The Bradmoor Murder by Melville Davisson Post Page B

by the heavy double express descending into the water!
    And then I remembered the penciled note that old Sir Godfrey Simon had handed to me, when, after the dinner, he had got into his motor:
    â€œTo-morrow,” he had said, “when your head is cool, read it.”
    I brought it out of my pocket now, and tore it open. There were a few lines in a clear, fine hand like copperplate.
    â€œBradmoor killed himself, of course,” the note ran. “I don’t know how he did it, but in some clever way. They have all gone out like that—his grandfather, who left his death on the West Coast to look like an accident, and his father, who pretended to fall from the steeple of the chapel. There has always been a monomania of fear preceding the act. It is a common symptom. I said they were all under a curse. A streak of insanity is a curse. It is the worst form of curse, because it cannot be prayed off in a meeting-house.”
    I read the note and put it down on the table before the girl. She moved her head slowly,her eyes wide, her face still in its tense abstraction.
    â€œThe Blue Image carried out his threat,” she murmured. “It was the dead man’s right hand that destroyed him; it was his right hand that was his enemy! How awful!”
    But the Blue Image, as a directing factor in this tragedy, seemed all at once a remote, fantastic notion, like the devil theory of the old paralytic helpless in her chair.
    Sir Godfrey Simon had been right—alone of all the theorists right. The curse on this family had extended itself to Bradmoor. Sir Godfrey had seen it on the way. He had marked the evidential signs of it, the monomania of fear that preceded it, and the care to give the act the distinguishing features of a criminal agent.
    Bradmoor’s father and his grandfather had staged their self-directed act for accident, the tragedy of chance. But the old Duke had gone a step beyond them, and with a stroke of genius had put his exit beyond a conjecture of self-direction.
    It was the cunning of the unbalanced mind in a moment of inspiration.
    And it had sent the keenest intelligence ofEngland to fantastic theories. Henry Marquis and his hard-headed experts had stopped against a wall; the countryside had gone full cry after a devil theory; and men like the Earl of Dunn, accustomed to the somber realities of life, had seen no solution except through the supernatural agency of a Dunsany god on his bench of rose-colored stone.
    And yet how snugly the whole thing ran in the grooves of this fantastic theory!
    It held, it enveloped the girl, beyond me. And how lovely, how desirable a thing she was! And the bargain with the god, struck in that mood of half humor, on the arc of sand, under the moon, before the sea, returned to me.
    If there was any virtue in the legend cut in the wedge characters of the ancient Sumerian priests on the bench of rose-colored stone below that sinister image, let it now appear. If it was the moving factor in this affair, let it go on. If it had, as its threat ran, encouraged Brad-moor’s right hand to destroy him, let it carry out the remainder of that legend. And the words of it returned striding through my memory:
    â€œ
His right hand shall be his enemy; and the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces
.”
    The thing was like the pronouncement of a fate. And Bradmoor’s death awfully confirmed it.
    But was that one fact merely a sinister coincidence—or would the thing go on? If it required faith, here was the faith of Joan, and here was the bargain I had struck.
    But the beauty, the charm, the fascination of the girl overwhelmed me. She became in that moment above all things, in any world,