“Didn’t you hear what he told Mrs. Durstin?” I broke in. “It’s some silly sort of game he played; he wanted to see if he could bully us into thinking that we saw—”
“What he has seen, maybe?”
“What he saw? Why, what could he see that we couldn’t?”
“That which Mademoiselle Kirsten saw, perhaps.”
“See here,” I dropped into the armchair by the fire and felt for my cigar-case, “all this mystery has me slowly going crazy. Classon didn’t seem in any jocose mood when he asked us what we saw while looking at that picture. Indeed, it seemed to me that he was definitely frightened, and when we told him that we saw the picture of a saint he seemed relieved, yet a little disappointed, too.
“Then take Karen Kirsten. I can’t understand her. She’s more like Brunhilde than Griselda; I’d say she never was afraid of anything. Twelve hundred years ago women like her swung double-bladed axes and tugged twenty-foot oars beside their men, and spat back curses and defiance in the face of god and devil; yet if that woman wasn’t absolutely mad with horror of some sort—if she isn’t hag-ridden and almost wild to leave this house this very minute—I never saw terror in a human face. Have you any idea what it’s all about?”
He turned from the window and tore the blue wrapping from a packet of “Marylands,” selected one of the evil-smelling things with infinite care and set it alight. “Not an idea, my friend, merely a thought; one of those vague, elusive thoughts that fade like dewdrops in the sun when you seek to put them into words. But—” He shook his head impatiently, as though to clear his brain, then recommenced:
“You saw the composition of those pictures, how they are constructed of cleverly matched bits of colored stone. Very good. Between the little colored fragments are tiny, so small lines, n’est-ce-pas?”
“Of course, it’s a mosaic—”
“Bien. It was only for a moment, for the fraction of the twinkling of an eye, but as I looked upon those pictures I thought the colored marbles ran together, separated, turned about one another like the bright glass of a kaleidoscope and formed a different pattern. It was over quickly, parbleu, so quickly that it could hardly have been said to have occurred, but—” He paused and puffed reflectively at his cigarette, letting twin rivulets of smoke trickle slowly from his nostrils.
“What was it that you saw?”
“Mordieu, that is what taunts me. I cannot say. So quickly it came, so fast it disappeared that I had not time to realize it. But I am certain that it was an evil, an obscene and wicked thing I saw, like a monkey dancing on a consecrated altar.”
“But that’s absurd.”
“The line of demarcation that divides absurdity from horror is often very finely drawn, my friend.” For a moment he stared straight before him, and his little round blue eyes seemed misted, as though, still open, they shut out vision while he racked his inner consciousness for an answer to the riddle. Abruptly: “Come, let us go and look at it,” he bade. “It may be in the quiet of the empty room we shall be able to congeal and hold that fleeting metamorphosis which mocked me when we stood there with the others.”
We tiptoed toward the stairs, but hardly had we gone ten feet when his hand upon my arm brought me to a halt. In the dim light cast by a single swinging oil lamp someone was coming from the floor below, someone who walked in silence and whose presence we should not have realized had it not been for the shadow cast across the stairhead.
“Back into this doorway if you please, my friend,” de Grandin whispered, and as we shrank into the recess of the deepset door Karen Kirsten glided up the stairs, paused a moment with one hand upon the baluster and threw back her head with up-turned eyes as though imploring mercy from kind Providence. She was tense as a drawn harp-string, and her face was set in lines of suffering, but the faint light seeping up the stair-well from behind her rippled through her golden hair and cast shadows on her brows which seemed to deepen the cerulean of her eyes. In her sleeveless, neckless nightrobe of white crepe, with a slender hand laid humbly on her heaving bosom, it seemed to me she bore a likeness to the pictures of Saint Barbara.
“Ah, God!” she breathed in a high, quivering sigh. “God have pity!”
Filled with compassion I took a half-step toward her, but the sudden pressure of de Grandin’s small hand on my elbow halted me.
“Observe,” he breathed—“le sang!”
I felt a retching wave of sickness as he spoke. Across the bodice of her nightdress where her slender hand had rested, was a dark, rubescent stain.
For an endless moment we three, watched and watchers, stood in statue-like stillness; then with another sobbing sigh the woman turned and glided down the hall, her white, bare feet as soundless as a zephyr on the polished boards.
“Wh—what can have happened?” I faltered, but his only answer was to urge me toward the stairs.
The pale glow of a single lamp burning like a vigil light above the altar-table where the ikon stood shone through the gunroom as we entered. At a glance I saw the little doors were open and the triple picture on display, but before de Grandin’s quickly indrawn breath had sounded I had also seen the thing that lay before the table on the floor.
It was—it had been—Wyndham Farraday, the dissolute young playwright, and a single glance assured us he was dead. His head lay back, and in the staring, sunken eyes, pinched nose, drooping jaw and idiotically half-protruding tongue we read the signs that to the practised eye are unmistakable. He lay upon his back with arms thrown out to right and left as though he had been crucified upon the hardwood floor, and from the left breast of his pajama jacket thrust the gilded cross-shaped handle of a slender dagger, a mediæval misericord, thin as a darning-needle, pointed as a bee-sting, designed to slip between the links of fine chain-mail and deal the death blow where a larger weapon would have failed. A little sluggish stream of blood had stained his jacket round the knife-wound. He was not handsome or majestic as he lay there with the chill of rigor mortis even then beginning to congeal his loose-hung lower jaw. Poets and romantic writers to the contrary, there is little dignity or beauty in raw death, as every soldier, doctor and embalmer knows. The majesty of death is largely artificial.
“Do you think she—” I began, but de Grandin’s sudden exclamation broke my words.
“L’idole—the picture, my friend—observe her, if you please!” he breathed.
I looked, then blinked my eyes in wondering disbelief. The little bits of colored marble which composed the triple picture seemed sliding past, around and through one another with a bewildering kaleidoscopic motion, losing their old pattern, making vague, unformed designs upon their golden background, then rearranging themselves in new and terrifying groupings. It was hard—impossible—to say what scenes they formed, but I felt a wave of nausea sweeping over me, a physical sickness such as that I felt when as a young interne I had been assigned to duty at the city morgue and for the first time smelled the fulsome odor of decaying human flesh.
Then sanity returned. The lamp! It was swaying pendulum-like above the ikon. That was it; the changing light and shadow as the light swung back and forth had caused an optical illusion. I took the boat-shaped bowl of burnished copper in my hands and steadied it. When I looked again the pictures had resumed their lovely wont. The youths and maidens once again danced joyously upon the tender, blue-green grass against a background of fresh-budding willows; the chubby cooing infants rolled and sported on a flowering sward; the pale, ascetic saint looked out with admonition and reproach upon a world which wooed the pomps and pleasures of the carnal life.
“Oh, thou empty-headed zany, thou species of an elephant, thou—oh, le bon Dieu give me patience with this witless one!” de Grandin fairly chattered, his round blue eyes ablaze with indignation, his small hands twitching to close round my throat.
“Why, what’s the matter now?” I asked. “That swaying lamp obscured our vision; we’ll need a steady light to see—”
“If kindly Providence will defe
nd me from my well-intentioned friends, I think that I can guard against my enemies!” he broke in sharply, looking at me with a heaven-grant-me-fortitude expression. “In your attempt at helpfulness you have blocked the path of justice, human and divine. That swinging lamp was not set in motion by itself, par consequent it must have started swaying by some outside force. I would make bold to venture that some human hand had touched it in the recent past, for it was still in motion when we came here. Accordingly, there were unquestionably finger-prints upon it. Whose? Hélas, that we shall never know. You must needs stop the light from swinging because it made you see things which were not there to see—and left your great and ugly paw-prints on it in the process. Twenty expert tracers cannot now find the prints which were left there by the person who had touched that lamp a little while before. And that person, I damn think, was none other than the murderer of this poor one.
“Also, the distortion of this picture, as you call it, which you have attributed to the swaying of that lamp, may be the very crux of all this cursèd mystery. Why was Monsieur Classon anxious to have the testimony of his guests that this pretty picture was nothing but a pretty picture? Because, I think, he had seen it show another scene, pardieu! Why did la Kirsten show such signs of fear when she looked upon this seventy-times-damned ikon? Because she saw a something which was not good to see while the others saw but pretty figures! Why did Jules de Grandin have impressions of some sacrilegious scene when first he looked upon this piece of what seems innocent mosaic? Because I am attuned to superphysical appearances; I see deeper into such things than the ordinary man. Finally, why did you look sick, as if your dinner had most vilely disagreed with you, when you looked at this cursèd picture but a moment since? Because you, too, saw something dreadful taking shape. A moment more and we had captured it—but you must be helpful and dispel the atmosphere of evil which was gathering thick as fog.
“And now you ask me what’s the matter! You should abase yourself. You should repent in sackcloth; you should walk barefoot through the snow; you should abstain from liquor for a week, parbleu!
“No matter,” he put aside annoyance with true French practicality and turned toward the door. “This is now a matter for police investigation. Let us telephone the state constabulary.”
“THIS IS POSITIVELY THE most uncanny business I’ve ever seen,” Captain Chenevert of the State Police informed us.
De Grandin eyed him saturninely. “You are informing me, mon capitaine?”
“I certainly am. Look here: We’ve checked and double-checked that room for finger-prints, and what do we find? Nothing. Not a thing!”
“Nothing?”
“Well, practically. Or, rather, something worse. There are plain and unmistakable prints on the dagger handle, but they’re Wyndham Farraday’s. Now, that just doesn’t make sense. Farraday might have stabbed himself through the heart, though this job’s so neatly done it almost seems as if a surgeon did it; but if he did it himself one of two things would have followed the infliction of the wound. Either he’d have staggered forward and fallen in a heap, probably on his side, or he’d have collapsed at once; in which case he would either have fallen face-forward or dropped upon his back with his legs partly doubled under him. Possibly—though this usually happens in cases of shooting through the brain—he’d have been seized with a cadaveric spasm, all his muscles would have tightened into knots, and his fingers would have closed round the dagger-hilt in an almost unbreakable grip.”
He paused and looked at Jules de Grandin questioningly. “Do you agree?”
“Perfectly, mon capitaine; you have exhausted the possibilities of the situation from a scientific standpoint.”
“Then why in blazing hell was he lying so neatly spread out on the floor with his heels together like a soldier at attention and his arms flung out at right angles to his body?”
“Mightn’t someone wearing gloves have stabbed him after he’d had the dagger in his hand?” I hazarded; but:
“Not a chance!” Chenevert smiled bleakly. “We’ve considered that, but if it had been done that way Farraday’s finger-prints would have been practically obliterated, or at least smudged to some extent. They’re not; they’re clean and clear as any I’ve ever seen. This thing’s got me going nutty. The finger-prints say ‘suicide’ with a capital S; all collateral evidence points to murder. If such a thing weren’t palpably absurd here, I’d say it looked like hari-kari—ritual suicide with the assistance of a second party, you know. I saw a case of it in Kobe some years ago. A man had disemboweled himself in the approved Japanese manner, but the friend who acted as his second had waited to compose his limbs so that he lay as peacefully as Wyndham Farraday, though he must have threshed around terribly during the death agony.”
Suddenly I saw it all. Karen Kirsten’s frenzy to get away, her terror when she entered the gunroom last night, the blood on her nightgown when we saw her in the upper hall! It had been a suicide pact, and the woman lost her courage at the last. “By, George,” I exclaimed, “Miss—”
The kick de Grandin gave me underneath the table nearly broke my tibia, but it had the desired effect. “Mistakes like that are easy to make in such cases,” I ended lamely as Chenevert cast a questioning look at me.
“Friend Trowbridge has the right of it,” de Grandin nodded. “There are many angles to this case, my captain; the trail is long and winding, and involved. Perhaps it would be well to lay the household under interdict.”
“Eh? Inter—”
“Perfectly. Until the guilty party is arrested or the case marked permanently unsolved, every person in the building is suspect. People have a way of disappearing, my captain, once they leave the jurisdiction. While all of us are here you can put the finger on us at convenience. Once we are scattered—”
“I gotcha,” Chenevert laughed. “You bet I’ll put the clamp on, Doctor. Can’t hold ’em here indefinitely, but I’ll post a couple of the boys here with orders not to let anybody leave for thirty-six hours. We should know where we stand by that time. Meantime,” he wound his muffler round his neck and buttoned up his short coat, “there’s the body to dispose of and reports to be prepared. Call me at the barracks if anything comes up. I’ll be over again sometime this afternoon.”
“OH, THIS IS TERRIBLE!” Karen Kirsten wailed when we told her the police had forbidden us to leave. “I have shopping to do in New York, and my lawyers to consult about a new contract. I have to take a plane for the Coast immediately!” Her blue eyes blazed and her long hands folded and unfolded as she strode across the floor with her characteristic long-limbed, effortless walk. “I can’t—I won’t be cooped up in this dreadful place another minute, I tell you!”
True to the traditions of her trade, she was working herself into a temperamental tantrum, but beneath de Grandin’s level stare she calmed amazingly.
“It would be better if we told ourselves the truth without reservation of any sort, Mademoiselle,” he spoke in a level, almost toneless voice. “We are your friends; moreover, our experience has taught us to give credence to many things which the ordinary man would brush aside as nonsense. Nevertheless, we cannot help you if you are not frank.”
“Why shouldn’t I be frank?” she blazed. “I’ve nothing to hide. I know nothing of this dreadful business.”
“You did not know that Monsieur Farraday was dead until they told you?”
“Of course not!”
“Not even when you left your room at dead of night and crept mouse-quiet to the gunroom where he lay like one crucified before that so queer ikon?”
“What do you mean? I never left my room last night—”
“Mademoiselle,” he interrupted harshly, “you are lying. It was Doctor Trowbridge and I who notified the police of Monsieur Farraday’s death when we stumbled on his body in the gunroom. As we were about to leave our room we saw you coming up the stairs, we saw the agitation under which you labored, we saw the blood upon your robe de nuit. We have not spoken of this, Mademo
iselle, for there are some things best left unsaid, for the present, at any rate; but if you persist in this pretense of ignorance—if you will not help us to help you”—he spread his hands and raised his shoulders, brows and elbows in a shrug—“eh bien, it is a crime to withhold information from the officers, Mademoiselle. You would not have us become criminals, surely?”
She went absolutely rigid. There had never been much natural color in her cheeks; now they were positively corpse-gray. And her eyes were terrible in their fixed stare.
“You mean you saw me come upstairs last night?” she whispered. Her words were so low that we could scarcely hear them, her voice flat, expressionless, almost mechanical.
“Perfectly, Mademoiselle.” The ghost of a hard smile curved the lips beneath the trimly waxed wheat-blond mustache.
Surrender showed in the sudden drooping of her shoulders, in the lines of weariness that suddenly etched themselves in her carefully tended face.
“Very well,” she answered in a voice dull with fatigue, “I was there; I saw him—found him huddled up before the altar where that dreadful picture stands. He seemed so young, so helpless, lying there like that. I composed his limbs”—her blue eyes filled with tears and her firm chin quivered with unbidden sobs—“I stretched his arms out, too. It was a dreadful thing he’d done; it’s terrible to kill yourself, and I thought that if I stretched his arms out like a cross it might help him plead for pardon—”
“That was the only reason you arranged him so, Mademoiselle?” Again the flicker of a disbelieving smile showed upon his mobile lips.
“Oh”—the woman turned on him, her eyes gone flat with fright—“you’re dreadful, uncanny, devilish! No, if you must have the truth! I stretched his arms out like a cross because I was afraid. There’s an old belief in Sweden that the dead ride hard, that suicides are lonely on their way through hell, and come back to the world to look for company; but if you lay a cross across their path, their way back to this world is barred. They can’t come at you, then. We forget these things in practical America, but Death’s not practical; it’s as old and terrible as Odin’s raven or the Storm Sisters; it brings back thoughts of olden days, so—”
A Rival from the Grave Page 48