His hand took a firm grip on the scalpel.
The devil moved him towards the door between the two rooms. It festooned the girdle around his neck. “Like that,” it said gleefully. “There—doesn’t that make you a pretty red-and-white cravat?”
Hand and scalpel came out of his pocket.
And Michel Eyraud, standing in the dark sitting-room, fastened the ends of the girdle to the rope running through the block and tackle and gave a powerful jerk.
The rope sprang to the ceiling, the girdle followed it, and the professor’s thin neck snapped. The scalpel fell from his dead hand.
The rehearsal had been a complete success.
Just as they planned to do with the bailiff Gouffe, they stripped the body and plundered the wallet. “Not bad,” said Eyraud. “Do actresses get paid for rehearsing?”
“This one does,” said Gaby. And they dumped the body in the trunk.
Later the clothes would be disposed of in dustbins, the body carried by trunk to some quiet countryside where it might decompose in naked namelessness.
Gaby swore when she stepped on the scalpel. “What the hell is this?” She picked it up. “It’s sharp. Do you suppose he was one of those types who like a little blood to heighten their pleasures? I’ve heard of them but never met one.”
Gaby stood pondering, her dressing-gown open . . .
The first night, to the misfortune of the bailiff Gouffe, went off as smoothly as the rehearsal. But the performers reckoned without the patience and determination and genie policier of Marie-Fransis Goron, Chief of the Paris Surete.
The upshot was, as all aficionados of true crime know, that Eyraud was guillotined, nineteen months after the rehearsal, and Gaby, who kept grinning at the jury, was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.
When Goron was in London before the trial, he paid his usual courtesy call at Scotland Yard and chatted at length with Inspector Frederick G. Abberline.
“Had one rather like yours recently ourselves,” said Abberline. “Naked man, broken neck, left to rot in the countryside. Haven’t succeeded in identifying him yet. You were luckier there.”
“It is notorious,” Goron observed, “that the laboratories of the French police are the best in the world.”
“We do very well, thank you,” said Abberline distantly.
“Of course.” The French visitor was all politeness: “As you did last year in that series of Whitechapel murders.”
“I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, Mr. Goron, but no police force in the world could have done more than we did in the Ripper case. It was a nightmare with no possible resolution. And unless he strikes again, it’s going to go down as one of the greatest unsolved cases in history. Jack the Ripper will never hang.”
“Not,” said M. Goron, “so long as he confines his attention to the women of London.” He hurried to catch the boat train, thinking of Gabrielle Bompart and feeling a certain regret that such a woman was also such a devil.
Nellthu
Ailsa had been easily the homeliest and the least talented girl in the University, if also the most logical and level-headed. Now, almost twenty-five years later, she was the most attractive woman Martin had ever seen and, to judge from their surroundings, by some lengths the richest.
“. . . so lucky running into you again after all these years,” she was saying, in that indescribably aphrodisiac voice. “You know about publishers, and you can advise me on this novel. I was getting so tired of the piano . . .”
Martin had heard her piano recordings and knew they were superb—as the vocal recordings had been before them and the non-representational paintings before them and the fashion designs and that astonishing paper on prime numbers. He also knew that the income from all these together could hardly have furnished the Silver Room in which they dined or the Gold Room in which he later read the novel (which was of course superb) or the room whose color he never noticed because he did not sleep alone (and the word superb is inadequate).
There was only one answer, and Martin was gratified to observe that the coffee-bringing servant cast no shadow in the morning sun. While Ailsa still slept (superbly), Martin said, “So you’re a demon.”
“Naturally, sir,” the unshadowed servant said, his eyes adoringly upon the sleeper. “Nellthu, at your service.”
“But such service! I can imagine Ailsa-that-was working out a good spell and even wishing logically. But I thought you fellows were limited in what you could grant.”
“We are, sir. Three wishes.”
“But she has wealth, beauty, youth, fame, a remarkable variety of talents— all on three wishes?”
“On one, sir. Oh, I foxed her prettily on the first two.” Nellthu smiled reminiscently. “ ‘Beauty’—but she didn’t specify, and I made her the most beautiful centenarian in the world. ‘Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice—and of course nothing is beyond such dreams, and nothing she got. Ah, I was in form that day, sir! But the third wish . . .”
“Don’t tell me she tried the old ‘For my third wish I want three more wishes’! I thought that was illegal.”
“It is, sir. The paradoxes involved go beyond even our powers. No, sir,” said Nellthu, with a sort of rueful admiration, “her third wish was stronger than that. She said: “I wish that you fall permanently and unselfishly in love with me.”
“She was always logical,” Martin admitted. “So for your own sake you had to make her beautiful and . . . adept, and since then you have been compelled to gratify her every—” He broke off and looked from the bed to the demon. “How lucky for me that she included unselfishly!”
“Yes, sir,” said Nellthu.
Rappaccini’s Other Daughter
For of course that sinister Paduan precursor of Mad Scientists, whose story has been so ably if incompletely related by Mr. Hawthorne, was, though mad, enough of a scientist to keep a control. While he gave out that the beauteous Beatrice, of the loving soul and envenomed breath, was his only daughter, he was rearing
