A Rival from the Grave

by Seabury Quinn

  An expression of bewilderment, mingled with horrified incredulity, spread over Grafensburg’s broad face as de Grandin finished speaking. I could scarce refrain from laughing, he looked for all the world like William Jennings Bryan reading Darwin, or a leader of the W.C.T.U. perusing a deluxe edition of the Bartenders’ Guide.

  “Lieber Himmel!” he exclaimed. “You—you tell us this? With seriousness you say it? Yes? Mein Gott, du bist verrückt! Stay, stay, little man, and rave your crazy ravings. I am going to get drunk!”

  A smile of almost heavenly delight lit up de Grandin’s face. “Mon cher ami, mon brave collègue,” he exclaimed, “for a week I’ve known you, yet never till this instant have I heard you speak one word of sense!

  “Wait till I find my seven-times-accursed hat, and I will go with you!”

  A Rival from the Grave

  “HOW MANY LOBSTER SANDWICHES is that?” I demanded.

  Jules de Grandin knit his brows in an effort at calculation. “Sixteen, no, eighteen, unless I have lost count,” he answered.

  “And how many glasses of champagne?”

  “Only ten.”

  “By George, you’re hopeless,” I reproved. “You’re an unconscionable glutton and wine-bibber.”

  “Eh bien, others who considered themselves as righteous as you once said the same of one more eminent than I,” he assured with a grin as he stuffed the last remaining canapé homard into his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of Roederer. “Come, my friend, forget to take your pleasures sadly for a while. Is it not a wedding feast?”

  “It is,” I conceded, “but—”

  “And am I not on fire with curiosity?” he broke in. “Is it a custom of America to hold the celebration in the bridegroom’s home?”

  “No, it’s decidedly unusual, but in this case the bride had only a tiny apartment and the groom this big house, so—”

  “One understands,” he nodded, finding resting-space for his sandwich plate and glass, “and a most impressive house it is. Shall we seek a place to smoke?”

  We jostled through the throng of merrymakers, passed along the softly carpeted hall and made our way to Frazier Taviton’s study. Bookcases lined the walls, a pair of Lawson sofas ranged each side the fireplace invited us to rest, a humidor of Gener cigars, silver caddies of Virginia, Russian and Egyptian cigarettes and an array of cloisonné ash-trays offered us the opportunity to indulge our craving for tobacco.

  “Exquise, superbe, parfait!” the little Frenchman commented as he ignored our host’s expensive cigarettes and selected a vile-smelling Maryland from his case; “this room was made expressly to offer us asylum from those noisy ones out there. I think—que diable! Who is that?” He nodded toward the life-size portrait in its golden frame which hung above the mantel-shelf.

  “H’m,” I commented, glancing up. “Queer Frazier left that hanging. I suppose he’ll be taking it down, though—”

  “Ten thousand pestilential mosquitoes, do not sit there muttering like an elderly spinster with the vapors!” he commanded. “Tell me who she is, my friend.”

  “It’s Elaine. She is—she was, rather—the first Mrs. Taviton. Lovely, isn’t she?”

  “U’m?” he murmured, rising and studying the picture with what I thought unnecessary care. “Non, my friend, she is not lovely. Beautiful? But yes, assuredly. Lovely? No, not at all.”

  The artist had done justice to Elaine Taviton. From the canvas she looked forth exactly as I’d seen her scores of times. Her heavy hair, red as molten copper, with vital, flame-like lights in it, was drawn back from her forehead and parted in the center, and a thick, three-stranded plait was looped across her brow in a kind of Grecian coronal. Her complexion had that strange transparency one sometimes but not often finds in red-haired women. A tremulous green light played in her narrow eyes, and her slim, bright-red lips were slightly parted in a faintly mocking smile to show small, opalescent teeth. It was, as Jules de Grandin had declared, a fascinating face, beautiful but unlovely, for in those small features, cut with lapidarian regularity, there was half concealed, but just as certainly revealed, the frighteningly fierce fire of an almost inhuman sensuality. The sea-green gown she wore was low-cut to the point of daring, and revealed an expanse of lucent shoulders, throat and bosom with the frankness characterizing the portraiture of the Restoration. Scarcely whiter or more gleaming than the skin they graced, a heavy string of perfectly matched pearls lay round her throat, while emerald ear-studs worth at least a grand duke’s ransom caught up and accentuated the vivid luster of her jade-toned eyes.

  “Morbleu, she is Circe, la Pompadour and Helen of Tyre, all in one,” de Grandin murmured. “Many men, I make no doubt, have told her, ‘I worship you,’ and many others whispered they adored her, but I do not think that any ever truthfully said, ‘I love you.’”

  He was silent a moment, then: “They were divorced?”

  “No, she died a year or so ago,” I answered. “It happened in New York, so I only know the gossip of it, but I understand that she committed suicide—”

  “One can well believe it,” he responded as I paused, somewhat ashamed of myself for retailing rumor. “She was vivid, that one, cold as ice toward others, hot as flame where her desires were concerned. Self-inflicted death would doubtless have seemed preferable to enduring thwarted longing. Yes.”

  A chorus of shrill squeals of feminine delight, mingled with the heavier undertone of masculine voices, drew our attention to the hall. As we hurried from the study we saw Agnes Taviton upon the stairs, gray eyes agleam, her lips drawn back in laughter, about to fling her bouquet down. The bridesmaids and the wedding guests were clustered in the hall below, white-gloved arms stretched up to catch the longed-for talisman, anticipation and friendly rivalry engraved upon their smiling faces. Towering above the other girls, nearly six feet tall, but with a delicacy of shape which marked her purely feminine, was Betty Decker, twice winner of the women’s singles out at Albemarle and runner-up for swimming honors at the Crescent Pool events. The bride swung out the heavy bunch of lilies-of-the-valley and white violets, poised it for a moment, then dropped it into Betty’s waiting hands.

  But Betty failed to catch it. A scant four feet the bouquet had to fall to touch her outstretched fingers, but in the tiny interval of time required for the drop Betty seemed to stumble sideways, as though she had been jostled, and missed her catch by inches. The bridal nosegay hurtled past her clutching hands, and seemed to pause a moment in midair, as though another pair of hands had grasped it; then it seemed to flutter, rather than to fall, until it rested on the polished floor at Betty’s feet.

  “Rotten catch, old gal,” commiserated Doris Castleman. “You’re off your form; I could ‘a’ sworn you had it in the bag.”

  “I didn’t muff it,” Betty answered hotly. “I was pushed.”

  “No alibis,” the other laughed. “I was right behind you, and I’ll take my Bible oath that no one touched you. You were in the clear, old dear; too much champagne, perhaps.”

  De Grandin’s small blue eyes were narrowed thoughtfully as he listened to the girls’ quick thrust-and-parry. “The petite mademoiselle has right,” he told me in a whisper. “No one touched the so unfortunate young lady who let her hope of early matrimony slip.”

  “But she certainly staggered just before she missed her catch,” I countered. “Everybody can’t absorb such quantities of champagne as you can stow away and still maintain his equilibrium. It’s a case of too much spirits, I’m afraid.”

  The little Frenchman turned a wide-eyed stare on me, then answered in a level, almost toneless voice: “Prie Dieu you speak in jest, my friend, and your fears have no foundation.”

  “THERE’S A GENTLEMAN TO see yez, sors,” Nora McGinnis announced apologetically. “I tol’ ‘im it wuz afther office hours, an’ that yere mos’ partic’lar fer to give yerselves some time to digest yer dinners, but he sez as how it’s mos’ important, an’ wud yez plase be afther seein’ ‘im, if only fer a minute
?”

  “Tiens, it is the crowning sorrow of a doctor’s life that privacy is not included in his dictionary,” answered Jules de Grandin with a sigh. “Show him in, petite”—Nora, who tipped the scales at something like two hundred pounds, never failed to glow with inward satisfaction when he used that term to her—“show him in all quickly, for the sooner we have talked with him the sooner we shall see his back.”

  The change which three short months had made in Frazier Taviton was nothing less than shocking. Barely forty years of age, tall, hound-lean, but well set up, his prematurely graying hair and martial carriage had given him distinction in appearance, and with it an appearance of such youth and strength as most men fifteen years his junior lacked. Now he seemed stooped and shrunken, the gray lights in his hair seemed due to age instead of accidental lack of pigment, and in the deep lines of his face and the furtive, frightened glance which looked out from his eyes, we saw the symptoms of a man who has been overtaken by a rapid and progressive malady.

  “Step into the consulting-room,” I said as we concluded shaking hands; “we can look you over better there,” but:

  “I’m not in need of going over, Doctor,” Frazier answered with a weary smile; “you can leave the stethoscope and sphygmomanometer in place. This consultation’s more in Doctor de Grandin’s line.”

  “Très bien, I am wholly at your service, Monsieur,” the Frenchman told him. “Will you smoke or have a drink? It sometimes helps one to unburden himself.”

  Taviton’s hand shook so he could hardly hold the flame to his cigar tip, and when he finally succeeded in setting it alight he paused, looking from one to the other of us as though his tongue could not find words to frame his crowding thoughts. Abruptly:

  “You know I’ve always been in love with Agnes, Doctor?” he asked me almost challengingly.

  “Well,” I temporized, “I knew your families were close friends, and you were a devoted swain in high school, but—”

  “Before that!” he cut in decisively. “Agnes Pemberton and I were sweethearts almost from the cradle!”

  Turning to de Grandin he explained: “Our family homes adjoined, and from the time her nursemaid brought her out in her perambulator I used to love to look at Agnes. I was two years her senior, and for that reason always something of a hero to her. When she grew old enough to toddle she’d slip her baby fist in mine, and we’d walk together all around the yard. If her nurse attempted to interfere she’d storm and raise the very devil till they let her walk with me again. And the queer part was I liked it. You don’t often find a three-year-old boy who’d rather walk around with a year-old girl than play with his toys, but I would. I’d leave my trains or picture books any time when I heard Agnes call, ‘Frazee, Frazee, here’s Agnes!’ and when we both grew older it was just the same. I remember once I had to fight half a dozen fellows because they called me sissy for preferring to help Agnes stage a party for her dolls to going swimming with them.

  “We spent our summers in the Poconos, and were as inseparable there as we were in town. Naturally, I did the heavy work—climbed the trees to shake the apples down and carried home the sack—but Agnes did her share. One summer, when I was twelve and she was ten, we were returning from a fox-grape hunt. Both of us were wearing sandals but no stockings; we couldn’t go quite barefoot, for the mountain paths were rocky and a stone-bruised toe was something to avoid. Suddenly Agnes, who was walking close beside me, pushed me off the path into the bushes, and dived forward to snatch up a stick.

  “‘Look out, Frazy, stay away!’ she cried, and next instant I saw the ‘stick’ she had picked up was a three-foot copperhead. It had been lying stretched across the path, the way they love to, and in another step I’d have put my unprotected foot right on it. Copperheads don’t have to coil to strike, either.

  “There wasn’t time to take a club or rock to it, so she grabbed the thing in her bare hands. It must have been preparing to strike my ankle, or the pressure of her hand against its head worked on its poison-sac; anyway, its venom spilled out on her hand, and I remember thinking how much it looked like mayonnaise as I saw it spurt out on her sun-tanned skin. The snake was strong, but desperation gave her greater strength. Before it could writhe from her grasp or slip its head far enough forward to permit it to strike into her wrist, she’d thrown it twenty feet away into the bushes; then the pair of us ran down the mountainside as if the devil were behind us.

  “‘Weren’t you scared, Aggie?’ I remember asking when we paused for breath, three hundred yards or so from where we’d started running.

  “‘More than I’ve ever been in my life,’ she answered, ‘but I was more scared the snake would bite you than I was of what it might do to me, Frazier dear.’

  “I think that was the first time in my life that any woman other than my mother called me ‘dear’, and it gave me a queer and rather puffed-up feeling.”

  Taviton paused a moment, drawing at his cigar, and a reminiscent smile replaced the look of anguished worry on his face. “We were full of stories of King Arthur and the days of chivalry,” he continued, “so you mustn’t think what happened next was anywise theatrical. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to us. ‘When anybody saves another person’s life that life belongs to him,’ I told her, and went down upon one knee, took the hem of her gingham dress in my hand and raised it to my lips.

  “She laid her hand upon my head, and it was like an accolade. ‘I am your liege lady and you’re my true sir knight,’ she answered, ‘and you will bear me faithful service. When we’re grown I’ll marry you and you must love me always. And I’ll scratch your eyes out if you don’t!’ she added warningly.

  “God, I wish she’d done it then!”

  “Hein?” demanded Jules de Grandin. “You regret your sight, Monsieur?

  “Trowbridge, mon vieux, you must examine me anon; my ears become impertinent!”

  Taviton was earnest in reply: “You heard me quite correctly, sir. If I’d been blinded then the last thing I’d have seen would have been Agnes’ face; I’d have had the memory of it with me always, and—I’d never have seen Elaine!”

  “But, my dear boy,” I expostulated, “you’re married to Agnes; Elaine’s dead; there’s nothing to prevent the realization of your happiness.”

  “That’s what you think!” he answered bitterly.

  “Listen: I believed that bunk they told us back in ’17 about it’s being a war to end all war and make the world a decent place to live in. I was twenty-three when I joined up. Ever seen war, gentlemen? Ever freeze your feet knee-deep in icy mud, have a million lice camp on you, see the man you’d just been talking to ripped open by a piece of shrapnel so his guts writhed from his belly like angleworms from a tin that’s been kicked over? Ever face machine-gun fire or a bayonet charge? I did, within three months after I’d left the campus. Soldiers in the advanced sections go haywire, they can’t help it; they’ve been through hell so long that just a little human kindness seems like paradise when they go back from the front.

  “Elaine was kind. And she was beautiful. God, how beautiful she was!

  “I’d gotten pretty thoroughly mashed up along the Meuse, and they sent me down to Biarritz to recuperate. It was a British nursing-station, and Elaine, who came from Ireland, was out there helping. She seemed to take to me at once; I’ve no idea why, for there were scores of better-looking fellows there and many who had lots more money. No matter, for some reason she was pleased with me and gave me every minute she could spare. Strangely, no one seemed to envy me.

  “One night there was a dance, and I noticed that not many of the Scots or Irish, who were in the majority, seemed inclined to cut in on me. The English tried it, but the Gallic fellows passed us by as though we’d had the plague. Of course, that pleased me just as well but I was puzzled, too.

  “I shared a room with Alec MacMurtrie, a likable young subaltern from Highland outfit who could drink more, smoke more, and talk less than any man I’d ever seen. He was in
bed when I reported in that night, but woke up long enough to smoke a cigarette while I undressed. Just before we said good-night he turned to me with an almost pleading look and told me, ‘I’d wear a sprig o’ hawthorn in my tunic when I went about if I were you, laddie.’

  “I couldn’t make him amplify his statement; so next day I talked with old MacLeod, a dour, sandy-haired and freckled minister from Aberdeen who’d come out as chaplain to as rank a gang of prayerful Scots as ever sashayed hell-for-leather through a regiment of Boche infantry.

  “`Mac, why should anybody wear a sprig of hawthorn in his tunic?’ I demanded.

  “He looked at me suspiciously, poked his long, thin nose deep in his glass of Scotch and soda, then answered with a steel-trap snap of his hard jaws: ‘T’ keep th’ witches awa’, lad. I dinna ken who’s gi’en ye th’ warnin’, but ’tis sober counsel. Think it ower.’ That was all that I could get from him.

  “I was ready to go back to active duty when the Armistice was signed and everybody who could walk or push a wheel-chair got as drunk as twenty fiddlers’ tikes. MacMurtrie was out cold when I staggered to our room, and I was sitting on my bed and working on a stubborn puttee when an orderly came tapping at the door with a chit for me. It was from Elaine and simply said: ‘Come to me at once. I need you.’