Darkness had fallen and the old year was dying in a flurry of light, feathery snow when Jules de Grandin and I stopped at Breakstone’s house, the Frenchman with a great bundle of toys and a gigantic box of chocolates under his arm.
“I bring them for petit Monsieur Bobby—le pauvre enfant!” he told the child’s grandmother, who, with her husband, had agreed to occupy the house until Idris’ estate could be settled and permanent arrangements made for the little boy.
“Your daughter, Monsieur Breakstone’s first wife, she would have wished that you take charge of her little one in such circumstances,” de Grandin whispered as he ascended the stairs to the nursery. “It is well that you are here.
“We shall not waken him if he is sleeping,” he added as we halted before the nursery door, “but I should like to look at him, if I may, and leave these gifts where he can find them when he rises in the morning. However, if you think—”
He broke off abruptly, while he and Mr. Denham and I stared at each other in blank amazement. From the darkened nursery there came to us distinctly the sound of voices—happy voices!—of a child’s light laughter, the deeper laugh of a man and the soft, lilting laughter of a woman. Then: “Good night, little son, happy dreams; sleep tight!” a woman said, and, “Good night!” a childish treble answered.
Mr. Denham pushed back the door and stared about the room. Save for the little boy, snugly cuddled in his crib, the nursery was empty. “Why”—the grandfather began—“I thought—”
“Hello, Grandpa,” the youngster greeted sleepily, smiling at the old gentleman, “Mother’s been here, and Daddy, too. They told me good-night just a moment—”
“Why, Bobby, that can’t be!” his grandfather cut in. “Your Mother and Daddy are—”
“Say it, Monsieur,” de Grandin challenged fiercely, his little, round blue eyes glazing as they rested on the older man, “say it, and, parbleu, I shall pull your nose!”
To Bobby he announced: “Of course they were here, mon petit, and they shall come to you many, many more times in future, and he who says otherwise is a foul, depraved liar. Moreover, he must fight with Jules de Grandin who would tell you they may not come. Yes; I have said it.” He bent and kissed the youngster on the brow, then laid his gifts upon the table. “They are for you, my little cabbage,” he said. “Tomorrow, when you rise, you shall have them all, and—my love to your dear parents when next they come to you, my little one!”
“I WONDER WHAT IT WAS we heard in there?” I asked as we drove home from the theater some hours later. “I could have sworn we heard a man’s voice—and a woman’s, too—but that’s impos—”
“You could have sworn!” he interrupted, something like incredulity in his tone. “Pardieu, I shall swear it; I have sworn it; upon a pile of Holy Scriptures high as that Monsieur Woolworth’s so beautiful tower I will affirm it before all the world. ‘Whom did we hear?’ you ask. Barbe d’un chou-fleur, who should be in the little man’s nursery at sleepy-time but those who loved him in life; who but she who summoned us to witness the perfidy of the false wife and her paramour, and to learn the truth about the poison which took Monsieur Breakstone’s life? Who but the one who wreaked swift vengeance on the false-hearted murderess even as she gloated over her success? Who, indeed, parbleu?
“Death is strong, but love is stronger, my friend, and woman fights for the man she loves. The false one had but short time to enjoy her triumph, while as for her lover—ha, did not the spirit of dear Madame Marjorie, which led us to that house in Leight Street, indirectly cause his apprehension, and must he not now answer for his misdeeds before the bar of justice? But certainly.
“Attend me, my friend: Women, children and dogs know their friends instinctively. So, it would seem, do disembodied spirits. When Madame Marjorie sought one on this earthly plane to help her in her work, whom should she choose but Jules de Grandin? In times gone past he has been known as a ghost-breaker. These last few nights, I damn think, he has essayed a new rôle, that of ghost-helper. Yes, par la barbe d’un taureau, and it is a rôle he has liked exceedingly well!”
“But see here,” I expostulated, “you don’t seriously believe that Marjorie’s spirit was responsible for all this?”
Across the city, down by the water works, a whistle hooted hoarsely, another took up the cry, in a moment the night was full of shrieking, cheering whistles and clamoring bells. The carillon in St. Chrysostom’s belfry began to sing a joyous peal:
“Ring out the false, ring in the true,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow …”
Jules de Grandin removed the white-silk handkerchief from the left cuff of his dinner jacket and wiped his eyes upon it, unashamed. “My friend,” he assured me solemnly, “I do believe it; I believe it with all my heart. Come, let us hurry.”
“Why, what’s the hurry now?”
“The Old Year dies. I would greet the New Year fittingly—with a drink,” he answered.
Satan’s Stepson
1. The Living Dead
“HORNS OF A LITTLE blue devil!” Jules de Grandin bent his head against the sleet-laden February wind and clutched madly at my elbow as his feet all but slipped from under him. “‘We are three fools, my friends. We should be home beside our cheerful fire instead of risking our necks going to this sacré dinner on such a night.”
“Comment ça va, mon Jules,” demanded Inspector Renouard, “where is your patriotism? Tonight’s dinner is in honor of the great General Washington, whose birthday it is. Did not our own so illustrious Marquis de Lafayette—”
“Monsieur le Marquis is dead, and we are like to be the same before we find our way home again,” de Grandin cut in irritably. “As for the great Washington, I think no more of him for choosing this so villainous month in which to be born. Now me, I selected May for my début; had he but used a like discretion—”
“Misère de Dieu, see him come! He is a crazy fool, that one!” Renouard broke in, pointing to a motor car racing toward us down the avenue.
We watched the vehicle in open-mouthed astonishment. To drive at all on such a night was risking life and limb, yet this man drove as though contending for a record on the racing track. Almost abreast of us, he applied his brakes and swerved sharply to the left, seeking to enter the cross street. The inevitable happened. With a rending of wood and metal the car skidded end for end and brought up against the curb, its right rear wheel completely dished, its motor racing wildly as the rimless spokes spun round and round.
“Mordieu, you are suicidal, my friend!” de Grandin cried, making his way toward the disabled vehicle with difficulty. “Can I assist you? I am a physician, and—”
A woman’s hysterical scream cut through his offer. “Help—save me—they’re—” Her cry died suddenly as a hand was clapped over her mouth, and a hulking brute of a man in chauffeur’s leather coat and vizored cap scrambled from the driver’s cab and faced the Frenchman truculently. “Yékhat! Be off!” he ordered shortly. “We need no help, and—”
“Don’t parley with him, Dimitri!” a heavy voice inside the tonneau commanded. “Break his damned neck and—”
“’Cré nom! With whose assistance will you break my neck, cochon?” de Grandin asked sharply. “Name of a gun, make but one step toward me, and—”
The giant chauffeur needed no further invitation. As de Grandin spoke he hurled himself forward, his big hands outstretched to grasp the little Frenchman’s throat. Like a bouncing ball de Grandin rose from the ground, intent on meeting the bully’s rush with a kick to the pit of the stomach, for he was an expert at the French art of foot-boxing, but the slippery pavement betrayed him. Both feet flew upward and he sprawled upon his back, helpless before the larger man’s attack.
“À moi, mon Georges!” he called Renouard. “Je suis perdu!”
Practical policeman that he was, Renouard lost no time in answering de Grandin’s cry. Reversing the heavy walking-stick which swung from his arm he brought its lead-loaded crook down upon the ch
auffeur’s head with sickening force, then bent to extricate his friend from the other’s crushing bulk.
“The car, into the moteur, my friend!” de Grandin cried. “A woman is in there; injured, perhaps; perhaps—”
Together they dived through the open door of the limousine’s tonneau, and a moment later there came the sound of scuffling and mingled grunts and curses as they fought desperately with some invisible antagonist.
I rushed to help them, slipped upon the sleet-glazed sidewalk, and sprawled full length as a dark body hurtled from the car, cannoned into me and paused a moment to hurl a missile, then sped away into the shadows with a mocking laugh.
“Quick, Friend Trowbridge, assist me; Renouard is hit!” de Grandin emerged from the wrecked car supporting the Inspector on his arm.
“Zut! It is nothing—a scratch!” Renouard returned. “Do you attend to her, my friend. Me, I can walk with ease. Observe—” he took a step and collapsed limply in my arms, blood streaming from a deeply incised wound in his left shoulder.
Together de Grandin and I staunched the hemorrhage as best we could, then rummaged in the ruined car for the woman whose screams we had heard when the accident occurred.
“She is unconscious but otherwise unhurt, I think,” de Grandin told me. “Do you see to Georges; I will carry her—prie-Dieu I do not slip and kill us both!”
“But what about this fellow?” I asked, motioning toward the unconscious chauffeur. “We oughtn’t leave him here. He may freeze or contract pneumonia—”
“Eh bien, one can but hope,” de Grandin interrupted. “Let him lie, my friend. The sleet may cool his ardor—he who was so intent on breaking Jules de Grandin’s neck. Come, it is but a short distance to the house. Let us be upon our way; allez-vous-en!”
A RUGGED CONSTITUTION AND THE almost infinite capacity for bearing injury which he had developed during years of service with the gendarmerie stood Inspector Renouard in good stead. Before we had reached the house he was able to walk with my assistance; by the time he had had a proper pack and bandage applied to his wound and absorbed the better part of a pint of brandy he was almost his usual debonair self.
Not so our other patient. Despite our treatment with cold compresses, sal volatilis and aromatic ammonia it was nearly half an hour before we could break the profound swoon in which she lay, and even then she was so weak and shaken we forbore to question her.
At length, when a slight tinge of color began to show in her pale cheeks de Grandin took his station before her and bowed as formally as though upon a ballroom floor. “Mademoiselle,” he began, “some half an hour since we had the happy privilege of assisting you from a motor wreck. This is Doctor Samuel Trowbridge, in whose office you are; I am Doctor Jules de Grandin, and this is our very good friend, Inspector Georges Jean Jacques Joseph-Marie Renouard, of the Sûreté Générale, all of us entirely at your service. If Mademoiselle will be so kind as to tell us how we may communicate with her friends or family we shall esteem it an honor—”
“Donald!” the young woman interrupted breathlessly. “Call Donald and tell him I’m all right!”
“Avec plaisir,” he agreed with another bow. “And this Monsieur Donald, he is who, if you please?”
“My husband.”
“Perfectly, Madame. But his name?”
“Donald Tanis. Call him at the Hotel Avalon and tell him that I—that Sonia is all right, and where I am, please. Oh, he’ll be terribly worried!”
“But certainly, Madame, I fully understand,” he assured her. Then:
“You have been through a most unpleasant experience. Perhaps you will be kind enough to permit that we offer you refreshment—some sherry and biscuit—while Monsieur your husband comes to fetch you? He is even now upon his way.”
“Thank you so much,” she nodded with a wan little smile, and I hastened to the pantry in search of wine and biscuit.
Seated in an easy-chair before the study fire, the girl sipped a glass of Duff Gordon and munched a pilot biscuit while de Grandin, Renouard and I studied her covertly. She was quite young—not more than thirty, I judged—and lithe and slender in stature, though by no means thin, and her hands were the whitest I had ever seen. Ash-blond her complexion was, her skin extremely fair and her hair that peculiar shade of lightness which, without being gray, is nearer silver than gold. Her eyes were bluish gray, sad, knowing and weary, as though they had seen the sorrow and futility of life from the moment of their first opening.
“You will smoke, perhaps?” de Grandin asked as she finished her biscuit. As he extended his silver pocket lighter to her cigarette the bell shrilled imperatively and I hastened to the front door to admit a tall, dark young man whose agitated manner labeled him our patient’s husband even before he introduced himself.
“My dear!” he cried, rushing across the study and taking the girl’s hand in his, then raising it to his lips while de Grandin and Renouard beamed approvingly.
“Where—how—” he faltered in his question, but his worshipful glance was eloquent.
“Donald,” the girl broke in, and though the study was almost uncomfortably warm she shuddered with a sudden chill, “it was Konstantin!”
“Wha—what?” he stammered in incredulous, horrified amazement. “My dear, you surely can’t be serious. Why, he’s dead!”
“No, dear,” she answered wearily, “I’m not jesting. It was Konstantin. There’s no mistaking it. He tried to kidnap me.
“Just as I entered the hotel dining-room a waiter told me that a gentleman wanted to see me in the lobby; so, as I knew you had to finish dressing, I went out to him. A big, bearded man in a chauffeur’s leather uniform was waiting by the door. He told me he was from the Cadillac agency; said you had ordered a new car as a surprise for my birthday, but that you wanted me to approve it before they made delivery. It was waiting outside, he said, and he would be glad if I’d just step out and look at it.
“His accent should have warned me, for I recognized him as a Russian, but there are so many different sorts of people in this country, and I was so surprised and delighted with the gift that I never thought of being suspicious. So I went out with him to a gorgeous new limousine parked about fifty feet from the porte-cochère. The engine was running, but I didn’t notice that till later.
“I walked round the car, admiring it from the outside; then he asked if I’d care to inspect the inside of the tonneau. There seemed to be some trouble with the dome light when he opened the door for me, and I was half-way in before I realized some one was inside. Then it was too late. The chauffeur shoved me in and slammed the door, then jumped into the cab and set the machine going in high gear. I never had a chance to call for help.
“It wasn’t till we’d gone some distance that my companion spoke, and when he did I almost died of fright. There was no light, and he was so muffled in furs that I could not have recognized his face anyway, but his voice—and those corpse-hands of his—I knew them! It was Konstantin.
“‘Jawohl, meine liebe Frau,’ he said—he always loved to speak German to torment me—‘it seems we meet again, nicht wahr?’
“I tried to answer him, to say something—anything—but my lips and tongue seemed absolutely paralyzed with terror. Even though I could not see, I could feel him chuckling in that awful, silent way of his.
“Just then the driver tried to take a curve at high speed and we skidded into the curb. These gentlemen were passing and I screamed to them for help. Konstantin put his hand over my mouth, and at the touch of his cold flesh against my lips I fainted. The next I knew I was here and Doctor de Grandin was offering to call you, so—” She paused and drew her husband’s hand down against her cheek. “I’m frightened, Donald—terribly frightened,” she whimpered. “Konstantin—”
Jules de Grandin could stand the strain no longer. During Mrs. Tanis’ recital I could fairly see his ungovernable curiosity bubbling up within him; now he was at the end of his endurance.
“Pardonnez-moi, Madame,” he broke
in, “but may one inquire who this so offensive Konstantin is?”
The girl shuddered again, and her pale cheeks went a thought paler.
“He—he is my husband,” she whispered between blenched lips.
“But, Madame, how can it be?” Renouard broke in. “Monsieur Tanis, he is your husband, he admits it, so do you; yet this Konstantin, he is also your husband. Non, my comprehension is unequal to it.”
“But Konstantin is dead, I tell you,” her husband insisted. “I saw him die—I saw him in his coffin—”
“Oh, my darling,” she sobbed, her lips blue with unholy terror, “you saw me dead—coffined and buried, too—but I’m living. Somehow, in some way we don’t understand—”
“Comment?” Inspector Renouard took his temples in his hands as though suffering a violent headache. “Jules, my friend, tell me I can not understand the English,” he implored. “You are a physician; examine me and tell me my faculties are failing, my ears betraying me! I hear them say, I think, that Madame Tanis has died and been buried in a grave and coffin; yet there she sits and—”
“Silence, mon singe, your jabbering annoys one!” de Grandin cut him short. To Tanis he continued:
“We should be grateful for an explanation, if you care to offer one, for Madame’s so strange statement has greatly puzzled us. It is perhaps she makes the pleasantry at our expense, or—”
“It’s no jest, I assure you, sir,” the girl broke in. “I was dead. My death and burial are recorded in the official archives of the city of Paris, and a headboard, marks my grave in Saint Sébastien, but Donald came for me and married—”
“Eh bien, Madame, either my hearing falters or my intellect is dull,” de Grandin exclaimed. “Will you repeat your statement once again, slowly and distinctly, if you please? Perhaps I did not fully apprehend you.”
2. Inferno
DESPITE HERSELF THE GIRL smiled. “What I said is literally true,” she assured him. A pause, then: “We hate to talk of it, for the memory horrifies us both, but you gentlemen have been so kind I think we owe you an explanation.
The Dark Angel Page 10