“Sure?” he echoed. “To be sure I am sure, Mademoiselle. Remember, if you please, I am Jules de Grandin; I do not make mistakes.
“Come, calm yourself. Monsieur Jean will be here at any moment; then—”
He broke off, closing his eyes and standing in complete silence. Then he put his fingers to his pursed lips and from them plucked a kiss and tossed it upward toward the ceiling. “Mon dieu,” he murmured rapturously, “la passion delicieuse, is it not magnificent?”
“Alice! Alice, beloved—” Young Davisson’s voice faltered as he rushed into the room and took the girl into his arms. “When they told me that they’d found you at last, I could hardly believe—I knew they were doing everything but—” Again his speech halted for very pressure of emotion.
“Oh, my dear!” Alice took his face between her palms and looked into his worshipping eyes. “My dear, you’ve come to me again, but—” She turned from him, and fresh, hot tears lay upon her lashes.
“No buts, Mademoiselle!” de Grandin almost shouted. “Remember what I said. Take Love when he comes to you, my little friends; oh, do not make excuses to turn him out of doors—hell waits for those who do so! There is no obstacle to your union, believe me when I say so. Take my advice and have the good curé come here this very day, I beg you!”
Both Davisson and Alice looked at him amazed, for he was fairly shaking with emotion. He waved a hand impatiently. “Do not look so, make no account of doubts or fears or feelings of unworthiness!” he almost raged. “Behold me, if you please; an empty shell, a soulless shadow of a man, a being with no aim in life, no home nor fireside to bid him welcome when he has returned from duty! Is that the way to live? Mille fois non, I shall say not, but—”
“I let Love pass me by, my friends, and have regretted it but once, and that once all my aimless, empty life. Écoutez-moi! In the springtime of our youth we met, sweet Héloise and I, beside the River Loire. I was a student at the Sorbonne, my military service yet to come; she cher Dieu, was an angel out of Paradise!
“Beside the silver stream we played together; we lay beneath the poplar trees, we rowed upon the river; we waded barefoot in the shallows. Yes, and when we finished wading she plucked cherries, red ripe cherries from the trees, and twined their stems about her toes, and gave me her white feet to kiss. I ate the cherries from her feet and kissed her toes, one kiss for every cherry, one cherry for each kiss. And when we said bonne nuit—mon Dieu, to kiss and cling and shudder in such ecstasy once more!
“Alas, my several times great grandsire, he whose honored name I bore, had cut and hacked his way through raging Paris on the night of August 24 in 1572—how long his bones have turned to ashes in the family tomb—while her ancestors had worn the white brassard and cross, crying, ‘Messe ou mort! A bas les Huguenots!’”
He paused a moment and raised his shoulders in a shrug of resignation. “It might not be,” he ended sadly. “Her father would have none of me, my family forbade the thought of marriage. I might have joined her in her faith, but I was filled with scientific nonsense which derided old beliefs; she might have left the teachings of her forebears and accepted my ideas, but twenty generations of belief weigh heavily upon the shoulders of a single fragile girl. To save my soul she forfeited all claim upon my body; if she might not have me for husband she’d have no mortal man, so she professed religion. She joined the silent Carmelites, the Carmelites who never speak except in prayer, and the last fond word I had from her was that she would pray ceaselessly for my salvation.
“Hélas, those little feet so much adored—how many weary steps of needless penance have they taken since that day so long ago! How fruitless life has been to me since my stubbornness closed the door on happiness! Oh, do not wait, my friends! Take the Love the good God gives, and hold it tight against your hearts—it will not come a second time!
“Come, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded me, “let us leave them in their happiness. What have we, who clasped Love’s hand in ours long years ago, and saw the purple shadow of his smile grow black with dull futility, to do with them? Nothing, pardieu! Come, let us take a drink.”
We poured the ruby brandy into wide-mouthed goblets, for de Grandin liked to scent its rich bouquet before he drank. I studied him covertly as he raised his glass. Somehow, the confession he had made seemed strangely pitiful. I’d known him for five years, nearly always gay, always nonchalant, boastfully self-confident, quick, brave and reckless, ever a favorite with women, always studiously gallant but ever holding himself aloof, though more than one fair charmer had deliberately paid court to him. Suddenly I remembered our adventure of the “Ancient Fires”; he had said something then about a love that had been lost. But now, at last I understood Jules de Grandin—or thought I did.
“To you, my friend,” be pledged me. “To you, and friendship, and brave deeds of adventure, and last of all to Death, the last sweet friend who flings the door back from our prison, for—”
The clamoring telephone cut short his toast.
“Mercy Hospital,” a crisp feminine voice announced as I picked up the instrument. “Will you and Doctor de Grandin come at once? Detective Sergeant Costello wants to see you just as soon as—oh, wait a minute, they’ve plugged a phone through from his room.”
“Hullo. Doctor Trowbridge, sor,” Costello’s salutation came across the wire a moment later. “They like to got me, sor—in broad daylight too.”
“Eh? What the deuce?” I shot back. “What’s the trouble, Sergeant?”
“A chopper, sor.”
“A what?”
“Machine-gun, sor. Hornsby an’ me wuz standin’ be th’ corner o’ Thirty-Fourth an’ Tunlaw Streets half an hour back, when a car comes past like th’ hammers o’ hell, an’ they let us have a dose o’ bullets as they passed. Pore Hornsby got ’is first off—went down full o’ lead as a Christmas puddin’ is o’ plums, sor-but I’m just messed up’ a little. Nawthin’ but a bad ar-rm, an’ a punctured back, praise th’ Lord!”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Have you any idea who—”
“I have that, sor; I seen ’im plain as I see you—as I would be seein’ ye if ye wuz here, I mean, sor, an’—”
“Yes?” I urged as he paused a moment and a swallow sounded audibly across the wire.
“Yes, sor. I seen ’im, an’ there’s no mistake about it. It were th’ felly you an’ Doctor de Grandin turned over to me to hold fer murther last night. I seen ’im plain as day; there’s no mistakin’ that there map o’ hisn.”
“Good Lord, then he did escape!”
“No, sir; he didn’t. He’s locked up tight in his cell at headquarters this minute, waitin’ arraignment fer murther!”
19. The Lightning-Bolts of Justice
THAT EVENING ALICE SUFFERED from severe headaches and shortly afterward with sharp abdominal pains. Though a careful examination disclosed neither enlarged tonsils nor any evidence of mechanical stoppage, the sensation of a ball rising in her throat plagued her almost ceaselessly; when she attempted to cross the room her knees buckled under her as though they had been the boneless joints of a rag-doll.
Jules de Grandin pursed his lips, shook his head and tweaked the needle-ends of his mustache disconsolately. “L’hysterie,” he murmured. “It might have been foreseen. The emotional and moral shock the poor one has been through is enough to shatter any nerves. Hélas, I fear the wedding may not be so soon, Friend Trowbridge. The experience of marriage is a trying one to any woman—the readjustment of her mode of life, the blending of her personality with another’s—it is a strain. No, she is in no condition to essay it.”
Amazingly, he brightened, his small eyes gleaming as with sudden inspiration. “Parbleu, I have it!” he exclaimed. “She, Monsieur Jean and you, mon vieux, shall take a trip. I would suggest the Riviera, were it not that I desire isolation for you all until—no matter. Your practise is not so pressing that it can not be assumed by your estimable colleague, Doctor Phillips; and Mademoiselle Alice will m
ost certainly improve more quickly if you accompany her as personal physician. You will go? Say that you will, my friend; a very great much depends on it!”
Reluctantly, I consented, and for six weeks Alice, John Davisson and I toured the Caribbean, saw devastated Martinique, the birthplace of the Empress Josephine, drank Haitian coffee fresh from the plantation, investigated the sights and sounds and, most especially, the smells of Panama and Colon, finally passed some time at the Jockey Club and Sloppy Joe’s in Habana. It was a well and sun-tanned Alice who debarked with us and caught the noon train out of Hoboken.
Arrangements for the wedding were perfected while we cruised beneath the Southern Cross. The old Hume house would be done over and serve the bride and groom for home, and in view of Alice’s bereavement the formal ceremony had been canceled, a simple service in the chapel of St. Chrysostom’s being substituted. Pending the nuptials Alice took up residence at the Hotel Carteret, declaring that she could not think of lodging at my house, warm as was my invitation.
“All has been finished,” de Grandin told me jubilantly as he, Renouard and Ingraham accompanied me from the station. “The justice of New Jersey, of which you speak so proudly; she has more than justified herself. Oh yes.”
“Eh?” I demanded.
Renouard and Ingraham chuckled.
“They gave it to him,” the Englishman explained.
“In the throat—the neck, I should remark,” Renouard supplied, wrestling bravely with the idiom.
“The party will be held tomorrow night,” de Grandin finished.
“Who—what—whatever are you fellows saying?” I queried. “What party d’ye mean, and—”
“Grigor Bazarov,” de Grandin answered with another laugh, “the youthful-bodied one with the aged, evil-face; the wicked one who celebrated the Black Mass. He is to die tomorrow night. Yes, parbleu, he dies for murder!”
“But—”
“Patience, mon vieux, and I shall tell you all. You do recall how we—Monsieur Hiji, Renouard and I—did apprehend him on the night we rescued Mademoiselle Alice? Of course. Very well.
“You know how we conspired that he should be tried for a murder which he did not perpetrate, because we could not charge him with his many other crimes? Very good. So it was.
“When we had packed you off with Monsieur Jean and his so charming fiancée, your testimony could not serve to save him. No, we had the game all to ourselves, and how nobly we did swear his life away! Mordieu, when they heard how artistically we committed perjury, I damn think Ananias and Sapphira hung their heads and curled up like two anchovies for very jealousy! The jury almost wept when we described his shameful crime. It took them only twenty minutes to decide his fate. And so tomorrow night he gives his life in expiation for those little boys he sacrificed upon the Devil’s altar and for the dreadful death he brought upon poor Abigail.
“Me, I am clever, my friend. I have drawn upon the wires of political influence, and we shall all have seats within the death house when he goes to meet the lightning bolt of Jersey justice. Yes, certainly, of course.”
“You mean we’re to witness the execution?”
“Mais oui; et puis. Did I not swear he should pay through the nose when he slew that little helpless lad upon the Devil’s altar? But certainly. And now, by damn, he shall learn that Jules de Grandin does not swear untruly—unless he wishes to. Unquestionably.”
DEFTLY, LIKE MEN ACCUSTOMED to their task, the state policemen patted all our pockets. The pistols my companions wore were passed unquestioned, for only cameras were taboo within the execution chamber.
“All right, you can go in,” the sergeant told us when the troopers had completed their examination, and we filed down a dimly lighted corridor behind the prison guard.
The death room was as bright as any clinic’s surgery, immaculate white tile reflecting brilliant incandescent bulbs’ hard rays. Behind a barricade of white-enameled wood on benches which reminded me of pews, sat several young men whose journalistic calling was engraved indelibly upon their faces, and despite their efforts to appear at ease it took no second glance to see their nerves were taut to the snapping-point; for even seasoned journalists react to death—and here was death, stark and grim as anything to be found in the dissecting rooms.
“The chair,” a heavy piece of oaken furniture, stood near the farther wall, raised one low step above the tiled floor of the chamber, a brilliant light suspended from the ceiling just above it, casting its pitiless spotlight upon the center of the tragic stage. The warden and a doctor, stethoscope swung round his neck as though it were a badge of office, stood near the chair, conversing in low tones; the lank cadaverous electrician whose duty was to send the lethal current through the condemned man’s body, stood in a tiny alcove like a doorless telephone booth slightly behind and to the left of the chair. A screen obscured a doorway leading from the room, but as we took our seats in front I caught a fleeting glimpse of a white-enameled wheeled bier, a white sheet lying neatly folded on it. Beyond, I knew, the surgeon and the autopsy table were in readiness when the prison doctor had announced his verdict.
The big young Englishman went pale beneath his tropic tan as he surveyed the place; Renouard’s square jaw set suddenly beneath his bristling square-cut beard; de Grandin’s small, bright eyes roved quickly round the room, taking stock of the few articles of furniture; then, involuntarily his hand flew upward to tease the tightly waxed hairs of his mustache to a sharper point. These three, veterans of police routine, all more than once participants in executions, were fidgeting beneath the strain of waiting. As for me—if I came through without the aid of smelling-salts, I felt I should be lucky.
A light tap sounded on the varnished door communicating with the death cells. A soft, half-timid sort of tap it was, such as that a person unaccustomed to commercial life might give before attempting to enter an office.
The tap was not repeated. Silently, on well-oiled hinges, the door swung back, and a quartet halted on the threshold. To right and left were prison guards; between them stood the Red Priest arrayed in open shirt and loose black trousers, list slippers on his feet. As he came to a halt I saw that the right leg of the trousers had been slit up to the knee and flapped grotesquely round his ankle. The guards beside him held his elbows lightly, and another guard brought up the rear.
Pale, calm, erect, the condemned man betrayed no agitation, save by a sudden violent quivering of the eyelids, this perhaps, being due to the sudden flood of light in which he found himself. His great, sad eyes roved quickly round the room, not timorously, but curiously, finally coming to rest upon de Grandin. Then for an instant a flash showed in them, a lambent flash which died as quickly as it came.
Quickly the short march to the chair began. Abreast of us, the prisoner wrenched from his escorts, cleared the space between de Grandin and himself in one long leap, bent forward and spat into the little Frenchman’s face.
Without a word or cry of protest the prison guards leaped on him, pinioned his elbows to his sides and rushed him at a staggering run across the short space to the chair.
De Grandin drew a linen kerchief from his cuff and calmly wiped the spittle from his cheek. “Eh bien,” he murmured, “it seems the snake can spit, though justice has withdrawn his fangs, n’est-ce-pas?”
The prison warders knew their work. Straps were buckled round the prisoner’s wrists, his ankles, waist. A leather helmet like a football player’s was clamped upon his head, almost totally obscuring his pale, deep-wrinkled face.
There was no clergyman attending. Grigor Bazarov was faithful to his compact with the Devil, even unto death. His pale lips moved: “God is tyranny and misery. God is evil. To me, then, Lucifer!” he murmured in a singsong chant.
The prison doctor stood before the chair, notebook in hand, pencil poised. The prisoner was breathing quickly, his shoulders fluttering with forced respiration. A deep, inhaling gulp, a quick, exhaling gasp—the shoulders slanted forward.
So did the
doctor’s pencil, as though he wrote. The thin-faced executioner, his quiet eyes upon the doctor’s hands, reached upward. There was a crunching of levers, a sudden whir, a whine, and the criminal’s body started forward, lurching upward as though he sought to rise and burst from the restraining straps. As much as we could see of his pale face grew crimson, like the face of one who holds his breath too long. The bony, claw-like hands were taut upon the chair arms, like those of a patient in the dentist’s chair when the drill bites deeply.
A long, eternal moment of this posture, then the sound of grating metal as the switches were withdrawn, and the straining body in the chair sank limply back, as though in muscular reaction to fatigue.
Once more the doctor’s pencil tilted forward, again the whirring whine. Again the body started up, tense, strained, all but bursting through the broad, strong straps which bound it to the chair. The right hand writhed and turned, thumb and forefinger meeting tip to tip, as though to take a pinch of snuff. Then absolute flaccidity as the current was shut off.
The prison doctor put his book aside and stepped up to the chair. For something like a minute the main tube of his questing stethoscope explored the reddened chest exposed as he put back the prisoner’s open shirt, then: “I pronounce this man dead.”
“Mon dieu,” exclaimed Renouard.
“For God’s sake!” Ingraham muttered thickly.
I remained silent as the white-garbed orderlies took the limp form from the chair, wrapped it quickly in a sheet and trundled it away on the wheeled bier to the waiting autopsy table.
“I say,” suggested Ingraham shakily, “suppose he ain’t quite dead? It didn’t seem to me—”
“Tiens, he will be thoroughly defunct when the surgeon’s work is done,” de Grandin told him calmly. “It was most interesting, was it not?”
The Dark Angel Page 33
