Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/21

 earthbound spirit of a girl who begged a boon from them."

"Then you don't think that she haunted them because they'd thrown her body in the river?"

"Entirely no. I think she came to ask their help, and in their fear and horror at beholding her they could not understand her plea. First one and then another, lashed with the scorpion-whip of an accusing conscience, destroyed himself because he dared not look into her pleading eyes, thinking they accused him of mistreating her poor body, when all the pauvre belle créature asked was that they help her to secure release from her earthbound condition."

"Why should she have appealed to them?"

"In all that congregation of benighted worshippers of evil, she knew them best. They saw her die, they gave her body sepulture; one of them, at least, had been her lover, and was, presumably, bound to her by ties of mutual passion. She was most strongly in their minds and memories. It was but natural that she should appeal to them for succor. Did not you notice one outstanding fact in all the testimony—the poor Marescha appeared to them in turn, looking not reproachfully, but pleadingly? Her lips were held, she might not put her plea in words. She could but come to them as they had last beheld her, entreat them by dumb show, and hope that they would understand. One by one they failed her; one by one they failed to understand"

"Well, is there anything that we can do about it?"

"I think there is. Come, let us be upon our way."

"Where the deuce"

"To the rectory of St. Chrysostom. I would interview the Reverend Doctor Bentley."

"At this time of night?"

"Mais certainement, clergymen and doctors, they have no privacy, my friend. Surely, you need not be told that."

freshly lighted fire burned brightly in the Reverend Peter Bentley's study, the blue smoke spiraled upward from the tips of our cigars, the gray steam curled in fragrant clouds from the glasses of hot Scotch which stood upon the coffee-table. Looking anything but clerical in red-flannel bathrobe, black pajamas and red Turkish slippers, Doctor Bentley listened with surprizing tolerance to de Grandin's argument.

"But it seems the poor girl died in mortal sin," he murmured, obviously more in sorrow than in righteous indignation. "According to your statement, her last frantic words called on the Devil to fulfill his bargain: 'O Lord, be pitiful

"Précisément, mon père, but who can say her prayer was made to Satan? True, those so bewildered, misled followers of evil were wont to call the Devil Lord and Master, but is it not entirely possible that she repented and addressed her dying prayer to the real Lord of the heaven and earth? Somewhere an English poet says of the last-minute prayer of a not-wholly-righteous fox-hunter who was unhorsed and broke his sinful neck:

"Me, I believe in all sincerity that her repentance was as true as that the thief upon the cross expressed; that in the last dread moment she perceived the grievous error of her ways and made at once confession of sin and prayer for pity with her dying breath.

"But she had bent the knee at Satan's shrine. With her fair body—that body which was given her to wear as if it were a garment to the greater glory of the Lord—she parodied the sacred faircloth of the