The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  For a moment he regarded the sobbing matron with a thoughtful stare, then: “It may be Dr. Trowbridge and I can reason with the young Monsieur to more purpose than you or the good pastor,” he suggested. “In my country we have a saying, there are three sexes—men, women and clergymen. A headstrong young man, over-proud of his budding masculinity, is apt to treat advice from mother or minister alike with contemptuous impatience. The physician, on the other hand, is in a different position. He is a man of the world, a man of science, with body, parts and passions like other men, yet with a vast experience of the penalties of folly. His words may well be listened to when those of women and priests would meet only with disdain.

  I sat in open-mouthed astonishment at his temerity. To his logical Gallic mind the wisdom of his advice was obvious, but though he had lived among us several years, he had not yet learned to what heights of absurdity the Mother-cult has been raised in America, nor did he understand that it is the conventional thing to regard any woman, no matter how ignorant or inexperienced, as endowed with preternatural wisdom and omniscient foresight merely because she has at some time fulfilled the biological function of race-perpetuation. And Mrs. Mason Glendower’s thought-processes were, I knew, as conventional as a printed greeting card.

  “You mean,” the lady gasped, a sort of horrified incredulity replacing the grief in her countenance—“you mean you actually think a doctor can have more influence with a son than his pastor or his mother?”

  “Perfectly, Madame,” he replied imperturbably. Her scandalized astonishment was lost on him; it was as though she had asked whether in his opinion novocaine were preferable to cocaine as an anesthetic in appendectomy.

  “Well—” I braced myself for the coming storm, but, amazingly, it failed to materialize. “Perhaps you’re right, Dr. de Grandin,” she conceded with a sudden strange meekness. “Whatever you do, you can’t fail any more than Dr. Stephens and I have failed.”

  She smiled wanly, with a trace of embarrassment. “You’ll find Raymond in his room, now,” she informed us, “but I doubt he’ll see you. This is the time for his ‘silence,’ as he calls it and—”

  “Eh bien, Madame,” the little Frenchman chuckled, “lead us to his sanctuary. We shall break this silence of his, I make no doubt. Silence is golden, as your so glorious Monsieur Shakespeare has said, but a greater than he has said there is a time for silence and a time for speech. This, I think, is that time. But yes.”

  A BRAZEN BOWL OF INCENSE burned in Raymond Glendower’s room, its cloying, heady sweetness almost stunning us as we entered uninvited after half a dozen pleading calls and several timid knocks on the door by his mother had failed to evoke a response. Raymond perched precariously on a low, flat-topped stand similar to those used for supporting flower-pots, his legs crossed, feet folded sole upward upon his calves, his hands resting palm upward in his lap, the fingertips barely touching. His head was bowed and his eyes closed. So far as I could see, his costume consisted of a flowing white-muslin robe which might have been a folded sheet loosely belted at the waist, and a turban of the same material wound about his brow. Arms, legs, feet and breast were uncovered, for the robe hung open at the front, revealing his chest and the major portion of his torso. At first glance I was struck by the pallor of his face and the marked concavity of his cheeks; plainly the boy was suffering from primary starvation induced by a sudden diminution of diet.

  “What’s he been eating?” I whispered to his mother as the seated youth paid no more attention to our advent than he would have given the buzzing of a trespassing fly.

  “Fruit,” she whispered, back, “fruit and nuts and raisins, and very little of each. It’s against the discipline of the sect to eat anything killed or cooked.”

  “U’m,” I murmured. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Ever since he met that woman—nearly two months,” she returned. “My poor boy’s fading away before my eyes, and—”

  “S-s-sh!” I warned. Like a sleeper awakened, young Glendower had opened his eyes and wriggled from his undignified perch like a contortionist unwinding himself from a knot.

  “Oh, hullo, Dr. Trowbridge,” he greeted, crossing the room to take my hand cordially. If he felt any embarrassment at being caught thus he concealed it admirably. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. de Grandin,” he acknowledged my introduction. “Be with you in half a sec. If you’ll wait till I get some clothes on.”

  We retired to the drawing-room, and in a few minutes the young man, normally attired in a well-tailored blue suit, joined us. His mother excused herself almost immediately, and Raymond glanced from de Grandin to me with a humorous twist of his well-formed lips.

  “All right, Dr. Trowbridge,” he invited, “you may fire when ready. I suppose Mother’s called you in to show me the error of my ways. She had Stephens in the other day and the reverend old fool will never know how near he came to assassination. He began by singsonging at me and ended by attacking Estrella’s character. That’s where I draw the line. If he hadn’t been a preacher I’d have tossed him out on his neck. Just a little warning, gentlemen,” he added pleasantly. “Go as far as you like in quoting Joshua, Solomon and Moses at me—I won’t kick if you throw in a few passages from Deuteronomy for good measure, but one word against Estrella and we fight—physicians don’t share clerical immunity, you know.”

  “By no means, Monsieur,” de Grandin cut in quickly. “We have not had the honor of the young lady’s acquaintance, and he who condemns without having seen is a fool. Also, we have no wish to scoff at your faith. Me, I am a deep student of all religions, and the practices of yoga and similar systems interest me greatly. Is it possible that we, as serious students, might be permitted to see some of the outward forms of your so interesting cult?”

  The boy warmed to his request as a stray dog responds to a friendly pat upon the head. Plainly he had heard nothing but complaints and naggings since he became involved in the strange religion which he professed, and the first remarks by an outsider which did not imply criticism delighted him.

  “Of course,” he answered enthusiastically; “that is, I’m almost sure I can arrange it for you.” He paused a moment, as though considering whether to take us further into his confidence, then:

  “You see, Estrella is Exalted High Hierophant of the Church of Heavenly Gnosis, and though I am unworthy of the honor, her Sublimity has deigned to look on me with favor”—there was a reverential tremor in his voice as he pronounced the words—“and it is even possible she may receive a revelation telling her we may marry, as ordinary mortals do, though that is more than I dare hope for.” Again his words trembled on his lips, and we could see he actually fought for breath as he spoke, as though his wildly beating heart had expanded in his breast and pressed his lungs for space.

  “U’m?” de Grandin was all polite attention. “And will you tell us something of the society’s history, young Monsieur?”

  “Of course,” Raymond answered. “The Heavenly Gnosis is the latest manifestation of the Divine All which underlies everything. For thousands of years mankind has struggled blindly through the darkness, always seeking the Divine Light, always failing in its quest. Now, through the revelations of our Supreme Hierophant, the Godhead shall be made plain. Just twenty years ago the great boon came into the world, when Estrella, the Holy Child, was born. Like Mohammed and that other prophet whom men call Jesus, she was of humble parentage, but the Supreme Will follows Its own inscrutable designs in such matters—Buddha was a prince, Confucius was a scholar, Mohammed a camel-driver and Jesus the son of a carpenter. Estrella is the daughter of a laborer. She was born in a workman’s shanty beside the tracks of the Santa Fe; her father was a section foreman and her mother a cook and washerwoman for the men; yet when the Holy Child was barely old enough to walk the cattle and horses in the fields would kneel before her and touch their noses to the earth as she toddled past.

  “She was less than a year old when one of the workmen in her father’s gang came
upon her sitting between two great rattlesnakes while a third reptile reared on its tail before her and inclined its head in adoration. The man would have killed the snakes with his long-handled shovel, but the babe, who had never been heard to speak before, rebuked him for his impiety, reminding him that all things are God’s creatures, and that he who takes life of any kind on any pretext is guilty of supreme sacrilege in usurping a function of Deity, and must expiate his sin through countless reincarnations.”

  “Parbleu, you astonish me!” said Jules de Grandin.

  “Yes,” Raymond continued with all the recent convert’s fervor, “and from that day Estrella continued to prophesy and reveal truth after great truth. At her behest her parents gave up eating the remains of any living thing and ceased desecrating the divine element of fire by using it to cook their food. Her father abandoned his work and went to live in the desert, where day by day, in the silence of the waste places, new revelations came to the Holy Child who has condescended to cast her glorious eyes on me, the most unworthy of her worshipers.”

  “Mordieu, you amaze me!” de Grandin declared. “And then?”

  “When her period of preparation was done, her mother, who had committed all the wondrous things she foretold to writing, brought her East that the teeming cities of the seaboard might hear the words of truth from her own divine lips.”

  “Cordieu, you overwhelm me!” de Grandin assured him. “And have you found many converts to the faith, Monsieur?”

  “N-no,” Raymond admitted, “but those who have affiliated with us are important individually. There was Miss Stiles, a member of one of the state’s oldest and wealthiest families. She was one of the first to be converted, and distinguished herself by her great ardor and acts of piety. She also brought a number of other influential people into the light, and—”

  “May one inquire where this so estimable lady may be found now?” de Grandin asked softly. “I should greatly like to discuss—”

  “She has passed through her final incarnation and dwells forever in the ineffable light emanated by the Divine All,” young Glendower broke in. “She was summoned from battle to victory in the very moment of performing the supreme act of adoration, and—”

  “In fine, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted, “one gathers she is no more—she is passed away; defunct; dead?”

  “In the language of the untaught—yes,” Raymond admitted, “but we who have heard the truth know that she is clothed in garments of everlasting light and resides perpetually—”

  “Mais oui,” de Grandin cut in a trifle hastily, “you are undoubtlessly right, mon ami. Meantime, if you will endeavor to secure us permission to meet these so fortunate ones who bask in the sunlight of Mademoiselle’s revelations, we shall be most greatly obliged. At present we have important duties which call us elsewhere. Yes, certainly.”

  “WELL, WHAT ABOUT IT?” I inquired as we drove homeward. “I’m frank to admit I didn’t know what he was driving at half the time, and the other half I had to sit on my hands to keep from clouting the young fool on the head.”

  The little Frenchman laughed delightedly. “It is the love of the petit chien run wild, my friend,” he told me. “Some young men when smitten by it turn to poetry; some attempt great deeds of derring-do to win their ladies’ favor; this one has swallowed a bolus of undigested nonsense, plagiarized by an ignorant female from half the religions of the East, up to the elbow.”

  “Yes, but it has a serious aspect,” I reminded. “Suppose he married that charlatan, and—”

  “How wealthy is the Glendower family?” he interrupted. “Is the restrained elegance in which they live a mark of good taste, or a sign of comparative poverty?”

  “Why,” I replied, “I don’t think they’re what you could call rich. Old Glendower is reputed to have left a hundred thousand or so; but that’s not considered much money nowadays, and—”

  “But what of Monsieur Raymond’s private fortune?” he demanded. “Does he possess anything outside his expectancy upon his mother’s death?”

  “How the devil should I know?” I answered testily.

  “Précisément,” he agreed, in no way offended by my petulance. “If you will be good enough to drop me here, I shall seek information where it can be had reliably. Meantime, I implore you, arrange with your peerless cook to prepare a noble dinner against the time of my return. I shall be famished as a wolf.”

  “WHERE THE DEUCE HAVE you been?” I demanded as he entered the dining-room just as Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, was serving dessert. “We waited dinner for you till everything was nearly spoiled, and—”

  “Alas, my friend, I am desolated,” he assured me penitently. “But consider, is not my punishment already sufficient? Have I not endured the pangs of starvation while I bounced about in a sacré taxicab like an eggshell in a kettle of boiling water? But yes. They are slow of movement at the courthouse, Friend Trowbridge.”

  “The courthouse? You’ve been there? What in the world for?”

  “For needed information, to be sure,” he returned with a smile as he attacked his bouillon with gusto. “I learned much there which may throw light on what we heard this afternoon, mon vieux.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, certainly; of course. I discovered, by example, that a Miss Matilda Stiles, who is undoubtlessly the same pious lady of whom the young Glendower told us, passed away a month ago, leaving several sadly disappointed relatives and a last will and testament whereby she names one Mademoiselle Estrella Hudgekins her principal legatee. Furthermore, I discovered that a certain Matilda Stiles, spinster, of this county, did devise by deed, previous to her sad demise, several parcels of excellent valuable real estate in and near the city of Harrisonville to one Timothy Hudgekins and Susanna Hudgekins, his wife, as trustees for Estrella Hudgekins. Furthermore, I found on record several bills of sale whereby numerous articles of intensely valuable personal property—diamonds, antique jewelry, and the like—were conveyed outright by the said Matilda Stiles to the aforesaid Estrella Hudgekins—parbleu, already I do mouth the legal jargon unconsciously, so many instruments of transference I have read this afternoon!”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “No, my friend, it is not well; I damn think it is exceedingly unwell.” He helped himself to a generous portion of roast duckling and dressing and refilled his glass with claret. “Attend me, carefully, if you please. The young Monsieur Glendower was to receive in his own right a hundred thousand dollars from his father’s estate upon attaining his majority. He passed his twenty-first birthday last month, and already the attorneys have attended to the transfer of the funds. What think you from that?”

  “Why, nothing,” I returned. “I’d an idea Raymond would succeed to part of the property before his mother’s death. Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Ah, bah!” de Grandin replenished his plate and glass and regarded me with an expression of pained annoyance. “Can not you see, my old one? The conclusion leaps to the eye!”

  “It may leap to yours,” I replied with a smile, “but its visibility is zero, as far as I’m concerned.”

  2

  “YOU TWO WILL BE the only guests outside the church tonight,” Raymond Glendower warned as we drove toward the apartment hotel where the high priestess of the Church of the Heavenly Gnosis resided with her parents, “so if you’ll—er—try not to notice things too much, you know I’ll be awful obliged. You see—er—” he floundered miserably, but de Grandin came to his rescue with ready understanding.

  “Quite so, mon vieux,” he agreed. “It is like this: Devout members of the Catholic faith are offended when mannerless Protestants enter their churches, stare around as though they were at a museum, and fail to genuflect as they pass the altar; good Protestants take offense when ill-bred Catholics enter their churches and glance around with an air of supercilious disdain, and the Christian visitor gives offense to his Jewish brethren when he removes his hat in their synagogues, n’est-ce-pas?”

&n
bsp; “That’s it!” the boy agreed. “You’ve got the idea exactly, sir.”

  He leaned forward and was about to embark on another long and tiresome exposition of the excellence of his faith’s tenets when the grinding of our brakes announced we had arrived at our destination.

  The corridor of the Granada Apartments flashed with inharmonious colors like a kaleidoscope gone crazy, and I shook my head in foreboding. The house was not only screamingly offensive to the eye, it was patently an expensive place in which to live, and the prophetess must draw heavily on her devotees’ funds in order to maintain herself in such quarters.

  An ornate lift done in the ultra-modernistic manner shot us skyward, and Raymond preceded us down the passage, stopping before a brightly polished bronze door with the air of a worshiper about to enter a shrine. We entered without knocking and found ourselves in a long, narrow hall with imitation stone floor, walls and ceiling. A stone table with an alabaster glow-lamp at its center was the only piece of furniture. A huge mirror let into the wall and surrounded by bronze pegs did duty as a cloak-rack. All in all, the place was about as inviting as a corridor in the penitentiary.

  The room beyond, immensely large and almost square in shape, was mellowly lighted by a brass floor-lamp with a shade of perforated metal; its floor was covered with a huge Turkey carpet; the walls were hung with Persian and Chinese rugs. Beneath the lamp, its polished case giving back subdued reflections, like quiet water at night, was a grand piano flanked by two tall Japanese vases filled to overflowing with long-stemmed red roses. Near the opened windows, where the muted roar of the city seeped upward like the crooning of distant waves, was grouped a number of chairs no two of which were mates. Several guests were already seated, talking together in hushed tones like early arrivals at a funeral service.

  Oddly, though it was really a most attractive apartment, that rug-strewn room struck a sinister note. Whether it was the superheated atmosphere, the dimly diffused light or the vague reminiscence of incense which mingled with the roses’ perfume I do not know, but I had a momentary feeling of panic, a wild desire to seize my companions by the arms and flee before some unseen, evil presence which seemed to brood over the place bound us fast as a spider enmeshes a luckless fly.