Some few months afterwards, on returning from his honeymoon, which was passed among the grand scenery of Washington and Oregon, he found himself again near the corner of Dupont Street, with his bride. With a start of remembrance and recognition, he looked up. The imposing black and gold of the liquor sign had disappeared, and in its place, in gold and red, a smaller board bore the significant inscription:
It was evident to Malcolm Joyce that on the night of his memorable adventure Mr. Michael O'Brien had taken the bony semblance of his Celestial victim for The Real Thing.
WHEN THE CUCKOO CALLED
The announcement that London music hall audiences are losing their heads and hearts over "The Girl with the Guitar" causes Mr. Seymour Gaston to smile as he looks down upon the world from his offices on the nineteenth floor of a New York sky-scraper. Mr. Gaston is an ingenious, much traveled young bachelor with a history and a fortune. He recently invented a folding fire-escape, which also has a history and in which another fortune is said to await him. And "The Girl with the Guitar" is one of the two Zillerthaler sisters, whose permanent address is unknown and who receive two hundred guineas a night for presenting their Tyrolean second-sight séance. To such an extent do these mysterious maidens from the mountains hypnotize the public that they appear nightly at four different music halls. At the Alhambra they open the performance at eight o'clock, after which they are rushed by their manager in an automobile to the stage door of the second music hall, where they appear at eight forty-five, and so on, winding up at the Aquarium at a few minutes before ten with a thousand dollars in their pockets for the evening's work.
When the curtain rises upon their ten-minute act it discloses a typical Tyrolean scene—dim mountains in the background, a sombre pine forest, a toylike, gabled cottage in the distance. The lights are low and the stage is empty. The orchestra begins almost inaudibly a simple melody in the minor key. Presently a rich voice, that raises doubt in the mind of the listener as to whether it is male or female, joins in. It is a song of love, a serenade. The lights grow dimmer. A new sound steals into the concerted music of voice and instruments; there are strange, bizarre chords and rippling arpeggios, and then the music is drowned in the burst of wild applause that greets the appearance of "The Girl with the Guitar." She bows modestly, the lights go up, the rich voice is heard again in a joyous yodel, and the sister, too, appears, dressed in the picturesque attire of an Alpine hunter. This artistically conceived prologue brings the audience into closer sympathy with what follows. "The Girl with the Guitar," unheeding the applause and the demonstrations of the male portion of the audience, seats herself at the extreme right of the stage near the footlights. The sister is led by the manager along a narrow platform projecting into the centre of the hall, where, after being blindfolded, she seats herself with her back to the stage, and the real performance begins, to the muted music of the orchestra and the sad, fantastic chords of the guitar. The second-sight séance progresses in the time-honored way, except that no word is spoken save by the blindfolded sister, who accurately names and describes, in a clear, musical voice, each article as it is borrowed from the audience and held up in silence before the footlights by the manager, some thirty feet behind her back. "A gold watch with a picture of a lady on its face"; "a pair of pearl opera glasses"; "a half-crown piece with a hole in it"; and so on, the blindfolded girl describes the exhibits as though they were held out before her naked eyes. She never falters, never misses, and the puzzled look that comes to every face shows how completely she has mastered her art. But it is the strange, brilliant beauty and the fantastic music of "The Girl with the Guitar," who, seemingly unconscious of her surroundings, gazes idly across the stage, that hold the breathless attention of the audience. Music like hers has never before been heard from any instrument. It is absolutely unique; a new scale and new system of harmonies seem to have been discovered by this sombre-eyed girl. It is her weird, haunting melodies that trouble the mind with strange thoughts, and the impression of mystical, occult powers at work, produced by the performance, is really traceable to this music and the mysterious personality of the girl which pervades and dominates it all.
All this vividly recalls to Mr. Gaston a ten-minute drama of life in which he once played a part and which illustrates how a man can regain his lost peace of mind by being suddenly brought to the brink of eternity.
Four years ago, while he was managing the affairs of a large American enterprise in London, a cablegram announced to him one day that his business partner in the United States had robbed him of all he possessed. Brooding over his ruined business, to which he had given ten years of his life and sacrificed his health, his peace of mind fled and he traveled aimlessly over the Continent in search of anything that might bring him sleep and help him to bury the past. The doctors sent him to Baden-Baden, but he soon found that the conventional watering-place, where one reads suffering in almost every face, proved an irritant to his insomnia. The more he came in contact with humanity the more he felt drawn toward Nature. So he started on a tour of the Black Forest. At Trieberg, the picturesque little village which stands on the edge of a great waterfall high up in the dark, pine-clothed mountains, he found pleasure for a few days in visiting the quaint cottages scattered through the surrounding wilderness where the cuckoo clocks, music-boxes and wood carvings are made that always attract foreigners. The mountaineers carry these clocks and carvings on the back for miles down the winding, perilous pathways to a public exhibition hall at Trieberg in which is kept a full line of samples for the convenience of purchasers.
But the novelty of these scenes soon wore off, and on the third day after his arrival Gaston, craving excitement, bribed the custodian of this exhibition hall to set off all the clocks and instruments at intervals of one second. The chorus of a thousand cuckoos, reinforced by the patriotic rendering of "Die Wacht am Rhein," the William Tell Overture and "Die Lorelei" by scores of orchestrions and music-boxes, delighted him, but proved demoralizing to a party of American tourists bent on doing Europe in ten days. Mistaking their excited brandishing of alpenstocks, umbrellas and Baedekers for demonstrations of approval, the keeper kept up the performance until the inexorable schedule dragged the prospective purchasers away. They had spent the ten minutes allotted to the Black Forest.
In his wanderings and search for adventure, Gaston came one day upon what seemed like an unused trail that led higher up the mountain from an almost impenetrable jumble of rocks and pines near the waterfall.