers and sisters had done, in the end they yielded, though already a few were beginning to whisper that neither illnesses nor love were natural, but enchantments wrought by de Quincy.
The year after that marriage fever swept Harperstown, and though Joseph de Quincy healed many, the parents of his wife died. With part of their wealth he built a house upon an island near the shore, and removed thither with his wife and infant daughter, though many thought it a singularly isolated residence for a leech.
There they lived, and Elizabeth de Quincy was seen less and less among her neighbours. After her son’s birth some of her old illness came back upon her. A sister of her mother’s, being rowed across to the island as it chanced, during the husband’s absence (though many thought that the goodwife, being inquisitive by nature, watched and picked a time when she knew he would be from home), found her weeping bitterly; and, when pressed, the young wife said that she was tormented by evil dreams. Once she had dreamed that she woke in the night and, going to the window, saw her husband dancing naked with the maidservants by the shore, all their bodies glittering in the moonlight, and that they sacrificed a black cock there and did other rites such as it shamed her to tell of—though this was veriest phantasy, because Joseph was such a godly man and also so lamed that he could never have danced, and in the morning he had berated her roundly for her evil-mindedness and lewd fancies, but the black cock had been gone from the barnyard.
Also another time she had wakened in dead of night, thinking that something touched her, and when she looked she saw that a black scaly tail, tufted with flame at the end, like a fiend’s, had switched across her and lay there burning the covers. And when she turned shrieking, to see what manner of thing lay beside her in the bed, she was at first reassured by sight of her husband’s face, then saw, to her horror, that horns had risen, black and pointed, from his forehead. After that she screamed again and remembered nothing until Joseph was shaking her awake, and there were neither horns nor tail to be seen. Nor were the bedclothes scorched.
They were dreams, distempers of the mind: they came upon her always, she said, after some stupidness of hers had angered Joseph. She spoke pitifully, defending the husband, yet the aunt saw that she feared him.
She implored her aunt to pray for her, that she might be delivered from these night-terrors and hideous and unreasonable phantasies that made her life a torment. Then, of a sudden, a dish that stood on a table near them fell to the floor with a great clatter; and Elizabeth sprang up, her eyes wild with terror, shrieking: “He is coming! He is angry because he knows that I have been telling you! He is angry!” And she began to weep like a child in mortal terror.
But when the two women ran to the window there was no sign of anyone, nor of any new boat at the island’s shore. Elizabeth said, “Perhaps he is not here then. Perhaps this was not one of the things he makes fall; it did not strike me when it fell. It would have if he had been angry.”
Then, before her aunt could question her, she turned and drew her towards the door.
“Go now, for if he comes and finds you here he will ask me what we have been talking about, and he does not like me to tell all these things. Naturally, what husband would?” And she laughed a little; it was more pitiful, the aunt said later, than her cries.
“Must you tell him what we have said?” she says that she asked.
“ ’Tis no matter. When he looks at me, my tongue is not mine, but his. It answers; it betrays my thought to him.”
But on the way down to the beach she seemed to forget all that had happened, and laughed a little and spoke as she had in her girlish days. When her aunt asked her of the meaning of the fallen dish she looked puzzled and troubled and said, “I am become so awkward. I drop so many things. Only last week I scalded myself with boiling soup—’twas not flavoured to Joseph’s liking. Yet I had barely touched the dish when it fell.”
“You had not touched this dish at all, Elizabeth,” said her aunt. “You were not within three paces of it.”
And the young woman looked at her in veritable surprise and said, “I was not? That is strange. Joseph says ’tis part of my illness that I so often drop and break things.”
“Had you forgotten that you did not break this?”
“Yes. I forget so many things. Like the black cock—Joseph says we had killed and eaten it the week before I had my dream, and when he fixed his eyes on me and told me so, I remembered it; yet I had not. I can still remember, too, seeing that black cock pecking up the grain the night before I dreamed.” And she looked puzzled and wondering, like a child.
That conversation has been preserved to posterity. It was told and told again by the goodwife many times, but whether Elizabeth de Quincy ever told it to any is not known, because after that day she sickened and took to her bed, and never again knew any that came near her during the year longer that she lived. And it is said, also, that a farm-boy saw Joseph de Quincy row to his home that day, and turn when he saw his kinswoman’s boat, and land on the other side of the island, where he might have crept up to the house unseen.
But he could not have touched the dish that stood upon his table unless he had had the power of entering invisible to the women.
Such is the record of the life and deeds of Joseph de Quincy, as sworn to by his own kin and neighbours at the trial of his daughter Sarai for witchcraft in Salem in the year of the great Witch-Hunt or Delusion, in 1692, two years after his death. She was convicted and hanged, her own husband, a merchant of Salem, being among her accusers. Many of the usual tales were told of her: of women who had quarrelled with her and sickened and died, of men who showed bruises on their backs where she had transformed them into horseshape and ridden them through the air in the night.
But her maidservants testified that she had also, at divers times, displayed to them strange beasts, with horrible green eyes and slavering fangs, that sprang at them and vanished in the springing, and had told the wretched girls that these would devour them if they betrayed her in aught. Also, that they had known her to sacrifice black lambs and cocks to the Evil One in a dark room where they dared not follow to see what came in answer to her call.
And this woman, knowing that hope of life was past, confessed with unholy pride and glee that she had done all these things and more, after the teaching of her father, and would do yet more, and twelve times worse, if she were allowed to live.
Gaylord Carew laid the magazine down. He had not received Barret until after his regular office-hours, and the brightness was fading from the sky; evening was coming on. The hum of the traffic in Forty-fifth Street came up to them faintly from far below, storeys below, a dulled, unhuman whisper in the silence.
“They have a fondness for family names,” he mused, “and they are fascinated by family traditions, are they not? It seems to be rather a strong strain of blood. Inbred?”
The lawyer looked at him, rather startled.
“I suppose you might say so, but I never thought of it that way. There are only a few families in Harpersville sufficiently eminent to marry into the Quincys. They have done so for over two hundred years. That may be,” he spoke delicately, again with that odd air of secrecy and reservation, “why the male line has died out so rapidly during the last two generations. Elizabeth Stone’s father was the last. He contracted consumption, went West and married a Western girl, and seemed to have recovered until he tried to come back East. As in so many cases, it didn’t work; he died. His wife died too, the next month, at the birth of a second child—a still-born son. Miss Sarai was fit to be tied.”
“And considered it an insult for the little girl to be alive when her brother was dead?” Carew thought that the grim old woman herself must have been Chinese in her attitude toward daughters; indifferent as the ancestral French to dark blood as long as it flowed in the sacred veins of a Quincy. Had it been some psychic affinity, some cry of the old wizard’s blood that had made Captain Pegleg buy his yellow light-o’-love in Pekin—the queer golden woman with her heritage from Shamanistic sorceries and the mysterious monasteries on the Roof of the World? What part had that heritage played in the re-invigorated blood of these last two men who were Quincy, bred and bone?
His thoughts turned from the little girl, who had certainly once been very miserable in Witch House, to the other, hers, who was perhaps as miserable there now, though in a different way.
He looked at Barret.
“I’m afraid it might mean a several weeks’ stay in Witch House if I am to study this case and treat it properly. Is your client prepared for that?”
“Elizabeth?” The old lawyer’s face showed his relief. “It is what she wants. She says you can’t find out anything to understand it any other way. But I didn’t suppose you would consent. Less than ever after reading that fairy tale of Joseph’s.”
“It’s not a fairy tale in any sense of the word. Nor from any viewpoint broad enough to be genuinely rational. I should imagine that it all happened very much as it is told here. Even to the breaking of the dish. Breakage is a poltergeist trick; there are numerous cases on record, though science hasn’t yet discovered the physical principle behind them.”
“You don’t mean you take that kind of thing seriously?” Barret’s old blue eyes looked badgered and bewildered, suddenly a little uneasy.
“The murmurous voice, the staring into the unfortunate girl’s eyes—it is all very obvious hypnotism. I have used hypnotism in treating certain cases, and so have plenty of other doctors, though I prefer,” he smiled slightly “to teach my patients to de-hypnotize themselves—dissolve their illusions by their own strength. Why shouldn’t a master-mesmerist trade on his talents like any other fortune-hunter? Though I think Joseph de Quincy was far more than that; his wife’s fortune was, with him, probably the means to an end. He evidently took his office, his Godhead in the Coven, if you can call it that, seriously. Both his wife’s stories and the teaching he gave his daughter indicate that.”
“You mean he made her see those visions? They weren’t just a dying woman’s delirium?”
“Partly. I imagine that that scene on the beach was real, except that, being lame, he did not dance. But her powers of visualization would have been well-developed after his unscrupulous use of them. Another time, you notice, he appeared to her horned and tailed, the Devil of the Coven, in the very shape that she must have come to believe his true one. Her own imagination, or a trick of his to torment her? Since hypnotism was unknown then, except to his ilk, he was a wizard according to Glanvil’s definition: ‘One who can do or seem to do strange things beyond the known power of art or ordinary nature!’ ”
“Then you do think it was partly her own imagination?” Something in Barret’s voice clung to the idea tightly.
“Very probably. He was destroying her brain; it would inevitably have betrayed her at times. But I don’t think it often needed to. He was a masterhand. Some points in that story indicated that he could transmit his commands to her brain by telepathy—an unusual power. Rasputin is said to have had it, but it’s not among the recognized and accepted powers of hypnotism. The man who could command it—and whose mind was of a type that could deliberately invoke Incarnate Evil—is not a good antagonist. Alive or dead.”
He had spoken half to himself, sombrely. The old lawyer did not think that he had betrayed his own feelings by starting, yet suddenly Gaylord Carew looked up, smiling whimsically in reassurance.
“Don’t be frightened. I’m not a spiritualist; I don’t believe in ghosts—your kind of ghost. Who knows the real definition of the word? I’ll do my best to lay, not encourage, whatever is troubling Witch House.”
The old man did not answer clearly; he stirred restlessly. For him the word had but one definition; one he did not believe in, but would have preferred not to remember. His was not a mystic temperament. He preferred to go to church on Sundays, and live honestly, and let the Hereafter wait until he came to it. Nonsense, extremely unpleasant nonsense, to think of its intruding on the here and now.
Yet he remembered uneasily and saw, clearly as a picture, Miss Sarai sitting in her purple dress, with the big purple amethyst rings gleaming on her fingers as they did in the portrait, her skinny, claw-like hands outstretched over the fire. That had been the last time he had ever seen her, the last fortnight before her death, and she had insisted on rising to receive him, though they had both known that she would never leave her room again.
She had greeted him with a cackling laugh.
“I’m chilly, Barret—cold—and I’ll soon be colder. No fire can warm me now; I can’t seem to get near enough. But I’m going where there’s some that will, if the preachers have been right. Old howling Cotton Mather and his ilk—not these washed-out, sugar-coating modern nincompoops that wouldn’t know the Devil if they met him on the street.”
He had ignored that. It had often seemed best to ignore what Miss Sarai said. He had tried to persuade her to send for Elizabeth, at least to notify the young widow that her name had been restored to her aunt’s will.
But Miss Sarai had only laughed.
