“_‘Wine maketh the heart glad or sad, good or evil. Drink Oh! Man to thy
choice!’_” she read.
Then she pulled off the seal and poured out the wine; a thick amber
liquid, so heavy that it poured like thick cream. Its bouquet filled the
room with a faint, far-off odor of lotus flowers.
“Shall we drink now, Robert, or shall we wait until dinner is served?”
“Let us drink now,” I said, curious to taste this Eastern wine, with
which I was not familiar.
“Amen!” said my wife, softly.
Then she spoke, rapidly and softly under her breath, a few Chinese words,
or so I judged them to be, and we drank the wine. There was not a great
deal in the flagon, and we drank it all before dinner was served.
As I sat at dinner a strange comfortable feeling gradually came over me.
Distrust, fear, and apprehension died out of my mind, and my heart was
light. My wife and I laughed and talked together as we had done in the
days of our courtship. I was a different man.
After dinner we went into the music-room and she sang for me. Sang in a
sweet low voice strange weird old songs of ancient China. Of the dragon
banner floating in the sun, and the watch fires on the hills. Of old
Tartar loves and hates. Of wrongs that never die, but pass on from age to
age, from life to life, from death to death—unhasting, unending until the
debt be paid.
I sat listening, dozing in a hazy mental languor, with the feeling
foreign to me of late, that all was well with the world. I was peacefully
happy, and my wife’s sweet voice crooned on. Bedtime, the going up to our
bedroom, and what followed after is only a blurred memory.
I awoke, or seemed to awake (now that I am in this madhouse I do not
really know) far into the night.
I awoke with a feeling of suffocation, a sensation of impending
dissolution. I could not move, I could not speak. I had a sense of
something indescribably evil, loathsome, blood-curdling, that was hanging
over me, threatening my very life.
I tried to open my eyes. The lids seemed to be weighted down. All the
force of my will could only slightly open them. Through this slight
opening, I saw my wife bending over me, and the eyes that looked at me
_were the inscrutable eyes of Toi Wah_!
_VI._
Slowly she bent down—I could sense the delicate fragrance of her
hair—and applied her sweet, soft lips to mine. Again I felt that I was
suffocating, that the very breath of my life was being drawn from me.
I concentrated all my will in the effort to struggle, and with tremendous
effort I was able feebly to move an arm. My wife hastily took her lips
from mine and looked at me closely, with the cruel amber eyes of the
great Tartar cat, whose bones lay in my garret.
Once more she leaned over and applied her lips to mine. I lay there in
helpless lethargy, unable to move, but with an active mind that leaped
back into the past, bringing to my memory all the old nursery tales
of childhood of cats sucking the breath of sleeping children, of the
folklore tales that I had heard of helpless invalids done to death by
cruel cats who stole their breath from them.
I began to be aroused at last. Was my breath to be sucked from me by this
half-human, half-cat that was bending over me? With a final despairing
effort of my wine-sodden will, I raised my arms and pushed this soft
sweet vampire from my breast and from the bed.
And then, as the cold sweat of fear poured from my trembling body, I
shouted for help. At last my servant came running up the stairs and
pounded on the door.
“What is it?” he called. “What is wrong, sir? Shall I go for the police?”
“Nothing is wrong,” answered my wife calmly. She had risen from where I
had thrown her and was arranging her disheveled hair. “Your master has
had a terrible dream, that is all.”
“It is a lie!” I shouted. “Do not leave me alone with this vampire!”
I sprang from bed, and, heedless of my wife’s semi-nude condition, I
flung open the door. She shrank back, but I seized her by the wrist,
beside myself with nervous terror.
And then—there on her wrist—I saw! I looked closely to be sure. Then
instantly all was clear to me. I was in doubt no longer. I _knew_!
“Look!” I shrieked. “Here on her wrist! Toi Wah’s collar!” I do not know
why I said it, or scarcely what I did say, but I knew it to be true!
“Toi Wah’s collar!” I repeated. “She can’t take it off! _She is changing
into a cat!_ Look at her eyes! Look at her hair! Soon she will be Toi Wah
again with the collar about her neck, and then—”
And then I saw my wife disconcerted for the first time. I felt the arm I
had seized, tremble in my frenzied grip.
“Why, Robert!” she stammered. “I—I found this on the attic floor
yesterday. And—and—thinking it a curious old Chinese relic, I put it on
my wrist. It’s a bracelet, not a collar!”
“Take it off then!” I shouted. “Take it off! You can’t! You can’t, until
you become Toi Wah again, and then it will be about your neck. Read what
it says! It is in your accursed tongue!
“But you shall never live to madden me again with fear, to make my life
a hell of peering eyes and padding feet, and then to suck my breath at
last! I killed you once, I can do it again! And again and yet again in
any shape the devils in hell may send you to prey upon honest men!”
And I seized her by her beautiful throat. I meant to choke her until
those cruel yellow eyes started from their sockets, and then laugh as I
saw her gasping in the last agony of death.
But I was cheated. The servants overpowered me, and I was brought here to
this mad-house.
I said I was perfectly sane then. I say it now. And learned alienists,
sitting in council, have agreed with me. Tomorrow I am to be discharged
into the custody of my sweet cooing-voiced wife, who comes daily to see
me. She kisses me with soft lying lips that long to suck my breath, or
perhaps even rend the flesh of my throat with the little white teeth back
of the cruel lips.
So tomorrow I will go forth—to die. To be murdered! I go to death just
as surely as if the hangman waited to haul me to the gallows, or if the
warden stood outside to escort me to the electric chair.
I _know_ it! I have told the learned psychologists and doctors that I
know it. But they laugh.
“All a delusion!” they exclaim. “Why, your little wife loves you with
all her loyal heart. Even with your finger-prints a bluish bruise about
her tender throat, she loved you. That night when you awoke, frightened,
to find her bending over you, she was only kissing you, in an effort to
soothe your troubled sleep.”
But I _know_! Therefore, I am setting all this down so that when I am
found dead the learned doctors may know that I was right and they were
wrong. And so that Justice may be done.
And yet—perhaps nothing can be done. I have ceased to struggle. I have
given up. Like the Oriental, I say, “_Who can escape his fate?_”
For I shall die by Chinese justice, a Buddhist revenge for killing the
Tartar cat, Toi Wah. Toi Wah that I hated and feared, and have hated and
feared through all the lives that the two of us have lived, far, far back
to that time when the yellow sabre-toothed tiger seized my first-born
and fled with him among the reeds and ferns of the Paleozoic marshes, a
dainty morsel for her kitten.
And so—farewell!
* * * * *
“Such a weird tale!” the nurse shuddered, as the interne finished the
manuscript. “Let us drive over to Cheshire Manor and—”
“Do you believe this story?” interrupted the interne, tapping the
manuscript with his fingers, and skeptically lifting his eyebrows and
smiling.
“No, of course not!” exclaimed the nurse, “but—the drive won’t do us any
harm, and—I would like to make sure.”
As they stopped their car before the somber old mansion they were struck
by the strange silence of the place. Not a servant answered their ring.
And after a time, since the door stood open, they entered and began to
ascend the stairs.
A strange, weird, lonesome sound floated down to them—the yowl of a cat.
They stopped for an instant and looked at each other, and then, reassured
by the sunlight, and both being matter-of-fact professional people, they
pressed on. At the head of the stairs they faced a long passage at the
end of which was an open door.
“Look! That is the bedroom he wrote about,” whispered the nurse, grasping
the interne’s arm.
They walked softly down the passage to the door and looked in. On the
bed lay the man they sought, glassy-eyed, with fallen jaw and livid
face—_dead!_
On his breast stood a great yellow amber-eyed cat, who faced them with an
arched back and menacing snarl. Involuntarily, they drew back. The cat
sprang past them and down the passageway to the stairs, uttering the same
weird cry.
“My God!” gasped the nurse, with pallid lips. “Did you see? About that
cat’s neck—and it was a Tartar cat; I know the breed—about that cat’s
neck was—was the Topaz and Jade collar—that—that he wrote about!”