The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “But—” I began, when he shut me off with a quick gesture.

  “In the churchyard of Saint David’s this repentant Monsieur Richard Thompson did say. May I inquire, Friend Trowbridge, if there be such a church in the neighborhood? Assuredly there was once, for does he not say, ‘hard by Harrison’s village,’ and might that not have been the early designation of your present city of Harrisonville?”

  “U’m—why, yes, by George!” I exclaimed. “You’re right, de Grandin. There is a Saint David’s church down in the old East End—a Colonial parish, too; one of the first English churches built after the British took Jersey over from the Dutch. Harrisonville was something of a seaport in those days, and there was a bad reef a few miles offshore. I’ve been told the church was built and endowed with the funds derived from salvaging cargo from ships stranded on the reef. The parish dates back to 1670 or ’71, I believe.”

  “H’m-m.” De Grandin extracted a vile-smelling French cigarette from his black-leather case, applied a match to it and puffed furiously a moment, then slowly expelled a twin column of smoke from his nostrils. “And ‘dies natalis invicti’ our so scholarly Monsieur Richard wrote as the time for visiting this churchyard. What can that be but the time of Bonhomme Noël—the Christmas season? Parbleu, my friends, I think, perhaps, we shall go to that churchyard and acquire a most excellent Christmas gift for ourselves. Tonight is December 22, tomorrow should he near enough for us to begin our quest. We meet here tomorrow night to try our fortune, n’est-ce-pas?”

  Crazy and harebrained as the scheme sounded, both Eric and I were carried away by the little Frenchman’s enthusiasm, and nodded vigorous agreement.

  “Bon,” he cried, “très bon! One more drink, my friends, then let us go dream of the golden wheat awaiting our harvesting.”

  “But see here, Dr. de Grandin,” Eric Balderson remarked, “since you’ve told us what this message is written on this business looks more serious to me. Suppose there’s really something in this curse old Thompson speaks of? We won’t be doing ourselves much service by ignoring it, will we?”

  “Ah bah,” returned the little Frenchman above the rim of his half-drained glass. “A curse, you do say. Young Monsieur, I can plainly perceive you do not know Jules de Grandin, A worm-eaten fig for the curse! Me, I can curse as hard and as violently as any villainous old sea-robber who ever sank a ship or slit a throat!”

  2

  THE BLEAK DECEMBER WIND which had been moaning like a disconsolate banshee all afternoon had brought its threatened freight of snow about nine o’clock and the factory- and warehouse-lined thoroughfares of the unfashionable part of town where old Saint David’s church stood were noiseless and white as ghost-streets in a dead city when de Grandin, Eric Balderson and I approached the churchyard pentice shortly before twelve the following night. The hurrying flakes had stopped before we left the house, however, and through the wind-driven pluvial clouds the chalk-white winter moon and a few stars shone frostily.

  “Cordieu, I might have guessed as much!” de Grandin exclaimed in exasperation as he tried the iron grille stopping the entrance to the church’s little close and turned away disgustedly. “Locked—locked fast as the gates of hell against escaping sinners, my friends,” he announced. “It would seem we must swarm over the walls, and—”

  “And get a charge of buckshot in us when the caretaker sees us,” Eric interrupted gloomily.

  “No fear, mon vieux,” de Grandin returned with a quick grin. “Me, I have not been idle this day. I did come here to reconnoiter during the afternoon—morbleu, but I did affect the devotion at evensong before I stepped outside to survey the terrain!—and many things I discovered. First, this church stands like a lonely outpost in a land whence the expeditionary force has been withdrawn. Around here are not half a dozen families enrolled on the parish register. Were it not for churchly pride and the fact that heavy endowments of the past make it possible to support this chapel as a mission, it would have been closed long ago. There is no resident sexton, no curé in residence here. Both functionaries dwell some little distance away. As for the cimetière, no interments have been permitted here for close on fifty years. The danger of grave-robbers is nil, so also is the danger of our finding a night watchman. Come, let us mount the wall.”

  It was no difficult feat scaling the six-foot stone barricade surrounding Saint David’s little God’s Acre, and we were standing ankle-deep in fresh snow within five minutes, bending our heads against the howling midwinter blast and casting about for some starting-point in our search.

  Sinking to his knees in the lee of an ancient holly tree, de Grandin drew out his pocket electric torch and scanned the copy of Richard Thompson’s cryptic directions. “H’m,” he murmured as he flattened the paper against the bare ground beneath the tree’s outspread, spiked branches, “what is it the estimable Monsieur Thompson says in his so execrable poetry? ‘When the star shines from the tree.’ Name of three hundred demented green monkeys, when does a star shine from a tree, Friend Trowbridge?”

  “Maybe he meant a Christmas tree,” I responded with a weak attempt at flippancy, but the little Frenchman was quick to adopt the suggestion.

  “Morbleu, I think you have right, good friend,” he agreed with a nod. “And what tree is more in the spirit of Noël than the holly? Come, let us take inventory.”

  Slowly, bending his head against the wind, yet thrusting it upward from the fur collar of his greatcoat like a turtle emerging from its shell every few seconds, he proceeded to circle every holly and yew tree in the grounds, observing them first from one angle, then another, going so near that he stood within their shadows, then retreating till he could observe them without withdrawing his chin from his collar. At last:

  “Nom d’un singe vert, but I think I have it!” he ejaculated. “Come and see.”

  Joining him, we gazed upward along the line indicated by his pointing finger. There, like a glass ornament attached to the tip of a Yuletide tree, shone and winked a big, bright star—the planet Saturn.

  “So far, thus good,” he murmured, again consulting the cryptogram. “‘Be it as a sign to ye,’ says our good Friend Thompson. Très bien, Monsieur, we have heeded the sign—now for the summons.

  “‘Draw ye fourteen cubit line’—about two hundred and fifty-two of your English inches, or, let us say, twenty-one feet,” he muttered. “Twenty-one feet, yes; but which way? ‘To the entrance unto life.’ U’m, what is the entrance to life in a burying-ground, par le mort d’un chat noir? A-a-ah? Perhaps yes; why not?”

  As he glanced quickly this way and that, his eyes had come to rest on a slender stone column, perhaps three feet high, topped by a wide, bowl-like capital. Running through the snow to the monument, de Grandin brushed the clinging flakes from the bowl’s lip and played the beam of his flashlight on it. “You see?” he asked with a delighted laugh.

  Running in a circle about the weathered stone was the inscription:

  SANCTVS, SANCTVS, SANCTVS

  Vnleff a man be borne again of VVater &

  Ye Holy Spirit he fhall in nowife …

  The rest of the lettering had withered away with the alternate frosts and thaws of more than two hundred winters.

  “Why, of course!” I exclaimed with a nod of understanding. “A baptismal font—‘the entrance unto life,’ as old Thompson called it.”

  “My friend,” de Grandin assured me solemnly, “there are times when I do not entirely despair of your intellect, but where shall we find that much-cursed spot of which Monsieur—”

  “Look, look, for God’s sake!” croaked Eric Balderson, grasping my arm in his powerful hand till I winced under the pressure. “Look there, Dr. Trowbridge—it’s opening!”

  The moon, momentarily released from a fetter of drifting clouds, shot her silver shafts down to the clutter of century-old monuments in the churchyard, and, twenty feet or so from us, stood one of the old-fashioned boxlike grave-markers of Colonial times. As we looked at it in compliance wi
th Eric’s panic-stricken announcement, I saw the stone panel nearest us slowly slide back like a shutter withdrawn by an invisible hand.

  “Sa-ha, it lies this way, then?” de Grandin whispered fiercely, his small, white teeth fairly chattering with eagerness. “Let us go, my friends; let us investigate. Name of a cockroach, but this is the bonne aventure!

  “No, my friend,” he pushed me gently back as I started toward the tomb, “Jules de Grandin goes first.”

  It was not without a shudder of repulsion that I followed my little friend through the narrow opening in the tomb, for the air inside the little enclosure was black and terrible, and solid-looking as if formed of ebony. But there was no chance to draw back, for close behind me, almost as excited as the Frenchman, pressed Eric Balderson.

  The boxlike tomb was but the bulkhead above a narrow flight of stone stairs, steep-pitched as a ship’s accommodation ladder, I discovered almost as soon as I had crawled inside, and with some maneuvering I managed to turn about in the narrow space and back down the steps.

  Twenty steps, each about eight inches high, I counted as I descended to find myself in a narrow, stone-lined passageway which afforded barely room for us to walk in single file.

  Marching ahead as imperturbably as though strolling down one of his native boulevards, de Grandin led the way, flashing the ray from his lantern along the smoothly paved passage. At length:

  “We are arrived, I think,” he announced. “And, unless I am mistaken, as I hope I am, we are in a cul-de-sac, as well.”

  The passage had terminated abruptly in a blank wall, and there was nothing for us to do, apparently, but edge around and retrace our steps. I was about to suggest this when a joyous exclamation from de Grandin halted me.

  Feeling along the sandstone barrier, he had sunk to his knees, prodded the stone tentatively in several places, finally come upon a slight indentation, grooved as though to furnish hand-hold.

  “Do you hold the light, Friend Trowbridge,” he directed as he thrust the ferrule of his ebony cane into the depression and gave a mighty tug. “Ah, parbleu, it comes; it comes—we are not yet at the end of our tape!”

  Resisting only a moment, the apparently solid block of stone had slipped back almost as easily as a well-oiled trap-door, disclosing an opening some three and a half feet high by twenty inches wide.

  “The light, my friend—shine the light past me while I investigate,” de Grandin breathed, stooping almost double to pass through the low doorway.

  I bent as far forward as I could and shot the beam of light over his head, and lucky for him it was I did so, for even as his head disappeared through the cleft he jerked back with an exclamation of dismay. “Ha, villain, would you so?” he rasped, snatching the keen blade from his sword cane and thrusting it through the aperture with quick, venomous stabs.

  At length, having satisfied himself that no further resistance offered beyond the wall, he sank once more to his bended knees and slipped through the hole. A moment later I heard him calling cheerfully, and, stooping quickly, I followed him, with Eric Balderson, making heavy work at jamming his great bulk through the narrow opening, bringing up the rear. De Grandin pointed dramatically at the wall we had just penetrated.

  “Morbleu, he was thorough, that one,” he remarked, inviting our attention to an odd-looking contrivance decorating the stones.

  It was a heavy ship’s boom, some six feet long, pivoted just above its center to the wall so that it swung back and forth like a gigantic pendulum. Its upper end was secured to a strand of heavily tarred cable, and fitted with a deep notch, while to its lower extremity was securely bolted what appeared to be the fluke from an old-fashioned ship’s anchor, weighing at least three stone and filed and ground to an axlike edge. An instant’s inspection of the apparatus showed us its simplicity and diabolical ingenuity. It was secured by a brace of wooden triggers in a horizontal position above the little doorway through which we had entered, and the raising of the stone-panel acted to withdraw the keepers till only a fraction of their tips supported the boom. Pressure on the sill of the doorway completed the operation, and sprung the triggers entirely back, permitting the timber with its sharpened iron tip to swing downward across the opening like a gigantic headsman’s ax, its knife-sharp blade sweeping an arc across the doorway’s top where the head of anyone entering was bound to be. But for the warning furnished by the beam of light preceding him, and the slowness of the machine’s operation after a century or more of inactivity, de Grandin would have been as cleanly decapitated by the descending blade as a convict lashed to the cradle of a guillotine.

  “But what makes the thing work?” I asked curiously. “I should think that whoever set it in place would have been obliged to spring it when he made his exit. I can’t see—”

  “S-sst!” the Frenchman cut me off sharply, pointing to the deadly engine.

  Distinctly, as we listened, came the sound of tarred hawsers straining over pulley-wheels, and the iron-shod beam began to rise slowly, once more assuming a horizontal position.

  I could feel the short hairs at the back of my neck rising in company with the boom as I watched the infernal spectacle, but de Grandin, ever fearless, always curious, wasted no time in speculation. Advancing to the wall, he laid his hand upon the cable, tugging with might and main, but without visible effect on the gradually rising spar. Giving over his effort, he laid his ear to the stones, listened intently a moment, then turned to us with one of his quick, elfish smiles. “He was clever, as well as wicked, the old villain who invented this,” he informed us. “Behold, beyond this wall is some sort of a mechanism worked by running water, my friends. When the trigger retaining this death-dealer is released, water is also undoubtlessly permitted to run from a cask or tank attached to the other end of this rope. When the knife-ax has descended and made the unwelcome visitor shorter by a head, the flowing water once more fills the tank, hoists the ax again to its original position, and pouf! he are ready to behead the next uninvited guest who arrives. It are clever, yes. I much regret that we have not the time to investigate the mechanism, for I am convinced something similar opens the door through which we entered—perhaps once each year at the season of the ancient Saturnalia—but we did come here to investigate something entirely quite different, eh, Friend Balderson?”

  Recalled to our original purpose, we looked about the chamber. It was almost cubical in shape, perhaps sixteen feet long by as many wide, and slightly less in height. Save the devilish engine of destruction at the entrance, the only other fixture was a low coffin-like block of stone against the farther wall.

  Examining this, we found it fitted with hand-grips at the sides, and two or three tugs at these heaved the monolith up on end, disclosing a breast-high, narrow doorway into a second chamber, somewhat smaller than the first, and reached by a flight of some five or six stone steps.

  Quickly descending these, we found ourselves staring at a long stone sarcophagus, bare of all inscription and ornament, save the grisly emblem of the “Jolly Roger,” or piratical skull and thigh-bones, graven on the lid where ordinarily the name-plate would have rested, and a stick of dry, double-forked wood, something like a capital X in shape, which lay transversely across the pirate emblem.

  “Ah, what have we here?” inquired de Grandin coolly, approaching the coffin and prying at its lid with his cane-sword.

  To my surprise, the top came away with little or no effort on our part, and we stared in fascination at the unfleshed skeleton of a short, thick-set man with enormously long arms and remarkably short, bandy legs.

  “Queer,” I muttered, gazing at the relic of mortality. “You’d have thought anyone who went to such trouble about his tomb and its safeguards would have been buried in almost regal raiment, yet this fellow seems to have been laid away naked as the day he was born. This coffin has been almost airtight for goodness knows how many years, and there ought to be some evidence of cerements left, even if the flesh has moldered away.”

  De Grandin
’s little blue eyes were shining with a sardonic light and his small, even teeth were bared beneath the line of his miniature golden mustache as he regarded me. “Naked, unclothed, without fitting cerements, do you say, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked. Prodding with his sword blade between the skeleton’s ribs a moment, he thrust the flashlight into my grip with an impatient gesture and put both hands elbow-deep into the charnel box, rummaging and stirring about in the mass of nondescript material on which the skeleton was couched. “What say you to this, and these—and these?” he demanded.

  My eyes fairly started from my face as the electric torch ray fell on the things which rippled and flashed and sparkled between the little Frenchman’s white fingers. There were chains of gold encrusted with rubies and diamonds and greenly glowing emeralds; there were crosses set with amethyst and garnet which any mitered prince of the church might have been proud to wear; there were ear- and finger-rings with brilliant settings in such profusion that I could not count them, while about the sides of the coffin were piled great stacks of broad gold pieces minted with the effigy of his most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and little hillocks of unset gems which sparkled and scintillated dazzlingly.

  “Regal raiment did you say, Friend Trowbridge?” de Grandin cried, his breath coming fast as he viewed the jewels with ecstasy. “Cordieu, where in all the world is there a monarch who takes his last repose on such a royal bed as this?”

  “It—it’s real!” Balderson breathed unbelievingly. “It wasn’t a pipe-dream, after all, then. We’re rich, men—rich! Oh, Marian, if it only weren’t too late!”

  De Grandin matter-of-factly scooped up a double handful of unset gems and deposited them in his overcoat pocket. “What use has this old drôle for all this wealth?” he demanded. “Mordieu, we shall find better use for it than bolstering up dead men’s bones! Come, my friends, bear a hand with the treasure; it is high time we were leaving this—Trowbridge, my friend, watch the light!”