The little Frenchman paused beside the bier, and it seemed to me there was a hint of irony in the smile that touched the corners of his mouth as he leant forward. “Eh bien, my old one; we know a secret, thou and I, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked the silent form before us.
I swallowed back an exclamation of dismay. Perhaps it was a trick of the uncertain light, possibly it was one of those ghastly, inexplicable things which every doctor and embalmer meets with sometime in his practise—the effect of desiccation from formaldehyde, the pressure of some tissue gas within the body, or something of the sort—at any rate, as Jules de Grandin spoke the corpse’s upper lids drew back the fraction of an inch, revealing slits of yellow eyes, which seemed to glare at us with mingled hate and fury.
“Good heavens; come away!” I begged. “It seemed as if he looked at us, de Grandin!”
“Et puis—and if he did?” he asked me as we left the chapel. “Me, I damn think that I can trade him look for look, my friend. He was clever, that one, I admit it; but do not be mistaken, Jules de Grandin is no one’s imbecile.”
4
The wedding took place in the rectory of St. Chrysostom’s. Robed in stole and surplice, Doctor Bentley glanced benignly from Dennis to Arabella, then to de Grandin and me as he began: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this company to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.…” His round and ruddy face grew slightly stern as he continued: “If any man can show just cause why they should not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.”
He paused the customary short, dramatic moment, and I thought I saw a hard, grim look spread on Jules de Grandin’s face. Very faint and far-off seeming, so faint that we could scarcely hear it, but gaining steadily in strength, there came a high, thin, screaming sound. Curiously, it seemed to me to resemble the long-drawn, wailing shriek of a freight train’s whistle heard from miles away upon a still and sultry summer night, weird, wavering and ghastly. Now it seemed to grow in shrillness, though its volume was no greater. High, so high the human ear could scarcely register it, it beat upon our consciousness with a frightful, piercing sharpness. It was like a sick, shrill scream of hellish torment that set the tortured air to quivering till we could not say if we were really hearing it, or if it were but a subjective ringing in our heads.
I saw a look of haunted fright leap into Arabella’s eyes, saw Dennis’ pale face go paler as the strident whistle sounded shriller and more shrill; then, as it seemed I could endure the stabbing of that needle-sound no longer, it ceased abruptly, giving way to blessed, comforting silence. And through the silence came a peal of chuckling laughter, half breathless, half hysterical, wholly devilish: Huh — hu-u-uh — hu-u-u-u-uh! the final syllable drawn out until it seemed almost a groan.
“The wind, Monsieur le Cure, it is the wind,” said Jules de Grandin sharply. “Proceed to marry them, if you will be so kind.”
“The wind?” Doctor Bentley echoed incredulously. “Why, I could have sworn I heard somebody laugh, but—”
“It is the wind, Monsieur; it plays strange tricks at times,” the little Frenchman answered, his small, blue eyes as hard as frozen iron. “Proceed, if you will be so kind; we wait on you.”
“Forasmuch as Dennis and Arabella have consented to be joined together in holy wedlock…I pronounce them man and wife,” concluded Doctor Bentley, and de Grandin, ever gallant, kissed the bride upon the lips, and, before we could restrain him, planted kisses upon both of Dennis’ cheeks.
“Parbleu, I thought that we might have the trouble, for a time,” he told me as we left the rectory.
“What was that awful, shrieking noise we heard?” I asked.
“It was the wind, my friend,” he answered in a hard, fiat, toneless voice. “The ten times damned, but wholly ineffectual wind.”
5
So, then, little sinner, weep and wail for the burden of mortality that has befallen thee; weep, wail, cry and breathe, my little wrinkled one.’ Ha, you will not? Pardieu, I say you shall!”
Gently, but smartly, Jules de Grandin spanked the small red infant’s small red posterior with the end of a towel wrung out in hot water, and as the smacking impact sounded, the tiny, toothless mouth opened to its fullest compass, and a thin, high, piping squall of protest sounded.
“Ah, that is better, mon petit ami,” the little Frenchman chuckled. “One can not learn too soon that one must do as one is told, not as one wishes, in this world which you have entered. Look to him, Mademoiselle.” He passed the wriggling, bawling morsel of humanity to the nurse and turned to me as I bent above the table where Arabella Tantavul lay. “How does the mother, good Friend Trowbridge?” he asked.
“U’m’mp,” I answered noncommittally, working furiously. “Poor youngster,” I added as Arabella, swathed in blankets, was trundled to her room, “she had a pretty tough time of it, but—”
“But in the morning she will have forgotten!” de Grandin cut in with a laugh. “Ha, have I not seen it? She will gaze upon the little monkey-thing which I just caused to breathe the breath of life, and vow it is the loveliest of all God’s lovely creatures. Cordieu, she will hold it at her tender breast and smile on it—she will—
“Sacré nom d’un rat, what is that?”
From the nursery where, ensconced in wire trays twenty new-born fragments of humanity slept or squalled, there came a sudden frightened scream—a woman’s cry of terror.
We raced along the corridor, reached the glass-walled room and thrust the door back, taking care to open it no wider than was necessary, lest a draft disturb the carefully conditioned air within the place.
Backed against the farther wall, her face gone gray with fright, the nurse in charge was staring at the skylight with horror-widened eyes, and even as we entered she opened her lips to emit another shriek.
“Stop it, Mademoiselle, you are disturbing your small charges!” De Grandin seized the horrified girl’s shoulder and administered a shake. Then:
“What is it that you saw, Mademoiselle,” he asked her in a whisper. “Do not be afraid to speak; we shall respect your confidence—but speak softly.”
“It—it was up there!” she pointed with a shaking finger toward the black square of the skylight. “They’d just brought Baby Tantavul in and I’d laid him in his crib when I thought I heard somebody laughing. Oh”—she shuddered at the recollection—“it was awful! Not really a laugh, but something more like a long-drawn-out hysterical groan. Did you ever hear a child tickled to exhaustion—how he moans and gasps for breath and laughs, all at once? I think the fiends in hell must laugh like that!”
“Yes, yes, we understand,” de Grandin nodded shortly, “but tell us, if you please, what happened next?”
“I looked around the nursery, but I was all alone here with the babies. Then it came again, louder, this time, and seemingly right above me. I looked up at the skylight, and—there it was!
“It was a face, sir—just a face, with no body to it, and it seemed to float in mid-air, just above the glass, then to dip down against it, like a child’s balloon drifting in the wind, and it looked right past me down at Baby Tantavul and laughed again.”
“A face, Mademoiselle, did you say—”
“Yes, sir, a face—the most awful face I’ve ever seen. It was thin and wrinkled, and shriveled like a mummy, and its long, gray hair hung down across its forehead, and its eyes were yellow—like a cat’s!—and as they looked at Baby Tantavul they seemed to stretch and open till the white of the balls glared all round the yellow irises, and the mouth opened, not widely, but as though it were chewing something that it relished—and it gave that dreadful, cackling, jubilating laugh again. That’s it! I couldn’t think before, but it seemed as if that bodiless head were laughing with a sort of evil triumph, Doctor de Grandin!”
“H’m,” the little Frenchman tweaked his tightly waxed mustache. “I should not wonder if it did, Mademoiselle.
”
He turned to me, and: “Stay with her, if you please, my friend,” he ordered. “I shall see the supervisor and have her send another nurse to keep her company. I shall request a special watch for the small Tantavul. I do not think that there is any danger, but—mice do not play where cats are wakeful.”
* * * *
“Isn’t he just lovely?” Arabella Tantavul looked up from the small knob of hairless flesh which rested on her breast, and ecstasy was in her eyes. “I don’t believe I ever saw so beautiful a baby!”
“Tiens, Madame, his voice is excellent, at any rate,” de Grandin answered with a grin, “and from what one may observe, his appetite is excellent, as well.”
Arabella smiled and patted the small creature’s back. “You know, I never had a doll in all my life,” she told us. “Now I’ve got this dear little mite, and I’m going to be so happy with him. Oh, I wish Uncle Warburg were alive; I know this darling baby would soften even his hard heart.
“But I mustn’t say such things about him, must I? He really wanted Dennis and me to marry, didn’t he? His will proved that. You think he wanted us to marry, Doctor?”
“I am persuaded that he did, Madame. Your marriage was his dearest wish, his fondest hope,” de Grandin answered solemnly.
“I felt that way, too. He was harsh and cruel to us while we were growing up, and preserved his stony-hearted attitude to the end, but underneath it all there must have been some hidden streak of kindness, some lingering affection for Dennis and me, or he’d never have put that clause into his will—”
“Nor have left this memorandum for you,” de Grandin interrupted, drawing from an inner pocket the parchment envelope which Dennis had given him the day before his father’s funeral.
The youthful mother started back as though he menaced her with a live scorpion, and instinctively her arms closed protectively about the baby at her breast.
“The—that—letter?” she faltered, her breath coming in short, smothered gasps. “I’d forgotten it. Oh, Doctor de Grandin, burn it. Don’t let me see what’s in it. I’m afraid!”
It was a bright May morning, without sufficient breeze to stir the budding leaflets on the maple trees outside, but as de Grandin held the letter out I thought I heard the sudden rustle of a wind beyond the window, not loud, but shrewd and keen, like wind among the graveyard evergreens in autumn, and, curiously, there was a note of soft, malicious laughter mingled with it.
The little Frenchman heard it too, and for an instant he looked toward the window, and I thought I saw the flicker of an ugly sneer take form beneath the ends of his mustache.
“Open it, Madame” he bade. “It is for you and Monsieur Dennis, and little Monsieur Bébé here.”
“No-o; I daren’t—”
“Très bien, then Jules de Grandin does!” Drawing out his penknife he slit the heavy envelope, pressed suddenly against its ends, so that its sides bulged out, and dumped its contents on the counterpane. Ten twenty-dollar bills dropped on the coverlet. And nothing else.
“Two hundred dollars!” Arabella gasped. “Why—”
“As a birthday gift for petit Monsieur Dennis, one surmises,” de Grandin smiled, “Eh bien, the old one had a sense of humor underneath his ugly outward shell, it seems. He kept you on the tenterhooks lest the message in this envelope were one of evil import, while all the time it was a present of congratulation.”
“But such a gift from Uncle Warburg—I can’t understand it!” Arabella murmured wonderingly.
“Perhaps it is as well, Madame,” he answered as we rose to go. “Be happy with the gift, and give your ancient uncle credit for at least one act of kindliness. Au ’voir.”
* * * *
“Hanged if I can understand it either,” I told him as we left the hospital. “If that old curmudgeon had left a message berating them for fools for having offspring, it would have been more in character, but such a gift—well, I’m surprized.”
Amazingly, de Grandin halted in mid-stride and laughed until the tears rolled down his face. “Parbleu, my friend,” he told me when he managed to regain his breath, “I do not think that your surprize is half so great as that of Monsieur Warburg Tantavul!”
6
Dennis tantavul regarded me with misery-haunted eyes. “I just can’t understand it,” he admitted. “It’s all so sudden, so utterly—”
“Pardonnez-moi,” de Giandin interrupted from the door of the consulting-room, “I could not help but hear your last remark, and if it is net an intrusion—”
“Not at all,” the young man answered. “I’d like the benefit of your advice. It’s Arabella, and I’m dreadfully afraid that she—”
“Non, do not try it, mon ami,” de Grandin warned. “Do you give us the symptoms, let us make the diagnosis. He who acts as his own doctor has a fool for a patient, you know.”
“Well, then, here are the facts: This morning Arabella woke me up, crying as though her heart would break. I asked her what the trouble was, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger—no, not exactly that, rather as if I were some dreadful thing she’d suddenly discovered lying by her side. Her eyes were positively round with horror, and when I tried to take her in my arms and comfort her she shrank away as though I were infected with the plague.
“‘Oh, Dennie, don’t!’ she begged, and positively cringed away from me. Then she sprang out of bed, and drew her kimono about her as though she were ashamed to have me see her in pajamas, and ran sobbing from the room.
“Presently I heard her crying in the nursery, and went down there to try and comfort her—” He paused, and tears started to his eyes. “She was standing by the crib where little Dennis lay, looking at him with tears streaming down her cheeks, and in her hand she held a long, sharp steel letter-opener. ‘Poor little mite; poor little flower of unpardonable sin,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go, Baby darling; you to limbo, I to hell—oh, God wouldn’t, couldn’t be so cruel as to damn you for your parents’ sin!—but we’ll all three suffer torment endlessly, because we didn’t know!’
“She raised the knife to plunge it in the little fellow’s heart, and he stretched his baby hands out and laughed and cooed as the sunlight glinted on the deadly steel.
“I was on her in an instant, wrenching the knife from her with one hand, holding her against me with the other, but she fought me off.
“‘Don’t touch me, Dennie, please, please don’t!’ she begged. ‘I know it’s deadly sin, but I love you so, my dear, that I can’t resist you if I let you put your arms around me.’
“I tried to kiss her, but she hid her face against my shoulder and moaned as if in pain when she felt my lips against her neck. Then she went suddenly limp in my arms, and I carried her, unconscious but moaning pitifully, into her sitting-room and laid her on the couch. I left Sarah, the nurse maid, with her, giving strict orders not to let her leave the room till I returned. Can’t you come over right away?”
De Grandin’s cigarette had burned down till it threatened his mustache, and in his small, blue eyes was such a look of murderous rage as I had not seen for years. “Bête!” he murmured savagely. “Sale chameau; species of stinking goat! This is his doing, or Jules de Grandin is a lop-eared fool! Come, my friends, let us rush, hasten, fly; I would talk with Madame Arabella!”
* * * *
“Naw, suh, she’s gone,” the colored nurse-maid told us when we asked for Arabella. “Master Dennie started ter squeal sumpin’ awful right after Mistu Dennis lef, an’ Ah knowed it wuz time fo’ ’is breakfas’, so Mis’ Arabella wuz lying’ nice an’ still on th’ sofa, an’ Ah says to her, Ah says, ‘Yuh lay still, dere, now honey, whilst Ah goes an’ sees after yo baby; so Ah goes down ter th’ nussery an’ fixes ’im all up, an’ carries ’im back ter th’ settin’-room where Miss’ Arabella wuz, an’ she ain’t dere no mo’. Naw, suh.”
“I thought I told you—” Dennis began furiously, but de Grandin laid a hand upon his arm.
“Softly, if you please, Monsieur,” h
e soothed. “La bonne did wisely, though she knew it not; she was with the small one all the while, so no harm could come to him. Was it not better so, after what you witnessed in the morning?”
“Ye-es,” the other grudgingly admitted. “I suppose so. But Arabella—”
“Let us see if we can find a trace of her,” the Frenchman interrupted. “Look, do you miss her clothing?”
Dennis looked about the pretty, chintz-hung room. “Yes,” he decided as he finished his inspection; “her dress was on that lounge, and her shoes and stockings on the floor beneath it. They’re all gone.”
“So,” de Grandin nodded. “Distrait as she appeared to be, it is unlikely she would have stopped to dress had she not planned on going out.
“Friend Trowbridge, will you kindly call Police Headquarters, inform them of the situation, and ask to have all exits to the city watched?”
As I picked up the telephone he and Dennis started on a room-by-room inspection of the house.
“Find anything?” I asked as I hung up the ’phone after notifying headquarters.
“Cordieu, I should damn say yes!” de Grandin answered as I joined them in the upstairs living-room. “Look yonder, if you please, my friend.”
The room was obviously the intimate apartment of the house. Electric lamps under painted shades were placed beside the big leather-upholstered chairs, ivory-enameled bookshelves lined the walls to a height of four feet or so, upon their tops was a litter of gay, unconsidered little trifles—cinnabar cigarette boxes, bits of hammered brass. Old china, blue and red and purple, glowed mellowly in cabinets of mahogany, its colors catching up and accentuating the muted blues and reds of an antique Hamadan carpet. A Paisley shawl was draped scarfwise across the baby grand piano in the corner.
Directly opposite the door a carven crucifix was standing on the bookcase top. It was an exquisite bit of Italian work, the cross of ebony, the corpus of old ivory, and so perfectly executed that, though it was a scant four inches high, one could note the tense, tortured muscles, the straining throat which overfilled with groans of agony, the brow all knotted and bedewed with the cold sweat of torment. Upon the statue’s thorn-crowned head, where it made a bright, iridescent halo, was a band of gem-encrusted platinum, a woman’s diamond-studded wedding ring.
The Occult Detective Megapack: 29 Classic Stories Page 81
