The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  Had the loathsomeness been unrelieved by contrasting comeliness, the effect would have been less shocking; as it was, the hideous face inlaid between the perfect body and glowing, ruddy-diadem of hair was like the sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred picture—as though the oval of the Sistine Virgin’s face were cut from the canvas and the sardonic, grinning features of a Punchinello thrust through the aperture.

  To his everlasting credit, de Grandin did not flinch. Debonair as though at any social gathering, he bowed the monstrous creature to a chair and launched a continuous flow of conversation. All the while I could see his eyes returning again and again to the hideous countenance across the table, his keen surgeon’s mind surveying the grotesque features and weighing his chances of success against the almost foregone certainty of failure.

  THE ORDEAL LASTED SOMETHING like half an hour, and my nerves had stretched to the snapping point when sudden diversion came.

  With a wild, frantic movement the girl leaped up, oversetting her chair, and faced us, her misdirected eyes rolling with a horrible ludicrousness in their sockets, tears of shame and self-pity welling from them and coursing down the sides of her grotesque face. Her wide, cavernous mouth opened obliquely and she gave scream after scream of shrill, tortured anguish. “I know; I know!” she cried frenziedly. “Don’t think you’ve fooled me by taking all the mirrors from the house, Father! Remember, I go about the woods at will, and there are pools of quiet water in the woods! I know I’m hideous; I know I’m so repulsive that even the servants who wait on us must be blind! I’ve seen my face reflected in the moat and the swamp; I saw the horror in your eyes when you first looked at me, Dr. de Grandin; I noticed how Dr. Trowbridge couldn’t bear even to glance at me just now without a shudder! Oh, God of mercy, why haven’t I had courage to kill myself before?—Why did I live till I met strangers and saw them turn from me with loathing? Why—”

  “Mademoiselle, be still!” de Grandin’s sharp, incisive command cut through her hysterical words and stung her to silence. “You lament unnecessarily,” he continued as she turned her goggling toad-eyes toward him. “Monsieur, your father, bids you come to us for a specific purpose; namely, that I inspect your countenance and give him my opinion as a surgeon concerning the possibility of cure. Attend me: I tell you I can so reshape your features that you shall be completely beautiful; you shall grace the salons of Washington, of New York, of Paris, and you shall have young men to do you honor and lay their kisses thick upon your hands and lips, and breathe their tales of love into your ears; you—”

  A shriek of wild, incredulous laughter silenced him. “I? I have admirers—lovers? Dear God—the bitterness of the mockery! I am doomed to spend my life among the snakes and toads, the bats and salamanders of the swamps, a thing as hideous as the ugliest of them, cut off from all my kind, and—”

  “Your fate may be a worse one, unless I can prevent it,” Ducharme broke in with an odd, dry croaking voice.

  We turned on him by common consent as he rasped his direful prophecy. His long, goat-like face was working spasmodically; I could see the tendons of his thin neck contracting as he swallowed nervously, and the sad, bitter lips beneath the drooping gray mustache twisted into a smile that was more than half a snarl as he gazed at de Grandin and his daughter in turn.

  “You wondered why I greeted you with suspicion when you came asking food and shelter last night, gentlemen?” he asserted rather than asked, looking from the Frenchman to me. “This is why:

  “As I told you last night, the Ducharmes have lived here since long before the first English colony was planted in Virginia. Although our plantation has been all but eaten up by the swamps, the family wealth holds out, and I am what is counted a rich man, even in these days of swollen fortunes. It was the custom of our family for generations to send their women to a convent at Rheims for education; the young men were sent to Oxford or Cambridge, Paris or Vienna, occasionally to Louvain or Heidelberg, and their training was completed by the grand tour.

  “I followed the family tradition and studied at the Sorbonne when my undergraduate work at Oxford was completed. It was while I lived in Paris I met Inocencia. She was an Argentina—a native of the Argentine, a dancer in a cabaret, and as lovely a creature as ever set a man’s blood afire. All the students were mad about her, but Ruiz, a fellow-countryman of hers, and I were the most favored of her coterie of suitors.

  “Leandro Ruiz was a medical student, the son of an enormously wealthy cattleman, who took to surgery from an innate love of blood and suffering rather than from any wish to serve humanity or earn a livelihood, for he already had more money than he could ever spend, and as for humanitarianism, the devil himself had more of it.

  “One night as I sat studying, there came a terrified rapping at my door, and Inocencia fell, rather than ran, into my rooms. She had struggled through the raging sleet-storm from Montmartre, and Ruiz was hot behind her. He had accosted her as she left the café, and demanded that she come forthwith and consort with him—there never was an honorable thought in the scoundrel’s mind, and what he could not buy he was accustomed to take by force.

  “I had barely time to lock and bar the door when Ruiz and three hired bullies came clamoring up the stairs and battered on the panels like werewolves shut out from their prey. Ha, I left my mark on him that night! As he stooped down to bawl obscenities through the keyhole I thrust, a sword-cane through the lock and blinded him in one eye. Despite his wound he hung around the door nearly all night, and it was not till two gendarmes threatened him and his companions with arrest for public disturbance that they slunk away.

  “Next morning Inocencia and I arranged to be married, and as soon as the formalities of French-law could be complied with, we were wed and made a tour of Europe for our honeymoon. When we returned to Paris we heard Ruiz had contracted pneumonia the night he raged outside my quarters in the sleet, and had died and been buried in St. Sulpice. Ha, you may be sure we shed no tears at the news!

  “I was nearly thirty, Inocencia barely twenty, when we married. It was not till ten years later that Clarimonde was born, and when at last we had a child to crown our union we thought our cup of joy was surely overflowing. God!” He paused, poured himself a goblet of wine and drained it to the bottom before continuing:

  “No hired bonne was good enough to take our darling out; Inocencia herself accompanied her on every outing and filled the afternoons with recitals of the thousand cunning things our baby did and said while toddling in the park.

  “One day they did not return. I was frantic and set the entire gendarmerie by the ears to search for them. Nowhere could we find a trace till finally my wife’s dead body, partly decomposed, but still identifiable, was rescued from the Seine. Police investigation disclosed she had been murdered—her throat severed and her heart cut out, but not before a hundred and more disfiguring wounds had been inflicted with a knife.

  “My baby’s fate was still unknown, and I lived for weeks and months in a frenzy of mingled despair and hope till—” Again he paused; once more he filled and drained a wine-glass. Then: “At last my fears were set at rest. At daylight one morning the thin, pitiful wailing of a little frightened child sounded at my door, and when the concierge went to investigate she found Clarimonde lying there in a basket. Clarimonde, my Clarimonde, her mother’s sole remaining souvenir, dressed in the baby garments she had worn the day she vanished, positively identified by the little, heart-shaped birthmark on the under side of her left arm, but, my God, how altered! Her face, gentlemen, was as you see it now, a dreadful, disfigured, mutilated mask of horror, warped and carved and twisted almost out of human semblance, save as the most grotesque caricature resembles the thing it parodies. And with her was a letter, a letter from Leandro Ruiz. The fiend had caused the report of his death to be given us, and bided his time through all the years, always studying and experimenting in plastic surgery that he might one day carry out his terrible revenge, watching Inocencia and Clarimonde when they least suspec
ted it, familiarizing himself with their habits and ways so that he might best set his apaches on them and kidnap them when the time was ripe for his devil’s vengeance. After dishonoring and torturing Inocencia, he killed her slowly—cut her heart from her living breast before he slashed her throat. The next three months he spent carefully disfiguring the features of our baby, adding horror on horror to the poor, helpless face as though he were a sculptor working out the details of a statue with slow, painstaking care. At last, when even he could think of nothing more to add to the devastation he had made, he laid the poor, mutilated mite on my doorstep with a note describing his acts, and containing the promise that all his life and all his boundless wealth would be devoted to making his revenge complete.

  “You wonder how he could do more? Gentlemen, you can not think how vile humanity can be until you’ve known Leandro Ruiz. Listen: When Clarimonde reaches her twenty-first year, he said he would come for her. If death had taken him meanwhile, he would leave a sum of money to pay those who carried out his will. He, or his hirelings, would come for her, and though she hid behind locked doors and armed men, they would ravish her away, cut out her tongue to render her incapable of speech, then exhibit her for hire in a freak show—make my poor, disfigured baby girl the object of yokels’ gawking curiosity throughout the towns and provinces of Europe and South America!

  “I fled from Paris as Lot fled from Sodom, and brought my poor, maimed child to Ducharme Hall. Here I secured Minerva and Poseidon for servants, because both were blind and could not let fall any remarks which would make Clarimonde realize her deformity. I secured blind teachers and tutors; she is as well educated as any seminary graduate; every luxury that money could buy has been given her, but never has there been a mirror in Ducharme Hall, or anything which could serve as a mirror, since we came here from Paris.

  “Now, gentlemen, perhaps you understand the grounds for my suspicions? Clarimonde was twenty-one this month.”

  Jules de Grandin twisted the fine, blond hairs of his diminutive mustache until they stood out in twin needle-points each side of his mouth, and fixed a level, unwinking stare upon our host. “Monsieur,” he said, “a moment hence I was all for going to the North; I would have argued to the death against a moment’s delay which kept me from performing the necessary work to restore Mademoiselle Clarimonde’s features to their pristine loveliness. Now, parbleu, five men and ten little boys could not drag me from this spot. We shall wait here, Monsieur, we shall stay here, rooted as firmly as the tallest oak in yonder forest, until this Monsieur Ruiz and his corps of assassins appear. Then”—he twisted the ends of his mustache still more fiercely, and the lightning-flashes in his little, round eyes were cold as arctic ice and hot as volcanic fire—“then, by damn, I think those seventy-six-thousand-times accursed miscreants shall find that he who would step into the hornet’s nest would be advised to wear heavy boots. Yes; I have said it.”

  FROM THAT NIGHT DUCHARME Hall was more like a castle under siege than ever. In terror of abduction Clarimonde no longer roamed the woods, and Mr. Ducharme, de Grandin or I was always on lookout for any strangers who might appear inside the walled park. A week, ten days passed quietly, and we resumed our plans for returning North, where the deformed girl’s face could receive expert surgical treatment.

  “I shall give Mademoiselle Clarimonde my undivided attention until all is accomplished,” de Grandin told me as we lay in bed one evening while the October wind soughed and moaned through the locust-trees bordering the avenue and a pack of tempest-driven storm clouds harried the moon like hounds pursuing a fleeing doe. “With your permission I shall leave your house and take up residence in the hospital, Friend Trowbridge, and neither day nor night shall I be beyond call of the patient. I shall—

  “Attendez, voilà les assassins!” Faintly as the scuffing of a dried twig against the house, there came the gentle sound of something scratching against the rubble-stone of the wall.

  For a moment the Frenchman lay rigid; then with bewildering quickness he leaped from the bed, bundled the sheets and pillows together in simulation of a person covered with bedclothes, and snatched down one of the heavy silken cords binding back the draperies which hung in mildewed festoons, between the mahogany posts. “Silence!” he cautioned, tiptoeing across the chamber and taking his station beside the open casement. “No noise, my friend, but if it is possible, do you creep forward and peer out, then tell me what it is you see.”

  Cautiously, I followed his instructions, rested my chin upon the wide stone window-sill and cast a hurried glance down the wall.

  Agilely as a cat, a man encased in close-fitting black jersey and tights was scaling the side of the house by aid of a hooked ladder similar to those firemen use. Behind him came a companion, similarly costumed and equipped, and even as I watched them I could not but marvel at the almost total silence in which they swarmed up the rough stones.

  I whispered my discovery to de Grandin, and saw him nod once understandingly. “Voleurs de nuit—professional burglars,” he pronounced. “He chose expert helpers, this one. Let us await them.”

  A moment later there was a soft, rubbing sound as a long steel hook, well wrapped in tire-tape, crept like a living thing across the window-sill, and was followed in a moment by a slender and none too clean set of fingers which reached exploringly through the casement.

  In another instant a head covered by a tight-fitting black jersey cowl loomed over the sill, the masked eyes peered searchingly about the candlelit room; then, apparently satisfied that someone occupied the bed and slept soundly, the intruder crept agilely across the sill, landed on the stone floor with a soft thud and cleared the space between bed and window in a single feline leap.

  There was the glint of candlelight on sharpened steel and a fiendish-looking stiletto flashed downward in a murderous arc and buried itself to the hilt in the pillow which lay muffled in the blankets where I had lain two minutes before.

  Like a terrier pouncing on a rat de Grandin leaped on the assassin’s shoulders. While awaiting the intruder’s advent he had looped the strong curtain cord into a running noose, and as he landed on the other’s back, driving his face down among the bedding and effectively smothering outcry, he slipped the strangling string about the burglar’s throat, drew it tight with a single dexterous jerk, then crossed its ends and pulled them as one might pull the draw-string of a sack. “Ha, good Monsieur le Meurtrier,” he whispered exultantly, “I serve you a dish for which you have small belly, n’est-ce-pas? Eat your fill, my friend, do not stint yourself, Jules de Grandin has plentiful supply of such food for you!

  “So!” He straightened quickly and whipped the cord from his captive’s throat. “I damnation think you will give us small trouble for some time, my friend. Attention, Friend Trowbridge, the other comes!”

  Once more he took his place beside the window, once more he cast his strangling cord as a masked head protruded into the room. In a moment two black-clad, unconscious forms lay side by side upon the bed.

  “Haste, my friend, dépêchez vous,” he ordered, beginning to disrobe our prisoners as he spoke. “I do dislike to ruin Monsieur Ducharme’s bedding, but we must work with what we have. Tear strips from the sheets and bind these unregenerate sons of pigs fast. There is no time to lose; a moment hence and we must don their disguises and perform that which they set out to do.”

  We worked feverishly, tying the two desperadoes in strip after strip of linen ripped from the sheets, gagging them, blindfolding them; finally, as an added precaution, lashing their hands and feet to the head—and footposts of the bed. Then, shedding our pajamas, we struggled into the tightfitting jerseys the prisoners had worn. The stocking-like garments were clammily wet and chilled me to the marrow as I drew them on, but the Frenchman gave me no time for complaint. “Allons, en route, make haste!” he ordered.

  Leaving the unconscious thugs to such meditations as they might have upon regaining consciousness, we hastened to Ducharme’s chamber.

&nb
sp; “Fear not, it is I,” de Grandin called as he beat imperatively on our host’s door. “In our chamber repose two villains who gained entrance by means of scaling ladders—from the feel of their clothes, which we now wear, I should say they swam your moat. We go now to lower the drawbridge and let the master villain in. Do you be ready to receive him!”

  “Holà!” he called a moment later as we let ourselves out the front door and lowered the drawbridge. “Come forth, all is prepared!”

  Two men emerged from the darkness beyond the moat in answer to his hail, one a tall, stoop-shouldered fellow arrayed in ill-fitting and obviously new clothes, the other small, frail-looking, and enveloped from neck to high-heeled boots in a dark mackintosh or raincoat of some sort which hung about his spare figure like the cloak of a conspirator in a melodramatic opera. There was something infinitely wicked in the slouching truculent swagger of the big, stoop-shouldered bully, something which suggested brute strength, brute courage and brute ferocity; but there was something infinitely more sinister in the mincing, precise walk of his smaller companion, who advanced with an odd sort of gait, placing one foot precisely before the other like a tango dancer performing to the rhythm of inaudible music.