Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French
tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him 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 study and the devil: the esthetes, the
decadents, 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, false 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
civilizations--the great Zimbabwe, and 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. "I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the
night of the queer ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the devotees of this cult were young fellows, but the head
of it was a young woman who called herself _Tanit-Isis_, letting it
be know that her real name--her name in this latest incarnation, as
she put it--was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be the left-handed
daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to have been both a petty
artist and an artist's model before adopting this more lucrative
magical profession. Someone said she had lived for a time in the West
Indies--Martinique, I think--but she was very reticent about herself. Part of her pose was a great show of austerity and holiness, but I
don't think the more experienced students took that very seriously. "Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages
of slush about the goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realized his
simplicity I might have done something, but I never thought a puppy
infatuation like that could mean much. I felt absurdly sure that Denis'
touchy personal honor and family pride would always keep him out of the
most serious complications. "As time went on, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He
mentioned this Marceline more and more, and his friends less and less;
and began talking about the 'cruel and silly way' they declined to
introduce her to their mothers and sisters. He seems to have asked her
no questions about herself, and I don't doubt but that she filled him
full of romantic legendry concerning her origin and divine revelations
and the way people slighted her. At length I could see that Denis was
altogether cutting his own crowd and spending the bulk of his time with
this alluring priestess. At her especial request he never told the old
crowd of their continual meetings; so nobody over there tried to break
the affair up. "I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of
a patrician, and people of a certain class think all aristocratic
Americans are wealthy. In any case, she probably thought this a rare
chance to contract a genuine right-handed alliance with a really
eligible young man. By the time my nervousness burst into open advice,
it was too late. The boy had lawfully married her, and wrote that
he was dropping his studies and bringing the woman to Riverside. He
said she had made a great sacrifice and resigned her leadership of
the magical cult, and that henceforth she would be merely a private
gentlewoman--the future mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys
to come. "Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated
Continentals have different standards from our old American ones, and
anyway, I really knew nothing against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps,
but why necessarily any worse? I suppose I tried to keep as naïve as
possible about such things in those days, for the boy's sake. Clearly,
there was nothing for a man of sense to do but to let Denis alone so
long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her have a chance
to prove herself--perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much as some
might fear. So I didn't raise any objections or ask any penitence. The
thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back, whatever he
brought with him. *       *       *       *       *

"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of the marriage. Marceline was beautiful, and I could see how the boy might very well
get foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think
to this day she must have had some strain of good blood in her. She
was apparently not much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and
as graceful as a tigress in posture and motions. Her complexion was
a deep olive, and her eyes were large and very dark. She had small,
classically regular features, though not quite clean-cut enough to suit
my taste, and the most singular head of jet-black hair that I ever saw. "I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her
magical cult, for with that heavy profusion of it the idea must have
occurred to her naturally. Coiled up, it made her look like some
Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging down her
back, it came well below her knees and shone in the light as if it
possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own.