Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/74

 blood of the elder Aglinberry, and on his face the likeness of the uncle, too, must have borne within his breast the soul of the disappointed man who ate out his heart in sorrow and loneliness in this house which he had builded in the American woods. And the spirit of Amari, the Hindoo, who has kept safe the house from alien blood and from the members of her soulmate's family who would have robbed him of his inheritance, did find near at hand the healthy body of a lunatic whose soul—or intelligence, if you please—had long since sped, and entered thereinto to dwell on earth again. Did you not see sanity and longing looking out of her eyes when she beheld him in the madhouse this morning, my friend? Sanity? But yes, it was recognition, I tell you!

"Her violence? 'Twas but the clean spirit of the woman fighting for mastery of a body long untenanted by an intelligence. Were you to attempt to play a long-disused musical instrument, Trowbridge, my friend, you could make but poor work of it at first, but eventually you would be able to produce harmony. So it was in this case. The spirit sought to use a long-disused brain, and at first the music she could make was nothing but noise. Now, however, she has secured mastery of her instrument, and henceforth the body of Mary Ann will function as that of a healthy, sane woman. I, Jules de Grandin, will demonstrate her sanity to the world, and you, my friend, shall help me. Together we shall win, together we shall make certain that these lovers, thwarted in one life, shall complete this cycle in happiness.

"Eh bien," he twisted the ends of his blond mustache and set his hat at a rakish angle on the side of his head, "it is possible that somewhere in space there waits for me the spirit of a woman whom I have loved and lost in another life. I wonder, when she comes, if I, like the lucky young Aglinberry yonder, shall 'wake, and remember, and understand'?"

 

HE dark figure of a man slunk silently through the byways and alleys of Florence. He kept to the clutching shadows, avoiding the moonlight as much as possible. Once, when he unwittingly stepped into a bright patch of light, the rays of the moon gleamed brightly on something visible below the belt of his doublet. But he hastily drew back into the shadows and the gleam vanished. Once he halted and listened attentively because he thought he had heard a sound, but it was only a cat. Again, a bat swept by him in the darkness, and he shuddered, but it flew out in the moonlight and wheeled about in the calm summer air, casting a grotesque shadow upon the paving stones in the patch of light. He watched it, fascinated. A moth whirred out of its retreat into the moonlight, and, before he quite grasped the rapidity of the thing, the man saw the bat sweep downward, and the moth was no longer there.

