"Judge Pursuivant!" I cried, with a pleasure I did not try to disguise. "You here—it's like one of those Grand Hotel plays."
"Not so much coincidence as that," he smiled, taking the match I had found. "You see, I am still intrigued by the paradox we discussed the other night; I mean, the riddle of how and when Ruthven was set down. It so happens that an old friend of mine has a cabin near the Lake Jozgid Theater, and I need a vacation." He drew a cloud of comforting smoke. "Judiciously I accepted his invitation to stay there. You and I shall be neighbors."
"Good ones, I hope," was my warm rejoinder, as I lighted a cigarette from the match he still held.
By the time our train clanked out of the subterranean caverns of Grand Central Station, we were deep in pleasant talk. At my earnest plea, the judge discussed Lord Byron.
"A point in favor of the genuineness of the document," he began, "is that Byron was exactly the sort of man who would conceive and write a play like Ruthven."
"With the semi-vampire plot?" I asked. "I always thought that England of his time had just about forgotten about vampires."
"Yes, but Byron fetched them back into the national mind. Remember, he traveled in Greece as a young man, and the belief was strong in that part of the world. In a footnote to The Giaour—you'll find his footnotes in any standard edition of his works—he discusses vampires."
"Varduk spoke of those who fancied Byron to be the devil," I remembered.
"They may have had more than fancy to father the thought. Not that I do not admire Byron, for his talents and his achievements; but something of a diabolic curse hangs over him. Why," and Pursuivant warmed instantly to the discussion, "his very family history reads like a Gothic novel. His father was 'Mad Jack' Byron, the most sinful man of his generation; his grandfather was Admiral 'Foul-weather Jack' Byron, about whose ill luck at sea is more than a suggestion of divine displeasure. The title descended to Byron from his great-uncle, the 'Wicked Lord,' who was a murderer, a libertine, a believer in evil spirits, and perhaps a practising diabolist. The family seat, Newstead Abbey, had been the retreat of medieval monks, and when those monks were driven from it they may have cursed their dispossessors. In any case, it had ghosts and a 'Devil's Wood.'"
"Byron was just the man for that heritage," I observed.