The Crocodile | Page 9

in his library. Thinking that sickness must have seized him, I bounded down the stairs to offer assistance or search for it if necessary. But except for a pallor unusual even with him, he was not apparently sick. The crocodile lay belly up on the table, as if it had been hastily laid down.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Richard," said my father, in great excitement, "the door of the vault is open. But now I heard it creaking upon its hinges"
Virginia, who had heard the shrieks, now joined us, her face white with alarm.
"What is it?" she cried.
"The resurrection of the dead!" cried my father, and, thrusting my detaining arm suddenly aside, he literally burst out of the house. I followed at my best speed, and Virginia brought up the rear. In this order we raced through the woods, brightly mottled with sunshine and shadows, in the direction of the vault. Run as I would, I could not gain on my father, who seemed to possess the speed of a pestilence. As he ran he kept crying: "God is merciful! I shall see the face of my beloved."
I cannot account for what happened. A lithe lady, dressed in apple-green silk, with a wreath of flowers upon her head, appeared suddenly in the path, ahead of and facing my father. She held out her arms as if to detain him. But he bore down upon her at full speed, and I cried out to warn her. Then they met. But there was no visible or audible sign of collision. My father literally seemed to pass through her. He ran on, always at top speed, and the lithe lady in the apple-green silk was no longer to be seen in any direction. Yet she seemed to have left an influence in the bright forest, gentle and serene, and I could swear that there lingered in the air a faint smell of apple blossoms and orange blossoms. And it may be the echo of a cry of pain the ghost of a cry.
When I came to the vault, its door was wide open, and I found my father within, breaking with his thin hands the lid from my mother's coffin. I was not in time to prevent him from completing his mad outrage. The lid came clean away with a ripping noise, and my father gazed eagerly at the face thus rudely revealed to the light of day. But what horrible alchemy of the grave had brought into shape the face upon which my father looked so eagerly is not for mortal man to know. For the face was not my mother's, but his own.
Gently he laid his hand on the forehead, and gently he said: "Was she not bonny, Richard?... Was she not bonny?"
?
Our honeymoon was nearly a week old, when one morning Virginia and I were taking breakfast in the glass dining room of the old Hygeia Hotel. The waiters, the other guests, the cups, saucers, knives, and spoons all made eyes at us, but we were wonderfully happy. An old gentleman approached our table with a kind of a sad tiptoe gait. Tears were in his eyes.
"My dear boy," he said, "I have not the heart to congratulate you on your happiness, for I cannot help remembering what a good father you have so recently lost. I was present at his wedding, and I have not seen him since. But as you see ----" and the old gentleman drew attention to the tears in his eyes.
"Aren't you mistaken, sir?" said I. "Aren't you thinking of somebody else's father?"
"Why, no," said he, "your father was ------! Don't tell me that he wasn't."
"I shall have to," I said, "for he wasn't. My father was a crocodile."

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