“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I returned, “we all—”
“Parbleu, I have said it. That kitten incident, now, is probably the single tiny skeleton in the entire closet of your existence, yet sustained thought upon it will magnify it even as the cat of your dream grew from cat’s to lion’s size. Pardieu, my friend, I am not so sure you did dream of that abomination in the shape of a cat which visited you. Suppose—” he broke off, staring intently before him, twisting first one, then the other end of his trimly waxed mustache.
“Suppose what?” I prompted.
“Non, we will suppose nothing tonight,” be replied. “You will please go to sleep once more, my friend, and I shall remain in the room to frighten away any more dream-demons which may come to plague you. Come, let us sleep. Here I do remain.” He leaped into the wide bed beside me and pulled the down comforter snugly up about his pointed chin.
“…. aND I’D LIKE VERY much to have you come right over to see her, if you will,” Mrs. Weaver finished. “I can’t imagine whatever made her attempt such a thing—she’s never shown any signs of it before.”
I hung up the telephone receiver and turned to de Grandin. “Here’s another suicide, or almost-suicide, for you,” I told him half teasingly. “The daughter of one of my patients attempted her life by hanging in the bathroom this morning.”
“Par la tête bleu, do you tell me so?” he exclaimed eagerly. “I go with you, cher ami. I see this young woman; I examine her. Perhaps I shall find some key to the riddle there. Parbleu, me, I itch, I burn, I am all on fire with this mystery! Certainly, there must be an answer to it; but it remains hidden like a peasant’s pig when the tax collector arrives.”
“WELL, YOUNG LADY, WHAT’S this I hear about you?” I demanded severely as we entered Grace Weaver’s bedroom a few minutes later. “What on earth have you to die for?”
“I—I don’t know what made me want to do it, Doctor,” the girl replied with a wan smile. “I hadn’t thought of it before—ever. But I just got to—oh, you know, sort of brooding over things last night, and when I went into the bathroom this morning, something—something inside my head, like those ringing noises you hear when you have a head-cold, you know—seemed to be whispering, ‘Go on, kill yourself; you’ve nothing to live for. Go on, do it!’ So I just stood on the scales and took the cord from my bathrobe and tied it over the transom, then knotted the other end about my neck. Then I kicked the scales away and”—she gave another faint smile—“I’m glad I hadn’t locked the door before I did it,” she admitted.
De Grandin had been staring unwinkingly at her with his curiously level glance throughout her recital. As she concluded he bent forward and asked: “This voice which you heard bidding you commit an unpardonable sin, Mademoiselle, did you, perhaps, recognize it?”
The girl shuddered. “No!” she replied, but a sudden paling of her face about the lips gave the lie to her word.
“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” the Frenchman returned. “I think you do not tell the truth. Now, whose voice was it, if you please?”
A sullen, stubborn look spread over the girl’s features, to be replaced a moment later by the muscular spasm which preludes weeping. “It—it sounded like Fanny’s,” she cried, and turning her face to the pillow, fell to sobbing bitterly.
“And Fanny, who is she?” de Grandin began, but Mrs. Weaver motioned him to silence with an imploring gesture.
I prescribed a mild bromide and left the patient, wondering what mad impulse could have led a girl in the first flush of young womanhood, happily situated in the home of parents who idolized her, engaged to a fine young man, and without bodily or spiritual ill of any sort, to attempt her life. Outside, de Grandin seized the mother’s arm and whispered fiercely: “Who is this Fanny, Madame Weaver? Believe me, I ask not from idle curiosity, but because I seek vital information!”
“Fanny Briggs was Grace’s chum two years ago,” Mrs. Weaver answered. “My husband and I never quite approved of her, for she was several years older than Grace, and had such pronounced modern ideas that we didn’t think her a suitable companion for our daughter, but you know how girls are with their ‘crushes.’ The more we objected to her going with Fanny, the more she used to seek her company, and we were both at our wits’ ends when the Briggs girl was drowned while swimming at Asbury Park. I hate to say it, but it was almost a positive relief to us when the news came. Grace was almost broken-hearted about it at first, but she met Charley this summer, and I haven’t heard her mention Fanny’s name since her engagement until just now.”
“Ah?” de Grandin tweaked the tip of his mustache meditatively. “And perhaps Mademoiselle Grace was somewhere to be reminded of Mademoiselle Fanny last night?”
“No,” Mrs. Weaver replied, “she went with a crowd of young folks to hear Maundy preach. There was a big party of them at the tabernacle—I’m afraid they went more to make fun than in a religious frame of mind, but he made quite an impression on Grace, she told us.”
“Feu de Dieu!” de Grandin exploded, twisting his mustache furiously. “Do you tell me so, Madame? This is of the interest. Madame, I salute you,” he bowed formally to Mrs. Weaver, then seized me by the arm and fairly dragged me away.
“Trowbridge, my friend,” he informed me as we descended the steps of the Weaver portico, “this business, it has l’odeur du poisson—how is it you say?—the fishy smell.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Parbleu, what should I mean except that we go to interview this Monsieur Everard Maundy immediately, right away, at once? Mordieu, I damn think I have the tail of this mystery in my hand, and may the blight of prohibition fall upon France if I do not twist it!”
THE REV. EVERARD MAUNDY’S rooms in the Tremont Hotel were not hard to locate, for a constant stream of visitors went to and from them.
“Have you an appointment with Mr. Maundy?” the secretary asked as we were ushered into the anteroom.
“Not we,” de Grandin denied, “but if you will be so kind as to tell him that Dr. Jules de Grandin, of the Paris Sûreté, desires to speak with him for five small minutes, I shall be in your debt.”
The young man looked doubtful, but de Grandin’s steady, catlike stare never wavered, and he finally rose and took our message to his employer.
In a few minutes he returned and admitted us to the big room where the evangelist received his callers behind a wide, flat-topped desk.
“Ah, Mr. de Grandin,” the exhorter began with a professionally bland smile as we entered, “you are from France, are you not, sir? What can I do to help you toward the light?”
“Cordieu, Monsieur,” de Grandin barked, for once forgetting his courtesy and ignoring the preacher’s outstretched hand, “you can do much. You can explain these so unexplainable suicides which have taken place during the past week—the time you have preached here. That is the light we do desire to see.”
Maundy’s face went mask-like and expressionless. “Suicides? Suicides?” he echoed. “What should I know of—”
The Frenchman shrugged his narrow shoulders impatiently. “We do fence with words, Monsieur,” he interrupted testily. “Behold the facts: Messieurs Planz and Nixon, young men with no reason for such desperate deeds, did kill themselves by violence; Madame Westerfelt and her two daughters, who were happy in their home, as everyone thought, did hurl themselves from an hotel window; a little schoolgirl hanged herself; last night my good friend Trowbridge, who never understandingly harmed man or beast, and whose life is dedicated to the healing of the sick, did almost take his life; and this very morning a young girl, wealthy, beloved, with every reason to be happy, did almost succeed in dispatching herself.
“Now, Monsieur le prédicateur, the only thing this miscellaneous assortment of persons had in common is the fact that each of them did hear you preach the night before, or the same night, he attempted self-destruction. That is the light we seek. Explain us the mystery, if you please.”
Maundy’s lean, rugged f
ace had undergone a strange transformation while the little Frenchman spoke. Gone was his smug, professional smirk, gone the forced and meaningless expression of benignity, and in their place a look of such anguish and horror as might rest on the face of one who hears his sentence of damnation read.
“Don’t—don’t!” he besought, covering his writhing face with his hands and bowing his head upon his desk while his shoulders shook with deep, soul-racking sobs. “Oh, miserable me! My sin has found me out!”
For a moment he wrestled in spiritual anguish, then raised his stricken countenance and regarded us with tear-dimmed eyes. “I am the greatest sinner in the world,” he announced sorrowfully. “There is no hope for me on earth or yet in heaven!”
De Grandin tweaked the ends of his mustache alternately as he gazed curiously at the man before us. “Monsieur,” he replied at length. “I think you do exaggerate. There are surely greater sinners than you. But if you would shrive you of the sin which gnaws your heart, I pray you shed what light you can upon these deaths, for there may be more to follow, and who knows that I shall not be able to stop them if you will but tell me all?”
“Mea culpa!” Maundy exclaimed, and struck his chest with his clenched fists like a Hebrew prophet of old. “In my younger days, gentlemen, before I dedicated myself to the salvaging of souls, I was a scoffer. What I could not feel or weigh or measure, I disbelieved. I mocked at all religion and sneered at all the things which others held sacred.
“One night I went to a Spiritualistic seance, intent on scoffing, and forced my young wife to accompany me. The medium was an old colored woman, wrinkled, half-blind, and unbelievably ignorant, but she had something—some secret power—which was denied the rest of us. Even I, atheist and derider of the truth that I was, could see that.
“As the old woman called on the spirits of the departed, I laughed out loud, and told her it was a fake. The negress came out of her trance and turned her deepset, burning old eyes on me. ‘White man,’ she said, ‘yuh is gwine ter feel mighty sorry fo’ dem words. Ah tells you de speerits can heah whut yuh says, an dey will take deir revenge on you an’ yours—yas, an’ on dem as foller yuh—till yuh wishes yo’ tongue had been cut out befo’ yuh said dem words dis yere night.’
“I tried to laugh at her—to curse her for a sniveling old faker—but there was something so terrible in her wrinkled old face that the words froze on my lips, and I hurried away.
“The next night my wife—my young, lovely bride—drowned herself in the river, and I have been a marked man ever since. Wherever I go it is the same. God has seen fit to open my eyes to the light of Truth and give me words to place His message before His people, and many who come to sneer at me go away believers; but wherever throngs gather to hear me bear my testimony there are always these tragedies. Tell me, gentlemen”—he threw out his hands in a gesture of surrender—“must I forever cease to preach the message of the Lord to His people? I have told myself that these self-murders would have occurred whether I came to town or not, but—is this a judgment which pursues me forever?”
Jules de Grandin regarded him thoughtfully. “Monsieur,” he murmured, “I fear you make the mistakes we are all too prone to make. You do saddle le bon Dieu with all the sins with which the face of man is blackened. What if this were no judgment of heaven, but a curse of a very different sort, hein?”
“You mean the devil might be driving to overthrow the effects of my work?” the other asked, a light of hope breaking over his haggard face.
“U’m, perhaps; let us take that for our working hypothesis,” de Grandin replied. “At present we may not say whether it be devil or devilkin which dogs your footsteps; but at the least we are greatly indebted to you for what you have told. Go my friend; continue to preach the Truth as you conceive the Truth to be, and may the God of all peoples uphold your hands. Me, I have other work to do, but it may be scarcely less important.” He bowed formally and, turning on his heel, strode quickly from the room.
“THAT’S THE MOST FANTASTIC story I ever heard!” I declared as we entered the hotel elevator. “The idea! As if an ignorant old negress could put a curse on—”
“Zut!” de Grandin shut me off. “You are a most excellent physician in the State of New Jersey, Friend Trowbridge, but have you ever been in Martinique, or Haiti, or in the jungles of the Congo Belgique?”
“Of course not,” I admitted, “but—”
“I have. I have seen things so strange among the Voudois people that you would wish to have me committed to a madhouse did I but relate them to you. However, as that Monsieur Kipling says, ‘that is another story.’ At the present we are pledged to the solving of another mystery. Let us go to your house. I would think, I would consider all this business-of-the-monkey. Pardieu, it has as many angles as a diamond cut in Amsterdam!”
“TELL ME, FRIEND TROWBRIDGE,” he demanded as we concluded our evening meal, “have you perhaps among your patients some young man who has met with a great sorrow recently; someone who has sustained a loss of wife or child or parents?”
I looked at him in amazement, but the serious expression on his little heart-shaped face told me he was in earnest, not making some ill-timed jest at my expense.
“Why, yes,” I responded. “There is young Alvin Spence. His wife died in childbirth last June, and the poor chap has been half beside himself ever since. Thank God I was out of town at the time and didn’t have the responsibility of the case.”
“Thank God, indeed,” de Grandin nodded gravely. “It is not easy for us, though we do ply our trade among the dying, to tell those who remain behind of their bereavement. But this Monsieur Spence; will you call on him this evening? Will you give him a ticket to the lecture of Monsieur Maundy?”
“No!” I blazed, half rising from my chair. “I’ve known that boy since he was a little toddler—knew his dead wife from childhood, too; and if you’re figuring on making him the subject of some experiment—”
“Softly, my friend,” he besought. “There is a terrible Thing loose among us. Remember the noble martyrs of science, those so magnificent men who risked their lives that yellow fever and malaria should be no more. Was not their work a holy one? Certainly. I do but wish that this young man may attend the lecture tonight, and on my honor, I shall guard him until all danger of attempted self-murder is passed. You will do what I say?”
He was so earnest in his plea that, though I felt like an accessory before the fact in a murder, I agreed.
Meantime, his little blue eyes snapping and sparkling with the zest of the chase, de Grandin had busied himself with the telephone directory, looking up a number of addresses, culling through them, discarding some, adding others, until he had obtained a list of some five or six. “Now, mon vieux,” he begged as I made ready to visit Alvin Spence on my treacherous errand, “I would that you convey me to the rectory of St. Benedict’s Church. The priest in charge there is Irish, and the Irish have the gift of seeing things which you colder-blooded Saxons may not. I must have a confab with this good Father O’Brien before I can permit that you interview the young Monsieur Spence. Mordieu, me, I am a scientist; no murderer!”
I drove him past the rectory and parked my motor at the curb, waiting impatiently while he thundered at the door with the handle of his ebony walking stick. His knock was answered by a little old man in clerical garb and a face as round and ruddy as a winter apple.
De Grandin spoke hurriedly to him in a low voice, waving his hands, shaking his head, shrugging his shoulders, as was his wont when the earnestness of his argument bore him before it. The priest’s round face showed first incredulity, then mild skepticism, finally absorbed interest. In a moment the pair of them had vanished inside the house, leaving me to cool my heels in the bitter March air.
“You were long enough,” I grumbled as he emerged from the rectory.
“Pardieu, yes, just long enough,” he agreed. “I did accomplish my purpose, and no visit is either too long or too short when you can say that. No
w to the house of the good Monsieur Spence, if you will. Mordieu, but we shall see what we shall see this night!”
Six hours later de Grandin and I crouched shivering at the roadside where the winding, serpentine Albemarle Pike dips into the hollow beside the Lonesome Swamp. The wind which had been trenchant as a shrew’s tongue earlier in the evening had died away, and a hard, dull bitterness of cold hung over the hills and hollows of the rolling countryside. From the wide salt marshes where the bay’s tide crept up to mingle with the swamp’s brackish waters twice a day there came great sheets of brumous, impenetrable vapor which shrouded the landscape and distorted commonplace objects into hideous, gigantic monstrosities.
“Mort d’un petit bonhomme, my friend,” de Grandin commented between chattering teeth, “I do not like this place; it has an evil air. There are spots where the very earth does breathe of unholy deeds, and by the sacred name of a rooster, this is one such. Look you at this accursed fog. Is it not as if the specters of those drowned at sea were marching up the shore this night?”
“Umph!” I replied, sinking my neck lower in the collar of my ulster and silently cursing myself for a fool.
A moment’s silence, then: “You are sure Monsieur Spence must come this way? There is no other road by which he can reach his home?”
“Of course not,” I answered shortly. “He lives out in the new Weiss development with his mother and sister—you were there this evening—and this is the only direct motor route to the subdivision from the city.”
“Ah, that is well,” he replied, hitching the collar of his greatcoat higher about his ears. “You will recognize his car—surely?”
“I’ll try to,” I promised, “but you can’t be sure of anything on a night like this. I’d not guarantee to pick out my own—there’s somebody pulling up beside the road now,” I interrupted myself as a roadster came to an abrupt halt and stood panting, its headlights forming vague, luminous spots in the haze.
The Horror on the Links Page 36