Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/48

698 terribly low church and mid-Victorian. He classes foreigners and Anglo-Catholics, heathens, actors and Theosophists together. When I joined a troupe of unit dancers at the Palace he said public prayers for me; when I went out to the colonies to dance he disowned me as a vagabond. I met Big Jim while dancing in Bombay, and when I wrote I'd married him the only answer Father sent was a note congratulating me on having found an officer and gentleman to make an honest woman of me. I almost died when Little Jim was born, and the doctors said I could not stand the Indian climate, so Big Jim gave up his commission and we all went back to England. Father wouldn't see us for almost a year, but when we finally took our baby to him for baptism he capitulated utterly. He's really an old dear, when you penetrate his shell, but if he ever saw me do an Indian dance"

"You'd have to start from scratch again, old thing," her husband chuckled as he lit his pipe.

"She used to sneak off every chance she got and take instructions from the native dancers. Got so perfect in the technique that if she'd been a little darker-skinned she could have passed in any temple as a deva-dasi—by Jove, I say!" He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time.

"What is it, Jim?"

"I say, you know, I never noticed it before, but there's a look about you like Sarastai. Fine and beautiful, and all that sort of"

"Oh, Jim darling, stop it! Anyone would think—what's that?"

elp, 'elp, somebody—'elp!" the shriek came from the house behind us, each quavering syllable raw-edged with terror.

around the angle of the building, through the neatly planted kitchen garden and up the three low steps that reached the kitchen door.

"What is it—who is here?" cried de Grandin as we paused upon the big room's threshold.

In the corner farthest from the door crouched an aged woman, or perhaps I should have said a creature with a woman's body, but a face like nothing human. Seamed and lined with countless wrinkles, yellowed teeth bared in a senseless grin, she squatted by an open casement, elbows stiffly bent, hands hanging loosely, as a begging terrier might hold its paws, and mouthed and gibbered at us as we stared.

"Good God!" our host ejaculated. "Annie"

"Annie! Oh, my poor dear Annie!" cried our hostess as she rushed across the lamplit kitchen and threw her arms around the human caricature crouching in the angle of the wall. "What's wrong with her?" she called across her shoulder as she hugged the mouthing crone against her bosom. "What's—O God, she's mad!"

The woman cringed away from the encircling arms. "You won't 'urt ole Annie, will 'ee?" she whimpered. "You won't let the black man get 'er? See"—she bared a skinny forearm—e 'urt me! 'e 'urt me with a shiny thing!"

De Grandin drew his breath in sharply as he examined the tiny wound which showed against the woman's wrinkled skin. "Up to the elbow, mes amis," he told us solemnly. "We have stepped in it up to the elbow. Me, I know this mark. But yes, I have seen him before. The devotees of Kali sometimes shoot a serum in a victim's arm with such results. I know not what this serum is—and probably no white man does—but the Indian police know it. Whom the gods destroy