“It was after this unfortunate accident that I wrote Dr. Trowbridge. Last night, however, Mr. Rodman’s experience was repeated, the wound being in the left side of his throat this time. Rodman’s a fine young chap and wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me—he told me of the second wounding privately this morning. Now it’s up to us to find out who’s behind this nonsense. I realize it may sound like a tempest in a teapot to you, but I’m prepared to pay—”
“Eh bien, Monsieur, let us postpone the talk of payment till a later time, if you please,” de Grandin put in. “I cannot say how large or small my fee should be until I know what I am called upon to do, and have done it. Meantime, if you will tell me if the beads which Mademoiselle Stephens lost were merely ornamental trinkets or a rosary, it will be of interest.”
“Er, yes, I believe such beads are called rosaries,” Swearingen returned, evidently annoyed at such a trivial technicality. “Now, if you’ve any further questions, or suggestions—” He paused expectantly.
De Grandin took his narrow chin between his thumb and forefinger, gazing thoughtfully at the floor. “Is there a guest who has not complained of loss?”
“Oh, yes, we’ve ten house guests; only those I’ve mentioned have been annoyed.”
“U’m. Perhaps you will be good enough to show us the house, Monsieur. It is well to know the terrain over which one fights.”
We made a brief survey of the establishment. It was a big, rambling building with wide halls, broad staircases and large rooms, unremarkable in any way save for the lavish manner in which it had been furnished, and offering no secret nooks or crannies for nighttime lurkers.
“This is the art gallery,” our host announced as he pushed open a wide door in the rear of the first floor. “It’s the biggest room in the place, and—what the devil!” he paused at the entrance, a frown of mixed perplexity and anger gathering on his face. “By George, this thing is ceasing to be a joke!”
We had only to follow the line of his angry glance to see its cause. Against the farther wall hung an ornate gilt frame, some four feet high by three wide. To the inner edges of the gilded moulding a narrow border of painted canvas adhered, but the picture which the frame had enclosed had obviously been cut away with a less than razor-sharp blade, since ravelled bits of mutilated fabric roughened the lips of the cut.
“This is outrageous, infamous!” stormed Swearingen, striding across the gallery and glaring at the violated frame. “By George, if I can find out who did this I’ll prosecute, guest or no guest!”
“And what was the picture which was ravished away?” de Grandin asked.
“It was a picture of the Virgin Mary—‘The Virgin of Eckartsau,’ they called it—it cost me a thousand dollars, and—”
“Tenez, Monsieur, it can not have gone far. Distinctive pictures of the Blessèd Virgin identify themselves; the thief can not easily dispose of it, and the police will have small trouble tracing it and putting reputable dealers on guard.”
“Yes, yes, of course; but this is most confoundedly mystifying. My dear man, d’ye realize everything stolen since this business started is of a religious nature?”
De Grandin’s answering stare was as expressionless as that of a china doll. “I had begun to suspect it, Monsieur,” he replied. “Now this—Cordieu, Friend Trowbridge, give attention. Do you observe it?”
With what seemed unjustified excitement he dashed across the wide room to a piece of sculpture, and as he looked at it the tips of his trim, waxed mustache twitched like the whiskers of an eager tom-cat scenting a well-fatted mouse.
It was the top portion of a medieval altar tomb, the effigy of a recumbent woman executed in what appeared to be Carrara marble lying on an oblong plinth about the chamfered edge of which ran an inscription in Romanesque capitals. The figure wore the habit of a Benedictine nun, a leather belt and knotted girdle circling the slender waist, the hands folded demurely across the breast beneath the scapular. The head, however, instead of being coiffed in a nun’s bonnet and wimple was crowned with luxuriant long hair, parted in the middle and braided in two long plaits which fell forward over the shoulders and extended nearly to the knees, and on the brow was set a narrow diademlike coronet ornamented with a row of ingeniously carved strawberry leaves. It was a beautiful face the old-time sculptor had wrought, the features delicate, regular and classical, but with an intangible something about them which went beyond mere beauty, something nearly akin to life, something which seemed subtly to respond to the gaze of the beholder.
But it was not on the lovely carven features de Grandin’s fascinated gaze rested. His eyes sped swiftly from the slender, curving throat, the gently swelling bosom and delicately rounded knees to the sandaled feet peeping beneath the hem of the monastic gown. Like those of most pietistic figures of its period the effigy’s pedal extremities were represented uncovered save for the parchment soles and narrow crossed straps of religieuse sandals. With the fidelity characteristic of the elder craftsmen the carver had shown the feet prolapsed, as was natural when the extensor muscles had lengthened in cadaveric flaccidity, but the seat of death had obscured none of their beauty. The heels were narrow and the insteps high, the toes were long, slender and fingerlike, terminating in delicately tapering ends tipped with filbert-shaped nails.
“You see?” he pointed to the nearer foot, almost, but not quite touching it with his fingertip.
“Eh?” I queried, puzzled; then, “By Jove, yes!”
Slender as patrician hands, beautifully formed as they were, the statue’s feet were anomalies. Each possessed an extra toe inserted between the long, aquiline fourth digit and the little toe.
“Odd that he should have made such a slip; he was so faithful to detail every other way,” I commented.
“U’m, one wonders,” he murmured. “Me, I should not be astonished if his faithfulness persisted even here.” He shook his head as if to clear his vision, then bent beside the plinth on which the statue lay, deciphering the inscription incised in the stone.
Although the effigy was perfect in every way, the letters of the epitaph had been defaced in several places, so we could not read the legend in its entirety. The part still legible presented considerably more of a puzzle than a key to the lady’s identity:
HIC JACET ELEANOR—A COMITISSA ARGENT …
QVAE OBUT ANNO CHRISTI MCCX …
CVJVS MISEREATVR DEVS
“Humph,” I muttered, “evidently this statue once decorated the tomb of a Countess Eleanor somebody who died sometime in the thirteenth century, but—”
“Regardez-vous, my friend!” de Grandin’s excited comment broke through my stumbling translation. “Observe this, if you please.”
Inscribed on the extreme lower edge of the plinth, faint as though scratched with a stylus, was the cryptic notation:
MAL. III, I
“What make you of it?” he demanded.
“H’m,” I hazarded, “the sculptor’s signature, perhaps?”
“Le bon Dieu knows, not I,” he admitted. “I do not think the sculptor would have signed his work thus—he would have used a chisel and his letters would have been more regularly formed. However, one guess is as good as another at this time.
“What have you to tell us of her?” he asked Swearingen who stood before his mutilated painting, oblivious of our inspection of the marble.
“Eh? Oh, that? I don’t know much about it. Picked it up at a junk shop in Newark last month. Gloomy sort o’ thing. I wouldn’t ha’ bought it if the face hadn’t struck me as being rather pretty. It can’t be very valuable. The dealer let me have it for fifty dollars, and I believe I could have had it for half that if I’d held out. He seemed anxious to get rid of it. Confounded nuisance it is, too. The boys are always flocking in here looking at it—I caught young Rodman kissing it once, and—”
“Fanons d’un têtard, do you tell me so?” the Frenchman almost shouted. “Quick, Monsieur, give me the name of that so generous junkman who parted with this bit o
f almost priceless virtu so cheaply—right away, immediately, at once!”
“Eh, what’s the hurry?” our host asked. “I don’t think—”
“Precisely, exactly, quite so; I am aware of it, but I do. The name and address, quickly, if you please. And while we are about it, when was it the young Rodman embraced this—this statue?”
“H’m, last Friday, I believe, but—”
“Morbleu, the work was swift! Come, Monsieur, I wait the dealer’s name.”
“Adolph Yellen, Dealer in Antique Furniture, Bric-à-Brac and Objets d’art,” was the legend printed on the rather soiled billhead Swearingen produced in response to de Grandin’s insistence.
WE REACHED THE DINGY little shop in Polk Street just as the proprietor was about to fasten the gratings before his windows for the night.
“Holà, mon ami,” de Grandin called as he leaped from the car and approached the stoop-shouldered, bearded shopman, “you are Monsieur Yellen, I make no doubt? If so, I would that you tell us about a certain statue—a piece of carven marble representing a reclining lady—which you sold Monsieur Swearingen of Lyman’s Landing last month.”
The little antique dealer regarded him through the astonishingly thick lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles a moment, then raised his shoulders in a racial shrug. “I do not know nuttings habout her,” he returned. “I get her at a auction sale ven der lawyers sell Meestair Pumphrey’s things. All I know, I’m gladt to be rid from her—she vas onlucky.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of buying the piece, sir,” interrupted a scholarly-looking young man who had been talking with Mr. Yellen when we arrived. “Mr. Yellen is quite right, it is an unlucky bit of virtu, and—”
“Ah, it is that you know something, then?” the Frenchman cut in. “Bon, say on, Monsieur, I listen.”
“No-o, I can’t say I know anything definite about the statue,” the young man confessed with a diffident smile, “but I admit a strong antipathy to it. I’m Jacob Silverstein, Rabbi of the Beth Israel Congregation, and it may be simply our traditional theological distaste for graven images that leads me to dislike this woman’s effigy, but I must confess the thing affected me unpleasantly from the moment I first saw it. I tried to dissuade Adolph from selling it, and asked him to present it to some museum, or, better still, break it up and throw the pieces in the river, but—”
“One moment, Monsieur le Rabbin, is there some reason you should so dislike this piece of lifeless stone. If so, I am interested, if not, parbleu, I shall listen to what you say also.”
The young Hebrew regarded de Grandin speculatively, as though debating his answer. “You heard Mr. Yellen say the image was unlucky. He bought it, as he told you, at the auction of the late Horace Pumphrey’s effects. Mr. Pumphrey was a wealthy eccentric who collected artistic oddities, and this altar tomb was the last thing he bought. Within a month of its acquisition he began to manifest unmistakable symptoms of insanity, and would have been put in restraint if he had not died by falling from a second storey window of his house. There was some gossip about suicide, but the final verdict was death by misadventure.
“The first time I saw the statue in Mr. Yellen’s shop it produced a most unpleasant sensation; rather like that one experiences when looking into a cage of snakes at the zoo—you may know you’re in no danger, but the ancient human horror of serpents rouses your unconscious fears. After that I avoided it as much as possible, but once or twice I was obliged to pass it and—it was doubtless a trick of the light falling on the figure’s features—it seemed to me the thing smiled with a sort of malicious contempt as I went by.”
The rabbi paused, a faint flush mounting to his dark, hard-shaven cheeks. “Perhaps I’m unduly prejudiced, but I’ve always attributed Sydney’s trouble to some malign influence cast by that statue. At the time he bought the image Mr. Yellen had a young man named Sydney Weitzer in his employ, a youth he’d known practically all his life, and one of the most honest and industrious boys I’ve ever seen. Two months after that statue was brought into the shop Mr. Yellen was obliged to discharge him for stealing—caught him red-handed in theft. A few nights later the police arrested him as he attempted to burglarize the store.”
“U’m?” de Grandin nodded sympathetically. “Were your losses great, Monsieur Yellen?”
“Ha, dot boy, he vas a schlemihl! Vot you t’ink he stold? Books—religious books—old Bibles, prayer books, a missal from Italy vid halluf der pages missink, a worthless old rosary and a vooden statue from a saint. Er lot of dem I vouldn’t gaff you terventy dollars for!”
“Am I to understand that he confined himself to stealing worthless religious objects?”
Mr. Yellen lifted an expressive shoulder. “Dey vas all I had. I don’t buy moch religious stoffot goes by der richer dealers, but vunce in a vile I get some vid a job-lot of t’ings. Efferyt’ing of der kind in der shop that schlemihl stole. Vot he did vid dem Gott only knows. Nobody vid sense vould haff paid him money for dem. Oh, vell,”—he waved his hand in a gesture of finality—“vot can you eggspeck from a crazy feller, anyhow?”
“Crazy—”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Rabbi Silverstein broke in. “When Sydney came to trial for attempted burglary his only explanation was to say, ‘She made me do it—I had to go to her.’ He could not or would not explain who ‘she’ was, but begged so piteously to be allowed to return to her that the magistrate committed him for observation. Later he was sent to an asylum.”
On Jules de Grandin’s face there was the absorbed, puzzled look of one attempting to recall a verse or tune that eludes memory. “This is most odd, Monsieur. You think—”
The rabbi smiled deprecatingly. “It’s prejudice, no doubt, but I do associate that statue with Mr. Pumphrey’s death and Sydney’s otherwise inexplicable aberration. The regiment with which I served as chaplain passed through Valence en route to Italy, and made a short halt there. While going through the town I heard a story which might almost apply here. Not far from the city there is the ruin of an old château fort, and the country people tell a gruesome legend of a woman called the ‘Silver Countess’ who—”
“Mord d’un chat! vie d’un coq!” de Grandin cried. “But that is it! Since first I saw her lying there so sweetly innocent in six-toed sleep I’ve wondered what the keynote to this melody of mystery can be. Now, thanks to you, Monsieur le Rabbin, I have it! Adieu, you have been of the greatest help. Friend Trowbridge, we must hasten back to Lyman’s Landing. It is imperative.” He bowed courteously to the Jewish gentlemen and fairly dragged me to the waiting car.
“Past a book shop, my friend,” he told me. “We must consult a Bible, right away, at once, immediately, and all too well I realize we shall find none at Monsieur Swearingen’s.”
I drove slowly through the downtown section and finally located a small secondhand book store. De Grandin hurried in and came back in a moment with a small black volume in his hand. “Attend me, my old one,” he ordered, “what is the final book of the Old Testament?”
“H’m,” I ransacked memory for forgotten Sunday School teachings, “Malachi, isn’t it?”
“Bravo! And how would you designate the first verse of the third chapter of that book if you wrote it.” He thrust a pencil and notebook at me.
After a moment’s thought I scribbled “Mal. iii, 1,” and returned the book to him.
“Précisément!” he exulted. “Now, concentrate. Where have you seen precisely that citation recently—within the last six hours?”
“U’m” I knit my brows. “Why, that’s what we saw scratched on the plinth of that statue—”
“But yes, of course; certainly! Now, see this. That verse commences: ‘Behold, I will send my messenger.’ What does it mean?”
“Nothing, as far as I’m concerned,” I confessed. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Perhaps not, perhaps so,” he replied thoughtfully. “But of this I am sure: The lady of the six toes who lies at Monsieur Swearingen’s is undoubtlessly t
he ‘Silver Countess’ of whom Monsieur le Rabbin spoke. Does not her epitaph proclaim, ‘Hic Jacet Eleanora comitissa,’ which is to say, ‘Here lies the Countess Eleanor’? Yes, of course. And though the terminal of the next word is broken we have left the letters a-r-g-e-n-t, which undoubtlessly might be completed as argentum, signifying silver in the Latin, n’est-ce-pas?”
“I dare say,” I conceded, “but who the devil was this Silver Countess, and what was it she did?”
“That I do not certainly remember,” he admitted ruefully. “One little head is far too small to hold the multitude of legends about wicked ladies of the past. However, at the earliest chance I shall ask my friend Dr. Jacoby of the Musée Metropolitan. That man knows every bit of scandal in the world, provided the events took place not later than the fifteenth century!”
THE LONG SUMMER TWILIGHT had deepened into dusk by the time we reached Lyman’s Landing, and the wide, tree-shaded lawn was like a picture executed in silver and onyx mosaics. “My word,” I exclaimed enthusiastically, “it’s beautiful, isn’t it? Like a bit of fairyland.”
“Ha, fairyland, yes,” he agreed. “Like fairyland where pixies lure mortals to their doom and Morgaine la Fée queens it over her court of succubi.”
We had barely time to change for dinner before the meal was announced, and course followed heavy course, red and white, dry and sweet wines accompanying the food, and cognac bland as May and potent as December complementing coffee, which was served on the terrace.
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