Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft(428)

It was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure roof, walls, and windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and crevices. Moisture trickled down to the floor from unsuspected places, and the mounting wind rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters outside. But I minded none of this, nor even thought of my roadster outside beneath the trees, for I saw that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my host made a move to shew me to sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the older, better days. Soon, I saw, I would receive an inkling of why he lived alone in that ancient place, and why his neighbours thought it full of undesirable influences. His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and his tale soon took a turn which left me no chance to grow drowsy.

“Yes — Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born here in 1828. He’d be over a century old now if he were alive, but he died young — so young I can just barely remember him. In ‘64 that was — he was killed in the war, Seventh Louisiana Infantry C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist. My grandfather was too old to fight, yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped my mother bring me up. A good bringing-up, too — I’ll give them credit. We always had strong traditions — high notions of honour — and my grandfather saw to it that I grew up the way de Russys have grown up, generation after generation, ever since the Crusades. We weren’t quite wiped out financially, but managed to get on very comfortably after the war. I went to a good school in Louisiana, and later to Princeton. Later on I was able to get the plantation on a fairly profitable basis — though you see what it’s come to now.

“My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was rather lonely after that; and in ‘85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans. Things might have been different if she’d lived, but she died when my son Denis was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn’t try marriage again, but gave all my time to the boy. He was like me — like all the de Russys — darkish and tall and thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my grandfather had given me, but he didn’t need much training when it came to points of honour. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit — all I could do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven! Romantic young devil, too — full of high notions — you’d call ’em Victorian, now — no trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I’d gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.

“In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did — and proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I’d be with him so far off. Would to God I hadn’t! I thought he was the safest kind of a boy to be in Paris. He had a room in the Rue St. Jacques — that’s near the University in the ‘Latin Quarter’ — but according to his letters and his friends he didn’t cut up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from home — serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking attitudes and painting the town red.

“But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes — the decadents, you know. Experimenters in life and sensation — the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults — imitation devil-worship, fake Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole — probably most of ’em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school — for that matter, whose father I’d known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh — regular epitome of the yellow ‘nineties. Poor devil — he had the makings of a great artist, at that.

“Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they saw a good deal of each other — to talk over old times at St. Clair Academy, and all that. The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn’t see any especial harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the Bohemian element on the left bank — some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilisations — the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities in the Hoggar region of the Sahara — and that had a lot of gibberish connected with snakes and human hair. At least, I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh as saying odd things about the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa’s snaky locks — and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma Berenices.