Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/14

12 grave so deep that she'll not hear the judgment trumps!'

"Elaine had jumped or fallen from a window, fallen fourteen stories to a concrete pavement; but despite the fact that practically all her bones were broken Mr. Martin told me that her beauty was not marred. Certainly, there was no blemish visible as I sat beside her body on the night before the funeral.

"Mr. Martin was an artist. He had placed her in a casket of pale silver-bronze with écru satin lining and had clothed her in a robe of pale Nile green. Her head was turned a little to one side, facing me, and the soft black lashes swept her flawless cheeks so naturally it seemed that any moment they might rise and show the gleaming emerald of her eyes. One hand lay loosely on her breast, the fingers slightly curled as if in quiet sleep; the other rested at her side, and in the flickering light of the watch-candles I could swear I saw her bosom rise and fall in slumber.

"I could not take my eyes off her face. That countenance of perfect beauty I had looked upon so often, those slim, red-fingered hands and little satin-shod feet from which I'd drunk the blood at her command—it seemed impossible that they were now for ever quiet with the quietness of death.

But it's release,' I told myself. 'You're free. Your bondage to this beautiful she-devil's done; you can' the thought seemed profanation, and I thrust it back, but it came again unbidden: 'Now you can marry Agnes!'

"It was a trick of light and shadow, doubtless, but it seemed to me the dead lips in the casket curved in a derisive smile, and through the quiet of the darkened room of death there came, faint as the echo of an echo's echo, that whisper I had heard Armistice Night beside the sea at Biarritz: 'Mine! Mine; all mine for ever!'

"We buried her in Shadow Lawn, and Agnes sent me a brief note of sympathy. Within a month we saw each other, in two months we were inseparable as we had been before the war. Last winter she agreed to marry me.

I knew how Kartophilos felt when he was reconciled with Heaven the night that Agnes promised she would be my wife. All that I'd forfeited I was to have. The promises of childhood were to be fulfilled. I put the memory of my marriage to Elaine behind me like an ugly dream, and a snatch of an old war song was upon my lips as I let myself into my bedroom:

"That night I'd had the sweetest kiss I'd known since I went off to war; life was starting afresh for me, I was

"My train of happy thought broke sharply. My bedroom was instinct with a spicy, heady perfume, cloying-sweet, provocative as an aphrodisiac. I recognized it; it was a scent that cut through all the odors of the antiseptics a moment before I had first seen Elaine in the convalescent section of the nursing-home at Biarritz.

"I looked wildly round the room, but there was no one there. Stamping to the nearest window I sent it sailing up, and though it was a zero night outside I left it fully open till the last faint taint of hellish sweetness had been blown away.

"Shivering—not entirely from cold—I got in bed. As the velvet darkness settled down when I snapped off the light, I felt a soft touch on my cheek, a touch like that of soft, cold little fingers seeking my lips. I brushed my face as though a noisome insect crawled across it, and it seemed I heard a little sob—or perhaps