The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  To me he explained: “When I flung the filthy beast from me his vile face did come in contact with that carpet which was saturated in cyanide of mercury. It was on that they made their poor, deluded dupe dance till her feet wore covered with the powdered poison; then he who kissed and licked them perished instantly. So died Mademoiselle Stiles and so died Monsieur Marschaulk, and, grâce à Dieu, the poison he spread for the young Glendower has utterly destroyed that vile reptile of the name of Hudgekins. Half stunned from his fall, he breathed the deadly powder in, it dusted on his lips and swept into his mouth. So he died. I am very pleased to see it.”

  “What about th’ gur-rl, sor?” Costello reminded.

  “Nothing,” de Grandin returned shortly. “She is innocent, my friend, the dupe and tool of those wicked ones. Should you seek her for questioning anon, I think you will find her in Monsieur Glendower’s custody, by all appearances.”

  We turned with one accord toward the altar. In the light of the guttering candles Raymond Glendower and Dorothy Ericson, whom we had known as Estrella Hudgekins, were locked in each other’s arms, and kissing each other on the lips, as lovers were meant to kiss.

  “CERTAINLY, MR. HUDGEKINS CALLED the office,” the Granada telephone girl answered de Grandin’s query. “Just a few minutes after twelve o’clock he called and asked us to send up more heat.”

  “Did he now?” Costello asked. “Bedad, he’s some guy, that felly, isn’t he, Dr. de Grandin, sor?”

  “You called the Hudgekins apartment at intervals?” de Grandin asked the sleuth we’d left to watch the hotel.

  “Sure,” that worthy replied. “Every fifteen minutes, regular as clockwork. Always got th’ same answer: ’Yer party doesn’t answer,’ an’ by th’ way, sir, all them nickels I spent to call will have to go in on th’ expense account.”

  “But of course; cert—” de Grandin began, then. “Thief, cheat, robber, voleur! Would you make a monkey of me? How comes it you would charge for calls you could not make?”

  The detective grinned sheepishly, and de Grandin patted his shoulder with a smile. “Eh bien, mon petit brave,” he relented, “here is five dollars; will that perhaps cover the total of those nickels you did not spend?”

  Costello leading, we entered the Hudgekins’ elaborate suite. One glance about the living-room, and the Frenchman shouted with glee. “Look, behold, see, admire!” he ordered triumphantly. “Laugh at my face now, Friend Trowbridge, ask me again to explain those sacré ’phone calls!”

  Before the telephone was an ingenious device. A mechanical arm was fastened to the receiver, while in front of the mouthpiece was a funnel-shaped horn connected with a phonograph sound-box and needle which rested on a wax cylinder. The whole was actuated by clockwork, and the lever releasing the springs was attached to the bell-clapper of a large alarm clock set for fifteen minutes after twelve.

  Stooping, de Grandin turned the clock’s hands back. As they reached a quarter past twelve there was a light buzzing sound, the arm lifted the receiver from its hook, and in a moment a deep, gruff voice we all recognized spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hullo, this is Mr. Hudgekins. Please have the engineer send more heat up. Our apartment is cold as ice.” A pause, during which a courteous hotel official might have assured the tenant his wants would be attended to, then: “Thank you, very much. Goodnight.”

  “Well,”—Costello stared open-mouthed at the mechanism which would have provided an unshakable alibi in any criminal court—“well, sors, I’ll be damned!”

  “Undoubtlessly you will, unless you mend your ways,” de Grandin agreed with a grin. “Meantime, as damnation is a hot and thirsty business, I vote we adjourn to Friend Trowbridge’s and absorb a drink.”

  The Bride of Dewer

  1

  “I WALTER TAKE THEE ROSEMARY to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse—”

  Dr. Bentley’s measured, evenly modulated words, echoed by the bridegroom’s somewhat tremulous repetitions, sounded through St. Philip’s.

  “Eh bien,” irrepressible at church as elsewhere, Jules de Grandin whispered in my ear, “I feel myself about to weep in concert with the attenuated lady in lavender yonder, Friend Trowbridge. We may hold back the tears at a funeral, for the poor defunct one’s troubles are over and done, but at a wedding—pardieu, who can prophesy outcome?”

  “S-s-sh!” I commanded, reinforcing my scandalized frown with a sharp dig of my elbow in his ribs. “Can’t you be quiet anywhere?”

  “Under compulsion, yes,” be responded, grinning elfishly at my embarrassment, “but—”

  “—and have declared the same by giving and receiving a ring, and by joining hands, I now pronounce that they are man and wife”—Dr. Bentley’s announcement concluded the ceremony, and the majestic strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” drowned out the Frenchman’ chatter.

  Somewhat later, at the bride’s home, de Grandin pleasantly warmed by several glasses of champagne punch, lifted Rosemary Whitney’s white-gloved hand to his lips. “Madame Whitney,” he assured her, and his little blue eyes swam with sudden tears, “may the happiness of this night be the smallest part of the happiness which lies in store for you; may you and Monsieur Whitney be always happy as I should have been, had not le bon Dieu willed otherwise!”

  He was strangely silent on the way home. The propensity to chatter which kept his nimble tongue wagging most of his waking hours seemed to have deserted him entirely. Once or twice he heaved a deep, sentimental sigh; as we prepared for bed he forbore to make his usual complimentary remark about the excellence of my brandy, and even omitted to damn the instigators of the Eighteenth Amendment.

  It might have been three o’clock, perhaps a bit later, when the shrewish, insistent scolding of my telephone bell woke me.

  “Doctor—Dr. Trowbridge”—the voice across the wire was low and muted, as though smothered beneath a weight of sobs—“can you come over right away? Please! This is Mrs. Winnicott, and—it—it’s Rosemary. Doctor, she’s home, and—yes, yes,” evidently she turned to someone at her elbow, “right away.” Once more, to me: “Oh, Doctor, please hurry!”

  I was out of bed and beginning to dress almost before the sharp click in my ear told me Mrs. Winnicott had hung up, but swift as I was, Jules de Grandin was quicker. The chatter of the bell had roused him, and from the doorway of my room he had heard enough to realize an urgent call had come. While I still fumbled, cursing, at the fastenings of my collar, he passed down the upper hall, fully dressed. With my medicine and instrument kits in readiness he was waiting in the lower passage as I clattered down the stairs.

  “Rosemary Winnicott—Whitney, I mean,” I corrected myself. “Her mother just ’phoned, and though she wasn’t specific I gathered something dreadful has happened.”

  “Mordie, la petite Madame la Mariee?” he exclaimed. “Ohé, this is monstrous, my friend! Hurry; make haste!”

  A round, red sun, precursor of a broiling June day, was slowly creeping over the horizon as we reached the Winnicott house and dashed through the front door without the formality of knocking.

  In her pretty pink-and-ivory chamber Rosemary Whitney lay, pale as an image graven out of marble beneath the damask counterpane of the virginal bed she had risen from the previous morning with such sweet day-dreams as young girls know upon their wedding morns. Her eyes were quiet, though not closed, and her lips, bleached as though bereft of every drop of blood, were slightly parted. Once or twice she turned her head upon the pillow, weakly, like a fever patient, and emitted a little frightened moan. That was all.

  Impotent as a mother bird which sees its fledgling helpless before a coiling serpent—and as twitteringly nervous—Mrs. Winnicott stood beside her daughter’s bed, holding the little white hands that lay so listlessly on the bedspread, reaching mechanically for the phial of sal volatile which stood upon the night-table, then putting it back unopened.

  “What is it? What has happened, if you please?” de Grandi
n cried, placing the medicine cases on a chair and fairly bounding to the bedside.

  “I—I don’t know—oh, I don’t know!” Mrs. Winnicott wailed, wringing her hands helplessly together. “An hour ago—less, maybe—Walter and Rosemary drove up. Walter seemed stunned—almost as though he had been drugged—when he helped her from the car, and said nothing, just half-led, half-dragged her to the porch, beat upon the front door a moment, then turned and left her. I couldn’t sleep, and had been sitting by the window, watching the sky lighten in the east, so I saw them come. When I reached the front door Walter had gone and my poor baby lay there, like this. She’s been the same ever since. I’ve begged her to tell me—to answer me; but—you can see how she is for yourselves!”

  “And Walter made no explanation; didn’t even stay to help her up to bed?” I asked incredulously.

  “No!”

  “The young whelp—the scoundrel!” I gritted through my teeth. “If I could get my hands on him, I’d—”

  “Tiens, my friend, our hands are excellently well filled right here,” de Grandin reminded sharply. “Come, attend Mademoiselle—Madame, I mean; chastisement of the truant bridegroom may come later, when we are more at leisure.”

  Quick examination disclosed no physical injury of any kind. Rosemary suffered only from profound shock of some sort, though what the cause might be she was no more able to tell us than had she been a newborn babe. The Frenchman’s diagnosis paralleled mine, and before I could do more than indicate my opinion he had flown to the medicine case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and a phial of tincture digitalis, then, prepared an alcohol swab for the patient’s arm. With an ease and quickness that bespoke his experience in the field dressing-stations of the war, he drove the needle through the girl’s white skin, and the powerful heart-regulant shot home. In a few moments her quick, light breathing became more steady, her piteous moaning less frequent, and the deathly pallor which had disfigured her features gave place to the faint suspicion of a normal color.

  “Bien—très bon!” He regarded his handiwork complacently. “In a few moments we shall administer a sedative, Madame, and your daughter will sleep. From that time forth it is a matter of nursing. We shall procure a skilled attendant at once.”

  “HULLO, TROWBRIDGE,” GREETED A familiar voice on the telephone shortly after our return from Mrs. Winnicott’s, “d’ye know a fellow named Whitney—Walter Whitney? Seems to me you were his family’s physician—this is Donovan talking, over at City Hospital, you know.”

  “Yes, I know him,” I answered grimly. “What—”

  “All right, you’d better come over and get him, then. A policeman picked him up a little while ago, nutty as a store full o’ cuckoo clocks. Shortly before sunrise this mornin’ he was drivin’ his car round and round City Hall—seemed to think the Public Square was some sort o’ bloomin’ merry-go-round, and if the officer hadn’t had more sense than most he’d be decoratin’ a cell at some station house now, with a drunk an’ disorderly charge against him, instead of bein’ here an’ keepin’ more urgent cases out of a bed in H-3. Come on over and get him like a good fellow, won’t you?”

  “You mean—”

  “I sure do, son. It’s not dope an’ it isn’t booze—the boy’s as clean as a ribbon and sound as a hound’s tooth, but it’s something, all right, and I don’t mean maybe. I wish you’d come and take him off our hands. This isn’t any sanitarium for the idle rich, this is a bums’ roost, man.”

  “All right,” I promised, turning wearily away. To de Grandin, I announced:

  “It seems we’ll have to revise our opinion of Walter Whitney. Evidently whatever struck poor little Rosemary hit him, too; he’s over in the psychopathic ward of City Hospital, suffering from shock of some sort.”

  “Morbleu, this is tragic, no less!” the little Frenchman exclaimed as we set out to get the stricken bridegroom.

  THERE WAS NO DOUBT Walter Whitney had suffered an ordeal of some kind. His face was serious, preoccupied, as though he sought to catch the lilt of faint, far-away music, or was trying desperately to recall the rime of a snatch of half-remembered verse. When we addressed him he gave back a non-comprehending, vacant-eyed stare, and if we spoke sharply he repeated our words with slow hesitancy, like a child learning to talk or an adult struggling with the intricacies of some foreign language. Once or twice his eyes brimmed with tears, as tears come sometimes at memory of some long-forgotten sorrow, and once he spoke spontaneously.

  “What?” I asked, bending down to catch his mumbled answer.

  “The—old tale. It’s—true—after—all,” he muttered slowly, unbelievingly. And when I asked him what he meant he murmured thickly: “God have mercy on us!”

  2

  FOR TEN LONG DAYS we labored with the bride and bridegroom. Several times a day de Grandin or I called on them, but it was the little Frenchman’s indomitable will which dragged them back from the lethargy which succeeded the first onset of their strange malady to something near the normal. It was on the eleventh day, while we were visiting Rosemary, that she broke her semi-trance and spoke connectedly.

  “Walter and I stole out the back door to where he’d parked his car in the alley while the guests were making merry in the front part of the house,” she began with a sad, reminiscent smile, like an old woman recalling the joys of her vanished youth. “We drove to Bladenstown, where Walter had engaged a suite at the Carteret Inn by wire, and he waited in the garden while I fussed about the rooms.

  “I’d slipped out of my going-away dress and put on pajamas and kimono, and had finished creaming my face and brushing my hair when—”

  She paused, catching her lower lip between her milk-white teeth, like a little girl afraid of what she may say next.

  “Yes, Madame,” de Grandin prompted softly, his little blue eyes shining, “and then?”

  “I heard a footstep on the stairs,” she answered, a faint blush mantling her pale cheeks. “I thought it was Walter, and—” Again a little pause, then:

  “I switched the lights off quickly and dropped my kimono and slippers as I ran across the room and leaped into the bed. I didn’t want him to find me up, you see.”

  Evidently we were expected to understand, and, though neither of us did, we nodded slowly in concert.

  “The steps came up the little hall leading from the stairs to our suite,” she went on, “and paused before the door, then went down the hall, a little uncertainly, finally came back, and I could hear someone trying the latch tentatively.

  “My heart was beating so it almost shut my breath off, and there was goose-flesh all over me; I felt a sort of feverish-chill inside, but I couldn’t help but giggle. Walter was as scared as I. Somehow, one doesn’t expect a man to be all cold and trembly in such circumstances, but I knew he was and—and it made me feel happier—more as if we were starting out even, you know.

  “Just then the door opened a little, tiny crack, and as it did so, the moon, which had been behind the poplars growing at the lower end of the garden, sailed up into the sky and flooded the room with light. I held my breath, and put out my arms toward Walter, then—it came in!”

  Her face went white as chalk as she pronounced the words, and we could see the tiny nodules of horripilation form on her forearms.

  “It?” De Grandin wrinkled his brows in puzzlement. “What is it you say, Madame?”

  “It came into the parlor of our suite. There was a little, tittering laugh, like the affected snicker of a wicked, senile man—an old roué listening to a nasty, scandalous story, and then I saw it. Oh!” she put her thin, pale hands to her face as though to shut away a sight too terrible for memory, and her narrow, silk-sheathed shoulders shook with sobs of revulsion.

  “It wasn’t like a man, and yet it was. Not more than four feet tall, very stooped and bandy-legged, with no covering except a thick, horny hide the color of toadskin, and absolutely no hair of any kind upon its body anywhere. About the great wide grinning mouth there hung a fringe of droo
ping, wart-like tentacles, and another fringe of similar protuberances dangled from its chin, if it could be said to have a chin, for the head and face were more like those of a horned toad or lizard than anything I can think of. There seemed to be some sort of belt or sash about the creature’s waist, and from it hung a wide-bladed short sword without a scabbard.

  “It stopped just inside the room, and looked around with dreadful, shining eyes that never changed expression, then came slip-slopping on its wide, splayed feet toward the bed where I lay petrified with horror.

  “I wanted to scream, to jump up and run, to fling a pillow at the awful nightmare-thing which crept closer, and closer, but all I could do was lie there and stare—I couldn’t even lower the arms I’d held out to my husband when I thought I heard him at the door.

  “When it was almost up to me it spoke. ‘Don’t ’ee try and get away, my puss,’ it said, with a sort of horrible chuckle. ‘’Tis many and many a year since the old one had a man child to take a bride to wife, and the bargain was only for their bridenight; nothing more. Be quiet while I warm my chilled face in your bosom, my pretty, for it’s been more time than you can know since I’ve done as much—’

  “Then”—she paused a moment, fighting for breath like a winded runner finishing a race—“then it came over to me and put its arms about me—ugh! they were cold as something fished up from the river!—and kissed me—kissed me on the mouth!”

  Her voice rose to a shrill, thin scream as she finished, and for a moment she gasped weakly, then fell back against her pillows, her slender torso retching with physical sickness induced by the dreadful memory.

  I hastened to administer aromatic ammonia, and in a few minutes she regained comparative calm.

  “I don’t know what happened next,” she whispered. “I fainted, and the next I knew I was here in bed, with Mother and the nurse beside me.