The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “I know something of the principles.”

  “Bien. You know, then, that our conscious mind—the mind of external things—acts as the governor of our actions as the little whirling balls control the engine’s speed. Do you also realize that it acts as a sort of mental policeman? Good, again.

  “Now, when we wish to do a little naughty thing—or a great one, for that matter—and the sound common sense of this daytime conscious mind of ours overcomes the impulse, we say we have put it from our mind. Ah ha! It is there that we most greatly delude ourselves. Certainly. We have not put it from us; far otherwise; we have repressed it. As the businessman would say, we have ‘filed it for future reference.’ Yes. Often, by good fortune, the file is lost. Occasionally, it is found, only to be repressed once more by the conscious mind.

  “But when normal conscious control is overthrown, one or all of these stored-away naughty desires come bubbling to the surface. Every surgeon has seen this demonstrated when nicely brought up young ladies or religious old gentlemen are recovering from anesthesia. Cordieu, the language they employ would put a coal-heaver to the blush!

  “Attend me, if you please: The restraint of consciousness is entirely absent when we sleep—the policeman has put away his club and uniform and gone on a vacation. Then it is we dream all manner of strange, queer things. Then it is that a repressed desire, if it be strong enough, becomes translated into action while the dreamer is in a state of somnambulism. Then it was, Monsieur, you walked from out your room and would have done in earnest what you perpetrated in your dream had not Madame Sylvia’s scream summoned back some portion of the inhibitions of your waking self, so that you forbore to murder her, although the lingering remnant of your dream-desire stayed with you, and made you wish to do so.

  The skeptical look on Bartrow’s face gave way to an expression of grudging belief as the little Frenchman expanded his theory. “Well, what’s to be done?” he demanded as de Grandin finished.

  “I would suggest that you pack your golf clubs and go to Lake Hopatcong or the Kobbskill Club for a brief stay. There are certain matters we would attend to, and in the meantime you may recover from this so strange impulse to do your daughter-in-law an injury; I greatly fear you may do that for which you will be everlastingly sorrowful, should you remain.

  “Do not mistake me,” he added as Bartrow was about to form a rebellious reply, “it is no matter of exiling you from your own house, nor yet of cutting you from all communication from your son and his wife always. Quite no. We would have you absent for only a little while—no longer than is absolutely necessary—while we make arrangements. Be assured we shall write you to return at the earliest possible moment.”

  So it was arranged. Pleading frayed-out nerves and doctor’s orders, James Bartrow left for Hopatcong that evening, leaving Ransome and his wife in possession of the house.

  “Well, everything’s satisfactorily arranged for a while, at least,” I remarked as we returned from the station after seeing Bartrow off. “A few days of golf and laziness will probably sweep those cobwebs from his mind, and he’ll he right as rain when he returns.”

  The little Frenchman shook his head. “We have disposed of only half the problem, and that but temporarily,” he returned gloomily. “Why Monsieur Bartrow looked so strangely at his new daughter we know, though we do not know what caused the homicidal impulse which was behind the look; but why she regarded him with terror—ah, that is a far different matter, my friend, and one which needs explaining.”

  “Nonsense!” I scoffed. “Why shouldn’t she be afraid? What girl wouldn’t be terrified if she saw a man look at her like that?”

  “You do forget their recognition—and revulsion—was mutual and simultaneous,” he reminded.

  We finished our drive in silence.

  SYLVIA BARTROW LAY IN a long wicker deck-chair in the cool angle of the piazza, an orchid negligée trimmed with marabou about her slender shoulders, an eiderdown rug gathered about her feet and knees. Though her improvement had been steady since her fright a week before, she was still pale with a pallor not to be disguised by the most skillfully applied cosmetics, and the dark violet circles still showed beneath her big, melancholy gray eyes. She greeted de Grandin and me with the faintest ghost of a smile as we mounted the porch steps.

  “Madame, that we must trouble you thus drives us to the border of despair,” the Frenchman declared as he took her pallid fingers and raised them to his lips, “but there are several questions we must ask. Believe me, it is of importance, or we should not be thus disturbing you.”

  The girl smiled at him with something like affection, for his uniform politeness endeared him to every woman from nine to ninety, and nodded amiably. “I’ll tell you anything I can, Doctor de Grandin,” she replied.

  “Good. You are kind as you are beautiful, which is to say your generosity exceeds that of the good St. Nicholas,” he assured her as he drew up a chair, then:

  “Tell us, Madame, just what it was that frightened you so terribly last week. Speak with confidence; whatever you may say is spoken under the seal of medical inviolability.”

  She knit her brows, and her big eyes turned upward, like those of a little girl striving desperately to recall her seven-times table. “I—don’t—know,” she answered slowly. “I know it sounds silly—impossible, even—but I can’t remember a single thing that happened that night after I fell asleep. You’d think anything which frightened anyone as much as I was frightened would be impressed on him in all its detail till his dying day; but the truth is I only remember I was terribly, horribly afraid of something which came to my room, and that’s all. I can’t even tell you whether it was human or animal. Maybe it was just an awful dream, and I’m just a silly child afraid of something which never was.”

  “U’m, perhaps,” de Grandin agreed with a nod. Then: “Tell me, if you please, Madame Sylvia, were you frightened before this so unfortunate occurrence? Did anything distress you at any time, or seem to—”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “When I first entered the drawing-room, I went nearly wild with fright. When I looked at Daddy Jim standing there by the fireplace everything seemed to go red-hot inside me from my toes to my throat; I wanted to scream, but couldn’t; I wanted to run away, but didn’t have the strength. And when he turned and looked at me—I thought I should die. Just imagine, and Daddy Jim’s such a nice old darling, too!”

  “This feeling of terror, it passed away?” de Grandin pursued seriously.

  “Yes—no; not immediately. After I’d met him I realized it couldn’t have been Daddy Jim who frightened me, really, but there was a feeling of malaise which clung to me till—”

  “Yes—till?” the Frenchman prompted as she hesitated.

  “Till the big fright came and drove the little one away.”

  “Ah, so. You had never, by any chance, known anyone whom you feared and hatred who resembled your so estimable father-in-law?”

  “Why, no. I don’t think I was really afraid of anyone in my life—everyone has always been kind to me, you know, and as for hating anybody, I don’t think I could, really. I was just a little girl during the World War, and I used to try so hard to hate the Kaiser and von Hindenburg, but I never seemed able to do it as the other children could.”

  “I congratulate you,” he commented non-committally. “This so strange feeling of uneasiness, you still have it?”

  “No-o, I don’t. I did until—” She stopped, and her pale face suffused with a faint blush.

  “Yes, ma petite, until?” he prompted softly, leaning forward and taking her fingers lightly in his hand. “I think I know what you would say, but I do desire confirmation from your own lips.”

  “It’s no use,” she answered as tears welled in her eyes. “I’ve tried to down it, to say it wasn’t so for Rance’s sake, but it is—it is! It’s Daddy Jim—I’m afraid of him—terrified. There’s no earthly reason for it; he’s a dear, good, kind old man, and he loves Rance to distraction and l
oves me for Rance’s sake, but I live in constant horror of him. When he looks at me I go cold and tremble all over, and if he so much as brushes against my skirts as he passes I have to bite my lips to keep from screaming. When he kissed me that day I thought my heart would stop.

  “I can’t explain it, Doctor de Grandin, but the feeling’s there, and I can’t overcome it. Listen:

  “When I was a little girl we lived on the outskirts of Flagstaff, and I had a little Maltese kitten for pet. One day I saw Muff with her back up and every hair on her tail standing straight out and her eyes fairly blazing with rage and fright as she backed slowly away from something on the ground and spit and growled with every breath. When I ran up I saw she was looking at a young rattlesnake which had come out to sun itself. That kitten had never seen a rattler or any kind of snake in all her little life, but she recognized it as something to be feared and hated—yes, hated—the moment she laid eyes on it. Her instinct told her. That’s the way it is with me and my husband’s father. Oh, Doctor de Grandin, it makes me so unhappy! I want to love him and have him love me, and I don’t want to come between Rance and him, for they’re all the world to each other, but—” The tears which jeweled her eyelids gushed freely now, and her narrow shoulders shook with sobs. “I try to love him,” she wailed, “but I’m dreadfully afraid of him—I loathe him!”

  “I knew as much already, ma pauvre,” the Frenchman comforted, “but be of cheer, already I think I have found a way to remove this barrier which stands between you and your father-in-law. Your fear of him is grown from something deep within you, a something which none of us can as yet understand, yet which must have its roots in reason. That reason we shall endeavor to find. If you will come to Doctor Trowbridge’s tonight, we shall probe the underlying causes for this feeling of revulsion which so greatly troubles you.”

  “You—you won’t hurt me?” she faltered. Plainly terror and sustained mental tension had broken her nerve, and her only thought was to avoid pain at any cost.

  “Name of a little blue man, I shall say otherwise!” he exclaimed. “You and Monsieur your husband shall come to dinner, and afterward we shall talk—that is all. You are not terrified of that?”

  “Of course not,” she replied. “That will be delightful.”

  “Très bon, until tonight, then,” once more he raised her hand to his lips, then turned and left her with a smile.

  “WHAT DO YOU MAKE of it?” I asked as we drove homeward. “Doesn’t it strike you she’s trying to evade a direct answer when she says she can’t remember what frightened her?”

  “Not necessarily,” he returned thoughtfully. “She deceives herself, but she does so honestly, I think. Consider: She is of a decidedly neurotic type, you are agreed on that?”

  I nodded.

  “Very good. Like most of her kind, she is naturally very sensitive, and would suffer keenly were it not for the protective mental armor she has developed. The other night she had an experience which would have driven more matter-of-fact persons into neurasthenia, but not her. No. She said mentally to herself, ‘This thing which I have seen is dreadful, it is too terrible to be true. If I remember it I go mad. Alors, I shall not remember it. It is not so.’ And thereupon, as far as her conscious memory is concerned, it is not so. She does not realize she has given herself this mental command, nor does she know she has obeyed, but the fact remains she has. The extreme mental torture she suffered when the apparition appeared before her is buried deeply in her subconscious memory—mentally cicatrized, we might say, for she has protected her sanity by the sudden development of a sort of selective amnesia. It is better so; she might easily go mad otherwise. But tonight we shall open wide the secret storehouse of her memory, we shall see the thing which affrighted her in all its grisly reality, and we shall take it from her recollection forever. Yes. Never shall it trouble her again.”

  “Humph, you talk as though you were going to exorcise a demon,” I commented.

  He raised his shoulders and eyebrows in an eloquent shrug. “Who shall say otherwise?” he asked. “Long years ago, when the scientific patter we mouth so learnedly today had not been thought of, men called such things which troubled them by short and ugly names. She-devils which seduced the souls and bodies of men they called succubi; male demons which worked their will on women they denominated incubi. Today we talk of repressed desires, of unconscious libido, and such-like things—but have we gotten further than to change our terminology? One wonders. A tree you may denominate an oyster, and you may call an oyster a tree with equal ease, but all your new denominations to the contrary notwithstanding, the tree is still a tree, and the oyster nothing but an oyster. N’est-ce-pas?”

  ADDED TO HIS NUMEROUS other accomplishments, Jules de Grandin possessed unquestioned talents as a chef. He was the only man Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, would permit in her kitchen for longer than five minutes at a time, for across the kitchen range they met and gossiped as fellow artists, and many were the toothsome recipes they traded. That afternoon he was long in conference with my gifted though temperamental cook, and the result was a dinner the like of which has seldom been served in Harrisonville. Shrimp gumbo preceded lobster Cardinal and caneton à la presse followed lobster, while a salad garnished with a sauce which surely came from fairyland accompanied the duckling. From heaven alone knew where, de Grandin procured a bottle of Mirandol ’93, and this, with one of Nora’s famous deep-dish apple tarts and fromage Suisse completed the perfect meal.

  Coffee and cognac were served on the side veranda, and while we enjoyed the delightful sensation of the mingled processes of digestion and slow poisoning by nicotine de Grandin took possession of the conversation.

  “Your estimable father.” he began, addressing Ransome, “he is a connoisseur of interior decoration; his drawing-room, it is delightful. That walnut wainscot, by example, it is—”

  “Good Lord, you’d better not let Dad hear you call it walnut!” Ransome broke in with a laugh. “He’d have your life. That’s oak, man; he imported it especially from England, bought it standing in an old house in Kent, and it cost him almost its weight in gold to bring it over. Oak’s always been the passion of Dad’s life, it seems to me. He’s got a hundred or more pieces of antique oak—which is twice as rare as walnut, maple or mahogany—in the house, there are nothing but oak trees growing in the grounds, and every walking-stick he owns is carved from solid oak. He has to have ’em ’specially made, for they can’t be had in the shops. I’ve seen him pick up an acorn in the woods and fondle it as a miser might a diamond.”

  “Eh, do you tell me so?” de Grandin’s fingers beat a quick devil’s tattoo on the arm of his chair. “This is of the interest. Yes. Is it that he also collects other objets d’art?”

  “No-o, I couldn’t say that, though he has a small collection of curios in the place. There’s that old stone, for instance. He brought it from a place called Pwhyll-got in Wales years ago, and has it framed in native oak and hung up on the wall of his room. I never could see much sense in it; it looks pretty much like any other bit of flat, smooth rock to me, but Dad says it once formed part of a big ring of Cromlech and—”

  “Mort d’un rat âgé, the light; I begin to commence to see!” exclaimed the Frenchman.

  “What?”

  “Mille pardons, my friend, I did but think aloud, and all too often I think that way at random. You were saying—”

  “Oh, that’s all there is to his collection, really. He’s got a few curious old arrowheads, and a stone knife-blade or two, but I don’t suppose a real collector would give him twenty dollars for the lot.”

  “Certainement; not if he were wise,” de Grandin agreed.

  Deftly he turned the talk to matters of psychology, detailing several interesting cases of split personality he had witnessed in the laboratories of the Sorbonne. “I have here, by happy chance, an interesting little toy which has of late received much use in the clinics,” he added, apparently as an afterthought. “Would not yo
u care to see it?”

  Prompted by a sharp kick on the shins, I declared that nothing would please me more, and Ransome and Sylvia assented, mainly for politeness’ sake.

  “Behold it, is it not most innocent-looking?” he asked, proudly displaying an odd-looking contraption by means of which two circular looking-glasses, slightly smaller than shaving-mirrors, were made to rotate in opposing directions by means of a miniature motor.

  “Is it dangerous?” asked Sylvia, her woman’s curiosity slightly piqued.

  “Not especially,” he returned, “but it gives one queer sensations if one watches it in motion. Will you try?”

  Without awaiting their reply he set the machine on the study table, switched off all the lights save the central bulb which shed its beams directly on the mirrors, and pressed the switch.

  A light sustained humming sounded through the room, and the mirrors began describing their opposing orbits round each other at ever-increasing speed. I watched their dazzling whirl for a moment, but turned my eyes away as de Grandin tweaked me gently by the sleeve. “Not for you, Friend Trowbridge,” he whispered almost soundlessly; then:

  “Behold them, my friends, how they spin and whirl, is it not a pretty sight? Look carefully, you can distinguish the different speeds at which they turn. Closer, hold your gaze intently on them for a moment. Thus you may find—sleep—sleep, my friends, You are tired, you are fatigués, you are exhausted. Sleep is good—very good. Sleep—sleep—sleep!”

  His voice took on a low, singsong drone as he repeated the admonition to repose again and yet again, finally: “That is well. Be seated, if you please.”

  Like twin automata Ransome Bartrow and his bride sank into the chairs he hastily pushed forward. For a moment he regarded them thoughtfully, then snapped off the current from the motor and once more lit the lamps. Like a showman arranging his puppets, or a window-dresser disposing his figurines, he touched them lightly here and there, placing hands and feet in more restful positions, slipping cushions behind each reclining head. Then: