The Crocodile | Page 9

to you."
"Good-day, Richard? Good-day?"
"Yes," said I. "I am going to take her away."
"You'll not go far without money," said he.
"With heart," said I, "we shall go to the ends of the earth."
My father turned to the vault and addressed the shade of my mother.
"Hear him," cried he, "hear him that took you from me. He's going to
the ends of the earth. He turns his back upon your hallowed bones..."
His words became unintelligible.
During the packing of my trunk I left off again and again to go to

Virginia's door to ask if all were well with her. For there had been a
look in my father's face which haunted me like a hint of coming evil.
And although nothing but good came of that afternoon, still its events
were so strange as to make me believe that men are often forewarned of
the unusual. It was about three o'clock that suddenly I heard my father
shrieking aloud in his library. Thinking that sickness must have seized
him, I bounded down the stairs to offer assistance or search for it if
necessary. But except for a pallor unusual even with him, he was not
apparently sick. The crocodile lay belly up on the table, as if it had
been hastily laid down.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Richard," said my father, in great excitement, "the door of the vault is
open. But now I heard it creaking upon its hinges"
Virginia, who had heard the shrieks, now joined us, her face white with
alarm.
"What is it?" she cried.
"The resurrection of the dead!" cried my father, and, thrusting my
detaining arm suddenly aside, he literally burst out of the house. I
followed at my best speed, and Virginia brought up the rear. In this
order we raced through the woods, brightly mottled with sunshine and
shadows, in the direction of the vault. Run as I would, I could not gain
on my father, who seemed to possess the speed of a pestilence. As he
ran he kept crying: "God is merciful! I shall see the face of my
beloved."
I cannot account for what happened. A lithe lady, dressed in
apple-green silk, with a wreath of flowers upon her head, appeared
suddenly in the path, ahead of and facing my father. She held out her
arms as if to detain him. But he bore down upon her at full speed, and I
cried out to warn her. Then they met. But there was no visible or
audible sign of collision. My father literally seemed to pass through her.
He ran on, always at top speed, and the lithe lady in the apple-green
silk was no longer to be seen in any direction. Yet she seemed to have

left an influence in the bright forest, gentle and serene, and I could
swear that there lingered in the air a faint smell of apple blossoms and
orange blossoms. And it may be the echo of a cry of pain the ghost of a
cry.
When I came to the vault, its door was wide open, and I found my
father within, breaking with his thin hands the lid from my mother's
coffin. I was not in time to prevent him from completing his mad
outrage. The lid came clean away with a ripping noise, and my father
gazed eagerly at the face thus rudely revealed to the light of day. But
what horrible alchemy of the grave had brought into shape the face
upon which my father looked so eagerly is not for mortal man to know.
For the face was not my mother's, but his own.
Gently he laid his hand on the forehead, and gently he said: "Was she
not bonny, Richard?... Was she not bonny?"

Our honeymoon was nearly a week old, when one morning Virginia
and I were taking breakfast in the glass dining room of the old Hygeia
Hotel. The waiters, the other guests, the cups, saucers, knives, and
spoons all made eyes at us, but we were wonderfully happy. An old
gentleman approached our table with a kind of a sad tiptoe gait. Tears
were in his eyes.
"My dear boy," he said, "I have not the heart to congratulate you on
your happiness, for I cannot help remembering what a good father you
have so recently lost. I was present at his wedding, and I have not seen
him since. But as you see ----" and the old gentleman drew attention to
the tears in his eyes.
"Aren't you mistaken, sir?" said I. "Aren't you thinking of somebody
else's father?"
"Why, no," said he, "your father was ------! Don't tell me that he
wasn't."

"I shall have to," I said, "for he wasn't. My father was a crocodile."