You see tied about it a bit of silk thread? I broke it with my cane. The other end was in the hands of the madman. Briefly it is part of a diabolical plot to drive Miss Marbury insane or to the grave. It's God's justice that the one responsible suffered the fate he intended to inflict on another."
"Squire Broadman?"
"Of course. He would have lost control of the estate when Marjorie married, would he not?"
"Yes."
"That's it. Probably he has speculated with the money he held in trust. Now as to the Mandrake—and Valdemar: The cemetery story and the business of selling the plant were my first rays of light. In the library here I found, among other books, Thomas Newton's 'Herball to the Bible.' It had been much used—lately. No dust on it, such as the other books showed. This passage was marked:
"'It is supposed to be a creature having life engendered under the earth of the seed of some dead person put to death for murder.'"
"In a more recent work, Skinner's 'Myths and Legends of Flowers' I discovered a dog-eared page on which I read this: 'The devil has a special watch on these objects and unless one succeeded in selling one for less than he gave for it, it would stay with him till his death.' How does that strike you?
"But now we come to Valdemar. Here is a card I found in the Squire's card tray there. It's the charlatan's, you see. On the reverse is a memo in the Squire's writing—'See V. tomorrow and get more mandrakes.' You see, he was a benevolent old fiend. Of course, it was he who shrieked in the cemetery as she tore up the mandrake. It's hellish—that's all. Now let's see Valdemar."
THEY found the eminent psychometrist in the city jail, much perturbed and decidedly crestfallen. He told them, under methods not far removed from the third degree, his part in the transaction: Broadman had been working on the girl's mind, telling her she ought to vindicate her father's memory if she could, and sent her to Valdemar, whom he had previously hired to help in the nefarious scheme. He told her to go home and if anything happened to tell him.
As she reached the door, a white figure rose in the dark hallway—as prearranged and commanded her in sepulchral tones neither to rest nor sleep till her father's memory had been cleared. She swooned.
Then she told the Squire, but he cautioned her not to speak to the doctor about it and again to consult Valdemar. Broadman had read the mandrake stuff and the charlatan had arranged to secure some of the plants—goodness knows where—and suggested to Marjorie that she plant one on the grave of her father. Later, if she pulled it up, and the thing shrieked, she would know her parent had been justly punished. It had merely to be planted one day and torn up the next, they told her, to attain the desired results.
She had paid fifty cents for the thing, it seems, and naturally threw it from her when she heard the awful cry. Returning home, she found what she believed to be the same mandrake somewhere about her room, for as Skinner's book had further said: "Throw it into the fire, into the river. . . . so soon as you reached home, there would be the mandrake, creeping over the floor, smirking human fashion from a shelf or ensconced in your bed!"
She told Valdemar, and he assured her that if she sold the thing for less than she had paid for it, the curse would be removed. She tried this, but again one of the dread plants crept across the floor. Then the end had come swiftly. Doubtless, Valdemar admitted, the squire was himself half demented for years. Burton, putting two and two together, believed that in some subtle way Broadman had brought about the death of Alice, as he had hoped to encompass that of Marjorie, or at least to drive her insane, so that she might not marry and thus automatically expose his own guilt in the matter of the money.
"Which proves," remarked Fallon, as he bade his friend good-bye at the station the following day, "that it pays to read abstruse matter sometimes. I knew the legend of the mandrake long before I refreshed my memory of the thing in Squire Broadman's library!"
THE GARDEN OF EVIL
Thy soul is like a secret garden-close,
Where the cleft roots of mandragores enwreathe;
Where lilies and where fumitories breathe,
And ivy winds its flower with the rose.
The lolling weeds of Lethe, green or wan,
Exhale their fatal languors on the light;
From out infernal grails of aconite,
Poisons and dews are proffered to the dawn.
There, when the moon's phantasmal fingers grope
To find the marbles of a hidden tomb,
In cypress-covert sings the nightingale;
And all the silver-bellied serpents pale
Their ruby eyes among the blossoms ope,
To lift and listen in the ghostly gloom.
Deed 2,230 Years Old Unearthed
AN AGREEMENT between a locksmith named Pani and and a soldier named Paret, for the sale of a city house, was recently translated by Dr. Nathaniel Reich. It is in the form of a notary's agreement and is inscribed on a strip of papyrus recently brought to the University of Pennsylvania Museum from Thebes, Egypt.
The antiquity of the document is established by the dating: "In the month of Tybi of the tenth year of Pharaoh Alexander, son of Alexander." This ruler was the son of Alexander the Great, who was assassinated some time before the agreement was drawn up, so it is evident that Petesche, the notary, had not been apprised of the young Pharaoh's death.
It is interesting to note that, as in modern times, considerable care was exercised in locating the building to forestall the possibility of litigation, as shown by the following legal description:
"It stands in the northern quarter of Thebes, at the western place of the wall. Its neighbors are on the north of the houses of Petcharpe, the King's street lying between them; east, a house which is 2½ cubits of land (260 square cubits) which I sold to Khenseu, son of Uzeher."
