Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/135

 my bedside as soon as she was physically able. This made it more difficult for me to tell her what I felt I must in honor; that while I admired and esteemed and—now—pitied her, I did not care for her as a man must care for the woman he wishes to make his wife."

Bessie's face grew warmer under the doctor's look.

"And I found it impossible, finally, to tell her this," confessed Dr. Armitage reluctantly. "The fact that I had given her the Persian kitten; that it had been I who had inadvertently sent it leaping across her father's coffin; that I had, moreover, remained a witness, although unwilling, of her initiation into vampirism; all these things were against me. She managed to make me feel that I owed her everything a man could possibly owe a loving woman. I was helpless; chained by my conviction that no matter how innocent I was, yet something of blame was mine for what had happened. By the fetters my conscience bound about me, Gretel drew me on, and a day came when we were pronounced man and wife."

"Perhaps—if you had loved her?"

"Bessie, that might have made me her weak victim, later. I must get on with this On our wedding night I felt that I had made what reparation I could, by giving her my name, the promise of my constant protection. I could go no farther. I went into the room where she awaited me, lovely in gleaming white satin, her flaxen hair undulating loosely about her shoulders, and told her clumsily that while I would devote every fiber of my being to restoring her to the full freedom of a clean soul, I could not give her the physical return which she certainly must feel her own passion merited. In plain words, I would protect her and keep her from harming others, for her own sake, but I could never be a husband to her.

"Good God, what a living fury sprang into unsuspected existence at my ultimatum! At first she clung to me, curling her body about me, writhing like a serpent into my arms, her fingers in my hair and on my face. When she found me unstirred, she changed her tactics, and reproached me with having wilfully won her heart only to crush her. When that again failed to move me, she screamed out her innermost soul, laid bare her deepest secrets before my appalled eyes!

"Then I learned that she, in her passion for evil, had mastered languages only that she might delve into forbidden tomes of base knowledge. Too light-natured to undertake the study of the deeper undertones of occultism, she let her feet stray into dubious paths. She found a road that took her by imperceptible degrees down to a door that opened into Hell," said the doctor, his voice lowering as if he feared to be overheard.

"Dale, how dreadful! Oh, the poor thing!"

"Perhaps I am hard toward her, Bessie, because I know how evil she is. and how she has wilfully fostered the growth of darkness in her own soul, and bidden welcome to whatever spirit approached her, provided it catered to her own ends.

"Down that path Gretel had walked with wilful eyes wide open, for she discovered that it is easier to slip down than to climb, and she had not the perseverance and courage for the upward struggle. She had also opened her soul to the influence of a certain evil entity—I must not say that name aloud—a certain—suffice it to say that she became animated at times by that Power to which she had willingly bowed her proud head, and it was at the intimation of that Power that she had made me understand that she wanted the kitten, and that same awful power had promised me to her if she would put the little