“I am telling you men the truth,� Andrew says, pulling the gray beard. “Fifteen years ago I was infatuated with that woman. She possessed my every thought; she dominated me, like——�
“Like a nightmare!�
“Apposite illustration,� says Andrew, nodding. “Like a nightmare. It was just about the time I published my book, Studies of the Human Grotesque in Art, Ancient and Modern. You remember, some of you, I was keen on the subject—had been for years. And I was a traveler and collector in those days: I’d got together a wonderful show of illustrative subjects. You won’t see many of ’em now. I gave them to the Smoketown Mechanical Institute afterward.�
He pulls at his long cherrystick, and blows a cloud of Latakia, and goes on:
“I’d the whole house full. Peruvian idols, Aztec picture writings, Polynesian and Maori war masks; Chinese and Japanese, Burmese and Abyssinian, Hindu and Persian monstrosities of every kind; Egyptian, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Druidical, Gothic—— Well, well! I’m thoroughgoing, and when I do a thing I do it thoroughly. It’s enough to say that every variety of libel upon the human face and form that human ingenuity or depravity has ever perpetrated, I’d carefully collected and brought together here.�
He waves his hand, with a curious cabalistical ring upon it that once belonged, it is said, to Eliphas Lévi, who had it from Albertus Magnus. But this may be mere report.
“I worked hard, and drank a great deal of coffee,� says Andrew, “so much that my old housekeeper began to be afraid something mysterious was the matter with me. She expostulated at last, and I explained. Then she got interested in the book; she was an intelligent woman, poor dear old soul, and she got specially interested in that section of the work which deals with the Grotesque in Nature. Everything in humanity that is purely grotesque—not deformed, unnatural, outrageous, but purely quaint and bizarre—I piled into those chapters. The work is illustrative, you know, as well as descriptive, and the queer photographs and engravings that scientific friends had contributed to this particular portion of it absolutely fascinated the dear old lady.
“‘To be sure, Master Andrew’ (she had known me from my knickerbocker and peg-top days), ‘but them are queer folk. And, my heart alive!’—she uttered a sharp scream—‘if that picture isn’t the exact moral of Jane Ladds!’
“I glanced over her shoulder. It was a portrait of Jane, certainly—a rude little wood cut of the sixteenth century, purporting to be a portrait of a female jester, attached, in her diverting capacity, to the Court of Mary Tudor, during the latter part of her reign, and mentioned by name in some of the accounts of the Royal household as ‘Jeanne la Folle.’ Unless the long-dead delineator of her vanished charms has shamefully belied them, Jeanne must have been one of the most grotesquely hideous specimens of womanhood that ever existed. Judge, then, whether the exclamation of my housekeeper awakened my interest, excited my curiosity, or left me apathetic and unmoved!�
We are silent. Our interest, our curiosity, are urging us to hurry on the conclusion of Andrew’s story.