Then the World War, that sunderer of career-chains and remolder of men. The elder Pursuivant had been a colonel at twenty-one, a major-general before twenty-five; Keith, his son, deserting his brilliant legal career, was a major at twenty-six, but in the corps of brain-soldiers that matched wits with an empire. That he came off well in the contest was witnessed by his decorations, earnest of valor and resource.
“Ret. legal practise, 1919.” So he did not remain in his early profession, even though it promised so well. What then? Turn back for the answer. “Ph. D., Oxford, 1922.” His new love was scholarship. He became an author and philosopher. His interests included the trencher—I had seen him eat and drink with hearty pleasure—the study hall, the steel blade.
What else? “Protestant”—religion was his, but not narrowly so, or he would have been specific about a single sect. “Independent”—his political adventures had not bound him to any party. “Unmarried”—he had lived too busily for love? Or had he known it, and lost? I, too, was unmarried, and I was well past thirty. “Address: Low Haven”—a country home, apparently pretentious enough to bear a name like a manor house. Probably comfortable, withdrawn, full of sturdy furniture and good books, with a well-stocked pantry and cellar.
I felt that I had learned something about the man, and I was desirous of learning more.
On the evening mail I received an envelope addressed in Jake Switz’s jagged handwriting. Inside were half a dozen five-dollar bills and a railway ticket, on the back of which was scribbled in pencil: “Take the 9 a.m. train at Grand Central. I’ll meet you at the Dillard Falls Junction with a car. J. Switz.”
I blessed the friendly heart of Sigrid’s little serf, and went home to pack. The room clerk seemed surprised and relieved when I checked out in the morning, paying him in full. I reached the station early and got on the train, securing a good seat in the smoking-car. Many were boarding the car, but none looked at me, not even the big fellow who seated himself into position at my side. Six years before I had been mobbed as I stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited in this very station—a hundred women had rent away my coat and shirt in rags for souvenirs—
“Would you let me have a match, Mr. Connatt?” asked a voice I had heard before. My companion’s pale blue eyes were turned upon me, and he was tucking a trusty-looking pipe beneath his blond mustache.
“Judge Pursuivant!” I cried, with a pleasure I did not try to disguise. “You here—it’s like one of those Grand Hotel plays.”
“Not so much coincidence as that,” he smiled, taking the match I had found. “You see, I am still intrigued by the paradox we discussed the other night; I mean, the riddle of how and when Ruthven was set down. It so happens that an old friend of mine has a cabin near the Lake Jozgid Theater, and I need a vacation.” He drew a cloud of comforting smoke. “Judiciously I accepted his invitation to stay there. You and I shall be neighbors.”
“Good ones, I hope,” was my warm rejoinder, as I lighted a cigarette from the match he still held.
By the time our train clanked out of the subterranean caverns of Grand Central Station, we were deep in pleasant talk. At my earnest plea, the judge discussed Lord Byron.
“A point in favor of the genuineness of the document,” he began, “is that Byron was exactly the sort of man who would conceive and write a play like Ruthven.”
“With the semi-vampire plot?” I asked. “I always thought that England of his time had just about forgotten about vampires.”
“Yes, but Byron fetched them back into the national mind. Remember, he traveled in Greece as a young man, and the belief was strong in that part of the world. In a footnote to The Giaour—you’ll find his footnotes in any standard edition of his works—he discusses vampires.”
“Varduk spoke of those who fancied Byron to be the devil,” I remembered.
“They may have had more than fancy to father the thought. Not that I do not admire Byron, for his talents and his achievements; but something of a diabolic curse hangs over him. Why,” and Pursuivant warmed instantly to the discussion, “his very family history reads like a Gothic novel. His father was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, the most sinful man of his generation; his grandfather was Admiral ‘Foul-weather Jack’ Byron, about whose ill luck at sea is more than a suggestion of divine displeasure. The title descended to Byron from his great-uncle, the ‘Wicked Lord,’ who was a murderer, a libertine, a believer in evil spirits, and perhaps a practising diabolist. The family seat, Newstead Abbey, had been the retreat of medieval monks, and when those monks were driven from it they may have cursed their dispossessors. In any case, it had ghosts and a ‘Devil’s Wood.’ ”
“Byron was just the man for that heritage,” I observed.
“He certainly was. As a child he carried pistols in his pockets and longed to kill someone. As a youth he chained a bear and a wolf at his door, drank wine from a human skull, and mocked religion by wearing a monk’s habit to orgies. His unearthly beauty, his mocking tongue, fitted in with his wickedness and his limp to make him seem an incarnation of the hoofed Satan. As for his sins—” The judge broke off in contemplation of them.
“Nobody knows them all,” I reminded.
“Perhaps he repented,” mused my companion. “At least he seems to have forgotten his light loves and dark pleasures, turned
