I
The Sacrifice
Enid Mandifer tried to stand up under what she had just heard. She managed it, but her ears rang, her eyes misted. She felt as if she were drowning.
The voice of Persil Mandifer came through the fog, level and slow, with the hint of that foreign accent which nobody could identify:
“Now that you know that you are not really my daughter, perhaps you are curious as to why I adopted you.”
Curious … was that the word to use? But this man who was not her father after all, he delighted in understatements. Enid’s eyes had grown clearer now. She was able to move, to obey Persil Mandifer’s invitation to seat herself. She saw him, half sprawling in his rocking-chair against the plastered wall of the parlor, under the painting of his ancient friend Aaron Burr. Was the rumor true, she mused, that Burr had not really died, that he still lived and planned ambitiously to make himself a throne in America? But Aaron Burr would have to be an old, old man—a hundred years old, or more than a hundred.
Persil Mandifer’s own age might have been anything, but probably he was nearer seventy than fifty. Physically he was the narrowest of men, in shoulders, hips, temples and legs alike, so that he appeared distorted and compressed. White hair, like combed thistledown, fitted itself in ordered streaks to his high skull. His eyes, dull and dark as musket-balls, peered expressionlessly above the nose like a stiletto, the chin like the pointed toe of a fancy boot. The fleshlessness of his legs was accentuated by tight trousers, strapped under the insteps. At his throat sprouted a frill of lace, after a fashion twenty-five years old.
At his left, on a stool, crouched his enormous son Larue. Larue’s body was a collection of soft-looking globes and bladders—a tremendous belly, round-kneed short legs, puffy hands, a gross bald head between fat shoulders. His white linen suit was only a shade paler than his skin, and his loose, faded-pink lips moved incessantly. Once Enid had heard him talking to himself, had been close enough to distinguish the words. Over and over he had said: “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”
These two men had reared her from babyhood, here in this low, spacious manor of brick and timber in the Ozark country. Sixteen or eighteen years ago there had been Indians hereabouts, but they were gone, and the few settlers were on remote farms. The Mandifers dwelt alone with their slaves, who were unusually solemn and taciturn for Negroes.
Persil Mandifer was continuing: “I have brought you up as a gentleman would bring up his real daughter—for the sole and simple end of making her a good wife. That explains, my dear, the governess, the finishing-school at St. Louis, the books, the journeys we have undertaken to New Orleans and elsewhere. I regret that this distressing war between the states,” and he paused to draw from his pocket his enameled snuffbox, “should have made recent junkets impracticable. However, the time has come, and you are not to be despised. Your marriage is now to befall you.”
“Marriage,” mumbled Larue, in a voice that Enid was barely able to hear. His fingers interlaced, like fat white worms in a jumble. His eyes were for Enid, his ears for his father.
Enid saw that she must respond. She did so: “You have—chosen a husband for me?”
Persil Mandifer’s lips crawled into a smile, very wide on his narrow blade of a face, and he took a pinch of snuff. “Your husband, my dear, was chosen before ever you came into this world,” he replied. The smile grew broader, but Enid did not think it cheerful. “Does your mirror do you justice?” he teased her. “Enid, my foster-daughter, does it tell you truly that you are a beauty, with a face all lustrous and oval, eyes full of tender fire, a cascade of golden-brown curls to frame the whole?” His gaze wandered upon her body, and his eyelids drooped. “Does it convince you, Enid, that your figure combines rarely those traits of fragility and rondure that are never so desirable as when they occur together? Ah, Enid, had I myself met you, or one like you, thirty years ago—”
“Father!” growled Larue, as though at sacrilege. Persil Mandifer chuckled. His left hand, white and slender with a dark cameo upon the forefinger, extended and patted Larue’s repellent bald pate, in superior affection.
“Never fear, son,” crooned Persil Mandifer. “Enid shall go a pure bride to him who waits her.” His other hand crept into the breast of his coat and drew forth something on a chain. It looked like a crucifix.
“Tell me,” pleaded the girl, “tell me, fa—” She broke off, for she could not call him father. “What is the name of the one I am to marry?”
“His name?” said Larue, as though aghast at her ignorance.
“His name?” repeated the lean man in the rocking-chair. The crucifix-like object in his hands began to swing idly and rhythmically, while he paid out chain to make its pendulum motion wider and slower. “He has no name.”
Enid felt her lips grow cold and dry. “He has no—”
“He is the Nameless One,” said Persil Mandifer, and she could discern the capital letters in the last two words he spoke.
“Look,” said Larue, out of the corner of his weak mouth that was nearest his father. “She thinks that she is getting ready to run.”
“She will not run,” assured Persil Mandifer. “She will sit and listen, and watch what I have here in my hand.” The object on the chain seemed to be growing in size and clarity of outline. Enid felt that it might not be a crucifix, after all.
“The Nameless One is also ageless,” continued Persil Mandifer. “My dear, I dislike telling you all about him, and it is not really necessary. All you need know is that we—my fathers and I—have served him here, and in Europe, since the days when France was Gaul. Yes, and before that.”
The swinging object really was increasing in her sight. And the basic cross was no cross, but a three-armed thing like a capital T. Nor was the body-like figure spiked to it; it seemed to twine and clamber upon that T-shape, like a monkey on a bracket. Like a monkey, it was grotesque, disproportionate, a mockery. That climbing creature was made of gold, or of something gilded over. The T-shaped support was as black and bright as jet.
Enid thought that the golden creature was dull, as if tarnished, and that it appeared to move; an effect created, perhaps, by the rhythmic swinging on the chain.
“Our profits from the association have been great,” Persil Mandifer droned. “Yet we have given greatly. Four times in each hundred years must a bride be offered.”
Mist was gathering once more, in Enid’s eyes and brain, a thicker mist than the one that had come from the shock of hearing that she was an adopted orphan. Yet through it all she saw the swinging device, the monkey-like climber upon the T. And through it all she heard Mandifer’s voice:
“When my real daughter, the last female of my race, went to the Nameless One, I wondered where our next bride would come from. And so, twenty years ago, I took you from a foundling asylum at Nashville.”
It was becoming plausible to her now. There was a power to be worshipped, to be feared, to be fed with young women. She must go—no, this sort of belief was wrong. It had no element of decency in it, it was only beaten into her by the spell of the pendulum-swinging charm. Yet she had heard certain directions, orders as to what to do.
“You will act in the manner I have described, and say the things I have repeated, tonight at sundown,” Mandifer informed her, as though from a great distance. “You will surrender yourself to the Nameless One, as it was ordained when first you came into my possession.”
“No,” she tried to say, but her lips would not even stir. Something had crept into her, a will not her own, which was forcing her to accept defeat. She knew she must go—where?
“To Fearful Rock,” said the voice of Mandifer, as though he had heard and answered the question she had not spoken. “Go there, to that house where once my father lived and worshipped, that house which, upon the occasion of his rather mysterious death, I left. It is now our place of devotion and sacrifice. Go there, Enid, tonight at sundown, in the manner I have prescribed. …”