Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (98 page)

‘Well,’ countered the puzzled Lillian, ‘who is she, then, Daddy?’

It was, indeed, in this present case, quite as though Mrs Lorriquer were somebody else, somebody quite different from ‘herself’ whenever she sat at the card-table. That was as far as I could get with my attempt at any ‘explanation’.

The ‘somebody else’, as I thought the matter through, had three known characteristics. First, an incredibly ugly disposition. Second, the ability to speak fluently a language unknown to Mrs Lorriquer. Third, at least as manifested on one occasion, and evidenced by no more than the booming utterance of a single word, a deep, man-like, bass voice!

I stopped there in my process of reasoning. The whole thing was too absurdly bizarre for me to waste any more time over it along that line of reasoning. As to the obvious process of consulting Colonel Lorriquer or Mrs Preston, their daughter, on such a subject, that was, sheerly, out of the question. Interesting as the problem was to me, one simply does not do such things.

Then, quite without any warning, there came another piece of evidence. I have mentioned our St Thomas Cha-Chas, and also that Mrs Lorriquer was accustomed to visit the market-place in person in the interest of her table. The St Thomas Cha-Chas form a self-sustaining, self-contained community as distinct from the rest of the life which surrounds them in their own ‘village’ set on the seashore to the west of the main portion of the town as oil from water. They have been there from time immemorial, the local ‘poor whites’, hardy fishermen, faithful workers, the women great sellers of small hand-made articles (like the famous grass skirts) and garden produce. They are inbred, from a long living in a very small community of their own, look mostly all alike, and, coming as they did many years ago from the French island of St Bartholomew, most of them when together speak a kind of modified Norman French, a peasant dialect of their own, although all of them know and use a simplified variety of our English tongue for general purposes.

Along the streets, as well as in the public market-place, the Cha-Cha women may be seen, always separate from the Negress market-vendors, offering their needlework, their woven grass baskets and similar articles, and the varying seasonal fruits and vegetables which they cultivate in their tiny garden patches or gather from the more inaccessible distant groves and ravines of the island – mangoes, palmets, sugar-apples, the strange-appearing cashew fruits, every variety of local eatable including trays of the most villainous-appearing peppermint candy, which, upon trial, is a truly delicious confection.

Passing the market one morning I saw Mrs Lorriquer standing in a group of five or six Cha-Cha market women who were outvying one another in presenting the respective claims of various trays loaded with the small, red, round tomatoes in which certain Cha-Cha families specialize. One of the women, in her eagerness to attract the attention of the customer, jostled another, who retaliated upon her in her own familiar tongue. An argument among the women broke out at this, several taking sides, and in an instant Mrs Lorriquer was the center of a tornado of vocables in Cha-Cha French.

Fearing that this would be annoying to her, I hastened across the street to the market-place, toward the group, but my interference proved not to be required. I was, perhaps, half-way across when Mrs Lorriquer took charge of the situation herself and with an effectiveness which no one could have anticipated. In that same booming voice with which she had ejaculated ‘
Sapristi
!’ and in fluent, positively
Apache
French, Mrs Lorriquer suddenly put a benumbing silence upon the bickering market women, who fell back from her in an astounded silence, so sudden a silence that clear and shrill came the comment from a near-by Black woman balancing a tray loaded to the brim with avocado pears upon her kerchiefed head, listening, pop-eyed, to the altercation: ‘Ooh, me Gahd!’ remarked the Negress to the air about her. ‘Whoite missy tahlk to they in Cha-Cha!’

It was only a matter of seconds before I was at Mrs Lorriquer’s side.

‘Can I be of any assistance?’ I inquired.

Mrs Lorriquer glared at me, looking precisely as she did when engaged in one of her querulous, acrimonious arguments at the card-table. Then her countenance changed with a startling abruptness, and she looked quite as usual.

‘I was just buying some of these lovely little tomatoes,’ she said.

The Cha-Cha women, stultified, huddled into a cowering knot, looked at her speechlessly, their red faces several shades paler than their accustomed brick-color. The one whose tray Mrs Lorriquer now approached shrank back from her. I do not wonder, after the blast which this gentle-looking little American lady had but now let loose upon them all. The market seemed unusually quiet. I glanced about. Every eye was upon us. Fortunately, the marketplace was almost empty of customers.

‘I’ll take two dozen of these,’ said Mrs Lorriquer. ‘How much are they, please?’

The woman counted out the tomatoes with hands trembling, placed them carefully in a paper bag, handed them to Mrs Lorriquer, who paid her. We stepped down to the ground from the elevated concrete floor of the market.

‘They seem so subdued – the poor souls!’ remarked Mrs Lorriquer, whose goggle-eyed chauffeur, a boy as black as ebony, glanced at her out of the corner of a fearfully rolled eye as he opened the door of her car.

‘Come to luncheon,’ said Mrs Lorriquer, sweetly, beaming at me, ‘and help us eat these nice little tomatoes. They are delicious with mayonnaise after they are blanched and chilled.’ It seemed rather an abrupt contrast, these homely words of invitation, after what I had heard her call those Cha-Cha women.

‘I’ll come, with pleasure,’ I replied.

‘One o’clock, then,’ said Mrs Lorriquer, nodding and smiling, as her Black Hans turned the car skillfully and started along the Queen’s Road toward the center of town.

We did not play cards that afternoon after luncheon, because Mrs Lorriquer and Mrs Preston were going to an afternoon party at the residence of the Government Secretary’s wife, and Colonel Lorriquer and I sat, over our coffee, on the west gallery of the house out of reach of the blazing early-afternoon sun, and chatted.

We got upon the subject of the possibility of another isthmian canal, the one tentatively proposed across Nicaragua.

‘That, as you know, Mr Canevin, was one of the old French Company’s proposals, before they settled down to approximately the present site – the one we followed out – back in the late Seventies.’

‘De Lesseps,’ I murmured.

‘Yes,’ said the Colonel, musingly, ‘yes – a very complex matter it was, that French proposal. They never could, it seems, have gone through with it, as a matter of fact – the opposition at home in France, the underestimate of the gross cost of excavation, the suspicion of “crookedness” which arose – they impeached the Count de Lesseps finally, you know, degraded him, ruined the poor fellow. And then, the sanitation question, you know. If it had not been for our Gorgas and his marvelous work in that direction – ’

‘Tell me,’ I interrupted, ‘just how long were the French at work on their canal, Colonel?’

‘Approximately from 1881 to 1889,’ replied the Colonel, ‘although the actual work of excavation, the bulk of the work, was between ’85 and ’89. By the way, Canevin, we lived in a rather unusual house there. Have I ever mentioned that to you?’

‘Never,’ said I. ‘What was the unusual element about your house?’

‘Only that it was believed to be haunted,’ replied the Colonel; ‘although, I must admit, I never – we never – met with the least evidence outside the superstitions of the people. Our neighbors all believed it to be haunted in some way. We got it for a song for that reason and it was a very pleasant place. You see, it had been fitted up, quite regardless of the cost, as a kind of public casino or gambling-house, about 1885, and it had been a resort for de Lesseps’s crowd for the four years before the French Company abandoned their work. It was a huge place, with delightful galleries. The furniture, too, was excellent. We took it as it stood, you see, and, beyond a terrific job to get it clean and habitable, it was a very excellent investment. We were there for more than three years altogether.’

An idea, vague, tenuous, grotesque enough in all truth, and, indeed, somewhat less than half formed, had leaped into my mind at the combination of a ‘haunted’ residence and the French work on the ill-fated de Lesseps canal project.

‘Indeed!’ said I. ‘It certainly sounds interesting. And do you know, Colonel,
who ran the old casino; who,
so to speak,
was the proprietor – unless it was a part of the Company’s scheme for keeping their men interested?’

‘It was privately managed,’ returned the Colonel, ‘and, queerly enough, as it happens, I can show you a photograph of the former proprietor. He was a picturesque villain!’ The Colonel rose and started to go inside the house from where we sat on the cool gallery. He paused at the wide doorway, his hand on the jamb.

‘It was the proprietor who was supposed to haunt the house,’ said he, and went inside.

My mind reeled under the stress of these clues and the attempts, almost subconscious – for, indeed, I had thought much of the possible problem presented by Mrs Lorriquer’s case; a ‘case’ only in my own imagination, so far; and I had constructed tentatively three or four connected theories by the time the Colonel returned, a large, stiff, cabinet photograph in his hand. He laid this on the table between us and resumed his Chinese rattan lounge-chair. I picked up the photograph.

It was the portrait, stiffly posed, the hand, senatorially, in the fold of the long, black
surtout
coat, of the sort anciently known as a Prince Albert, of a rather small, emaciated man, whose face was disfigured by the pittings of smallpox; a man with a heavy head of jet-black hair, carefully combed after a fashion named, in our United States, for General McClellan of Civil War fame, the locks brushed forward over the tops of the ears, and the parting, although this could not be seen in the front-face photograph, extending all the way down the back to the neck. A ‘croupier’s’ mustache, curled and waxed ferociously, ornamented the sallow, sinister features of a face notable only for its one outstanding feature, a jaw as solid and square as that of Julius Caesar. Otherwise, as far as character was concerned, the photograph showed a very unattractive person, the type of man, quite obviously, who in these modern times would inevitably have followed one of our numerous and varied ‘rackets’ and probably, one imagined, with that jaw to help, successfully!

‘And how, if one may ask,’ said I, laying the photograph down on the table again, ‘did you manage to get hold of this jewel, Colonel Lorriquer?’

The old gentleman laughed. ‘We found it in the back end of a bureau drawer,’ said he. ‘I have mentioned that we took the house over just as it was. Did you notice the cameo?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, picking the photograph up once more to look at the huge breast-pin which seemed too large in the picture even for the enormous ‘de Joinville’ scarf which wholly obliterated the shirt-front underneath.

‘It is certainly a whopper!’ I commented. ‘It reminds me of that delightful moving picture
Cameo Kirby
, if you happened to see it some time ago, on the silent screen.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Colonel Lorriquer. ‘That, too, turned up, and in the same ancient bureau, when we were cleaning it. It was wedged in behind the edge of the bottom-board of the middle drawer. Of course you have observed that Mrs Lorriquer wears it?’

I had, and said so. The enormous breast-pin was the same which I had many times observed upon Mrs Lorriquer. It seemed a favorite ornament of hers. I picked up the photograph once more.

Down in the lower right-hand corner, in now faded gilt letters of ornamental scrollwork, appeared the name of the photographer. I read: ‘La Palma, Quezaltenango’.

‘ “Quezaltenango,” ’ I read aloud. ‘That is in Guatemala. Was the “Gentleman of the house”, perhaps, a Central American? It would be hard to guess at his nationality from this. He looks a citizen of the world!’

‘No,’ replied the Colonel, ‘he was a Frenchman, and he had been, as it appears, living by his wits all over Central America. When the work of construction actually began under the French Company – that was in 1885 – there was a rush of persons like him toward the pickings from so large a group of men who would be looking for amusement, and this fellow came early and stayed almost throughout the four years. His name was Simon Legrand, and, from what I gathered about him, he was a very ugly customer.’

‘You remarked that he was connected with the alleged haunting,’ I ventured. ‘Is there, perhaps, a story in that?’

‘Hardly a story, Mr Canevin. No. It was merely that toward the end of the French Company’s activities, in 1889, Legrand, who had apparently antagonized all his patrons at his casino, got into a dispute with one of them, over a game of
piquet
or
écarté
– one of those French games of some kind, perhaps even
vingt-et-un
, for all I know, or even
chemin-de-fer
– and Simon went up to his bedroom, according to the story, to secure a pistol, being, for the time, rather carelessly in that company, unarmed. His “guest” followed him upstairs and shot him as he stood in front of the bureau where he kept his weapon, from the bedroom doorway, thus ending the career of what must have been a very precious rascal. Thereafter, the French Company’s affairs and that of the casino being abruptly dissolved at about the same time, the rumor arose that Legrand was haunting his old quarters. Beyond the rumor, there never seemed anything to suggest its basis in anything but the imagination of the native Panamanians. As I have mentioned, we lived in the house three years, and it was precisely like any other house, only rather cheap, which satisfied us very well!’