"There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season. Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night."
"Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach yesterday--" I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That was my own deduction. "I saw him the day before in this house. Don't you know any such person? He has been on the island since that young lady was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He brought her to you."
A flicker of recollection appeared on Clementine's face.
"That man is gone, madame; it is many years. And he was not blue at all. He was English Jersey man, of Halifax."
"Did you never hear of any blue man on the island, Clementine?"
"I hear of blue bones found beyond Point de Mission."
"But that skeleton found in the hole near the Giant's Stairway was a woman's skeleton."
"Me loes!" exclaimed Madame Clementine, miscalling her English as she always did in excitement. "Me handle de big bones, moi-même! Me loes what de doctor who found him say!"
"You have hear lies, madame. Me loes there was a blue man found beyond Point de Mission."
"But who was it that I saw in your house?"
"He is not in my house!" declared Madame Clementine. "No blue man is ever in my house!" She crossed herself.
There is a sensation like having a slide pulled from one's head; the shock passes in the fraction of a second. Sunshine, and rioting nasturtiums, the whole natural world, including Clementine's puzzled brown face, were no more distinct to-day than the blue man and the woman with floating hair had been yesterday.
I had seen a man who shot down to instant death in the pit under the Giant's Stairway thirty-five years ago. I had seen a woman, who, perhaps, once thought herself intentionally and strangely deserted, seek and meet him after she had been killed at four o'clock!
This experience, set down in my note-book and repeated to no one, remains associated with the Old World scent of ginger. For I remember hearing Clementine say through a buzzing, "You come in, madame--you must have de hot wine and jahjah!"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Blue Man, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood