The Horror on the Links

by Seabury Quinn

  IT WAS SIX MONTHS later that a Western Union messenger entered my consulting room at Harrisonville and handed me a blue-and-white envelope. “Sign here,” he ordered.

  I tore the envelope open, and this is what I read:

  Miriam made big sensation in Folies Bérgères tonight. Felicitations.— de Grandin

  The Vengeance of India

  ALL DAY THE MARCH wind had been muttering and growling like a peevish giant with a toothache. As darkness fell it began to raise its voice; by nine o’clock it was shrieking and screaming like a billion banshees suffering with cholera morbus. I huddled over the coke fire burning in my study grate and tried to concentrate on my book, to forget the wailing of the wind and the misfortunes of the day, but made very poor work of it.

  Mingling with the wind’s skirling there suddenly sounded the raucous bellow of an automobile siren, followed, a moment later, by a hammering and clattering at the front door as if whoever stood outside would beat the panels in by main force.

  “If ye plaze, sor,” Nora, my maid of all work, announced, poking her nose around the half-opened study door, “there’s a gintilman ter see ye—an Eyetalian man, I think he is.” Nora disapproves strongly of “furriners” in general and Italians in particular, and when they come, as they frequently do, to summon me from the house on a stormy night, her disapproval is hidden neither from my callers nor me.

  Tonight, however, I greeted the interruption with something like relief. Action of any sort, even traveling a dozen miles to set an Italian laborer’s broken limb without much hope of compensation, would provide a welcome distraction from the pall of gloom which enveloped me. “Bring him in,” I ordered.

  “Parbleu!” exclaimed a voice behind her. “He is already in! Did you think, my friend, that I would travel all this way on such a night to have your servant debate entrance with me?”

  I leaped from my chair with a whoop of delight and seized both my visitor’s slender hands in mine. “De Grandin!” I exclaimed delightedly. “Jules de Grandin! What in the world are you doing here? I thought you’d be in your laboratory at the Sorbonne by now.”

  “But no,” he denied, handing his sopping cap and raincoat to Nora and seating himself across the fire from me, “there is little rest for the wicked in this world, my friend, and for Jules de Grandin there is none at all. Hardly had we finished with that villainous Goonong Besar than I was dispatched, post-haste, to Brazil, and when my work was finished there I must needs be called to tell of my experiments before your association of physicians in New York. Eh bien, but I fear me I shall not see my peaceful laboratory for some time, my friend.”

  “Oh, so you were in Brazil?” I answered thoughtfully.

  “Trowbridge, my friend!” he put out both hands impulsively. “The mention of that country distresses you. Tell me, can I be of help?”

  “H’m, I’m afraid not,” I replied sadly. “It’s an odd coincidence, your coming from there today, though. You see, a patient of mine, a Brazilian lady, died today, and I’ve no more idea what killed her than an African Bushman has about the nebular hypothesis.”

  “Oh, la, la!” he chuckled. “Friend Trowbridge, to see you is worth traveling twice around the world. Forty years a physician, and he worries over a faulty diagnosis! My dear fellow, do you not know the only truthful certificate a physician ever gives for the cause of death is when he writes down ‘unknown’?”

  “I suppose so,” I agreed, “but this case is out of the ordinary, de Grandin. These people, the Drigos, have lived here only a few weeks, and virtually nothing is known of them, except that they seem to have plenty of money. This morning, about eleven o’clock, I was called to attend their only child, a daughter about eighteen years of age, and found her in a sort of stupor. Not a faint, nor yet a condition of profound depression, simply sleepy, like any young woman who was up late the previous night. There was no history of unusual activity on her part; she had gone to bed at her usual hour the night before, and was apparently in good health within an hour of the time I was called. I could see no reason for my services, to tell you the truth, for her condition did not appear at all serious, yet, before I could reassure her parents and leave the house, she went to sleep and slept her life away. Died in what appeared a healthy, natural sleep in less than ten minutes!”

  “A-a-ah?” he answered on a rising note. “You interest me, my friend. It is, perhaps, some new, acute form of sleeping sickness we have here. Come, can you make some excuse to go to the people’s house? I would make inquiries from them. Perchance we shall learn something for the benefit of science.”

  I was about to demur when the tinkle of my telephone cut in. “Dr. Trowbridge,” called the party at the other end, “this is Johnston, the undertaker, speaking. Can you come over to Drigo’s to sign the death certificate, or shall I bring it to your house tomorrow? I can’t get any information from these folks. They don’t even know what she died of.”

  “Neither do I,” I muttered to myself, but aloud I said, “Why, yes, Mr. Johnston, I’ll come right over. There’s a friend of mine, another doctor, here; I’ll bring him along.”

  “Good enough,” he responded. “If I have to argue with these dagoes much longer I’ll need you and your friend, too, to patch up my nerves.”

  ROBED IN A GOWN of priceless old lace, a white net mantilla drawn over her smoothly parted black hair, Ramalha Drigo lay at rest in an elaborate open-couch casket of mahogany, her slender, oleander-white hands piously crossed upon her virginal bosom, a rosary of carved ebony, terminating in a silver crucifix, intertwined in her waxen fingers.

  “Bon Dieu,” de Grandin breathed as he bent over the girl’s composed oval face, “she was beautiful, this poor one! Hélas that she should die this early!”

  I murmured an assent as I took the form Mr. Johnston proffered me and wrote “unknown” in the space reserved for cause of death and “about one-half hour” in the place allotted for duration of last illness.

  “Gosh, Doc, he’s a queer one, that foreign friend of yours,” the undertaker commented, attracting my attention with a nudge and nodding toward de Grandin. The little Frenchman was bending over the casket, his blond, waxed mustache twitching like the whiskers of an alert tomcat, his slender, womanish hands patting the girl’s arms and breast questioningly, as though they sought the clue to her mysterious death beneath the folds of her robe.

  “He’s queer, all right,” I agreed, “but I’ve never seen him do anything without good reason. Why—”

  A faltering step in the hall cut short my remark as Mr. Drigo entered the parlor. “Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge,” he greeted with a courteous bow. “Dr. de Grandin”—as I presented the Frenchman—“I am honored to make your acquaintance.”

  De Grandin nodded an absent-minded acknowledgment of the courtesy and turned away, addressing Mr. Johnston in a whisper. “You are an embalmer, my friend?” he asked, almost eagerly, it seemed to me.

  “Yes,” answered the other, wonderingly. “I’ve had a license to practice for ten years.”

  “And it is customary that you embalm the dead in this country, yes?” de Grandin insisted.

  “Yes, sir; but sometimes—”

  “And when embalmment is not made, it is the exception, rather than the rule?”

  “Decidedly, but—”

  “You would embalm as a matter of course, unless expressly ordered to the contrary, then?”

  “Yes,” Johnston admitted.

  “Ah, then, was it Monsieur Drigo who forbade that you embalm his daughter?”

  The undertaker started as though pricked with a needle. “How did you know?” he demanded.

  The ghost of one of his impish smiles flickered across de Grandin’s face, to be replaced instantly with a look more suited to the occasion. “In France, my friend,” he confided, “the science of embalming, as practised in America, is still a rarity. But in Paris we have a young man, a Canadian, who preserves the dead even as you do here, and from him I have learn many things.
I have, for example, learned that you inject the preserving fluids in either the brachial, the carotid, the axillary or the femoral artery. Très bien, if you have embalmed this poor child here, you have used one of those arteries, n’est-ce-pas? The chances are that an American embalmer would not utilize the femoral artery to embalm a woman’s body, so I feel to see if you have bandaged the arm or breast of that poor dead child where you have inserted your fluid-tube in one of those other arteries. I find no bandage; I feel her cheeks, they are firm as life; therefore, I decide embalmment have not been done, and, knowing your custom here, I ask to know who have ordered the contrary. Voilà, it are not magic which make me know, but the ordinary sense of the horse.”

  He linked his arm in mine. “Come, Friend Trowbridge,” he announced, “there is no more we can do here. Let us leave this sad house to its sorrow. Tomorrow, or the next day, perhaps, you will have more of these so mysterious cases, and we can study them together. Meanwhile, let us leave what we can not help.”

  The three of us, Johnston, de Grandin and I, were about to pass from the house when the Frenchman paused, gazing intently at a life-sized half-length portrait in oils hanging on the hall wall. “Monsieur Drigo,” he asked, “forgive my unseemly curiosity, but that gentleman, who was he?”

  Something like terror appeared in the other’s face as he answered, “My grandfather, sir.”

  “Ah, but Monsieur,” de Grandin objected, “that gentleman, he wears the British uniform, is it not so?”

  “Yes,” Drigo replied. “My mother’s father was a British officer, her mother was a Portuguese lady.”

  “Thank you,” de Grandin replied with a bow as he followed me through the front door.

  THEY BURIED RAMALHA DRIGO in the little graveyard of the Catholic chapel the following day. It was a dreary ceremony, no one but the old priest, the Drigo family, de Grandin and I were in attendance, and the wailing March wind seemed echoing our own somber thoughts as it soughed through the branches of the leafless Lombardy poplars.

  “It is old, that cemetery?” de Grandin hazarded as we drove from the church to my house following the brief committal service.

  “Very old,” I assented. “St. Benedict’s is one of the earliest Roman Catholic parishes in New Jersey, and the cemetery is one of the few in this neighborhood dating back to Colonial days.”

  “And have you noticed any strange colored men in the neighborhood lately?” he asked irrelevantly.

  “Strange colored men?” I echoed. “What in the world are you driving at, de Grandin? First you ask me if the cemetery is old, then you go off at a tangent, and want to know if there are any strange Negroes in the neighborhood. You—”

  “Tell me, my friend,” he interrupted, “how did the poor dead lady spend her time? Did she walk much in the country, or go from home much in the night?”

  “For heaven’s sake!” I looked at him in wonderment, and almost ran the car into the roadside ditch. “Have you lost your senses completely, or are you trying to see how foolish you can be? I never heard such rambling questions!”

  “Nor have you ever heard that the longest way round is usually the shortest way home, apparently,” he added. “Believe me, my friend, I do not ask aimless questions. But no, that is not my method. Come, if you will set me down I shall walk through the village and attempt to collect some information. My regards to your amiable cook, if you please, and request that she will prepare some of her so excellent apple pie for dinner. I shall be home by meal time, never fear.”

  HE WAS AS GOOD as his word. It lacked twenty minutes of the dinner hour when he hurried into the house, his cheeks reddened from brisk walking in the chilly March air. But something in his manner, his nervously quick movements, his air of suppressed excitement, told me he was on the track of some fresh mystery.

  “Well, what is it?” I asked as we adjourned to the library after dinner. “Have you heard anything of the strange colored men you were so anxious about this afternoon?” I could not forbear a malicious grin as I reminded him of his senseless question.

  “But of course,” he returned evenly as he lighted a French cigarette and blew a cloud of acrid smoke toward the ceiling. “Am I not Jules de Grandin, and does not Jules de Grandin get the information he seeks? At all times? Most certainly.”

  He laughed outright at the amazed look with which I greeted his egotistical sally. “La la, Friend Trowbridge,” he exclaimed, “you are so droll! Always you Americans and English would have the world believe you have yourselves in perfect control, yet I can play upon you as a harpist plays upon his strings. When will you learn that my honest, well-merited self-respect is not empty boastfulness?”

  He cast aside his bantering manner and leaned forward very suddenly. “What do you know of St. Benedict’s cemetery?” he demanded.

  “Eh, St. Benedict’s—?” I countered, at a loss to answer.

  “Precisely, exactly,” he affirmed. “Do you, for example, know that the entire ground near the old chapel is underlaid with ancient tombs—vaulted, brick-lined passageways?”

  “No,” I replied. “Never heard such a thing.”

  “Ah, so?” he answered sarcastically. “All your life you have lived here, yet you know naught of this curiosity. Truly, I have said not half enough in praise of Jules de Grandin, I fear. And, since you know nothing of the tombs, I take it you did not know that when the Drigo family became affiliated with St. Benedict’s congregation they bought the freehold to a pew, and, along, with it, the license to bury their dead in one of the old tombs. Eh, you did not know that?”

  “Of course not,” I returned. “I’m a physician, not a detective, de Grandin. Why should I pry into my patients’ private affairs?”

  “U’m, why, indeed?” he replied. Then, with an abrupt change of subject: “Have you heard Beinhauer’s new hypothesis concerning catabolism? No?” And with that he launched on a long and highly technical explanation of the Austrian’s theory of destructive metabolism, nor could all my efforts drag him back to a single word concerning his discoveries of the afternoon.

  “PRETTY BAD BUSINESS, DOWN to th’ graveyard, ain’t it, Doc?” asked the postman as I passed him on my way to my morning calls the following day.

  “What’s that?” I asked, startled. “What’s happened?”

  He smiled with the conscious superiority of one who has interesting gossip to retail. “That Drigo girl”—he jerked an indicative thumb in the general direction of the Drigo home,—“th’ one that died th’ other day. Some grave robbers musta dug her up last night, ’cause th’ sexton of St. Benedict’s found her veil layin’ on th’ ground this mornin’. They’re goin’ to open her grave this afternoon to see if her body’s still there, I hear. ’Tain’t likely they’ll find nothin’, though; them body-snatchers don’t usually leave nothin’ layin’ around when they get through.”

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Grave robbery?”

  “Yep; that’s what they say.”

  I hurried on my way, my thoughts racing faster than the wheels of my motor. It was all too likely. Gossip of the mysterious cause of the girl’s death was bound to have got about, and her lovely body would have proved an irresistibly attractive bait for some anatomist with a passion for morbid research. At my first stop I called the house and told de Grandin.

  “Cordieu! Is it so!” he shouted in answer. “I have won my bet, then!”

  “You—what?” I replied incredulously.

  “Last night, when I had learned what I had learned, I wagered with myself that she would not remain grave-bound,” he replied. “Now I have won. This afternoon I go to witness the exhumation; but it is little more than a waste of time. She will not be there. On that I bet myself ten francs.”

  “What the devil—” I began, but a sharp click told me he had hung up. Three minutes later, when I reestablished communication with the office, Nora told me that the “furrin gintilman” had “gone down th’ road as if th’ Little Good Paypul wuz aftther ’im.”


  BY FOUR O’CLOCK THAT afternoon the entire village was buzzing with the gruesome news of the rifling of Ramalha Drigo’s grave. Father Lamphier, the aged parish priest of St. Benedict’s, wrung his hands in an agony of vicarious suffering for the girl’s distracted parents; Arthur Lesterton, the county prosecutor, vowed legal vengeance on the miscreants; Duffey, the police chief, gave an interview to a reporter from our one and only evening paper declaring that the police had several suspects under surveillance and expected to make an early arrest. Indignation was at fever heat; everybody made endless impracticable suggestions, nobody did anything. In all the town there seemed only two calm people: Ricardo Drigo, Ramalha’s father, and Jules de Grandin.

  Drigo thanked me courteously when I expressed sympathy for his misfortune, and said quietly, “It is fate, Doctor. It can not be escaped.” De Grandin nodded his head sapiently once or twice, and said nothing at all. But the glitter of his little blue eyes and the occasional nervous twitching of his slender white hands told me he was seething inwardly.

  We ate dinner in silence, I with no appetite at all, de Grandin with a gusto which seemed to me, in the circumstances, hardly decent.

  Each of us took a book in the library after dinner, and several hours passed in gloomy quiet.

  Suddenly: “The time approaches, Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin exclaimed, shutting his book with a snap and rising from his chair.

  “Eh?” I answered wonderingly.

  “We go; we observe; perhaps we find that answer to this sacré riddle tonight,” he replied.

  “Go? Observe?” I echoed stupidly.

  “But certainly. Have I been going hither and elsewhere all this time to sit idly by when the opportunity to act has come? Your coat, my friend, and your hat! We go to that St. Benedict’s cemetery. Right away, at once, immediately. This night, perhaps, I show you that which you have never seen before.”