The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “Dad?” the appellation was pronounced with questioning diffidence. “Oh, Dad?”

  Bartrow wheeled with a nervous jerk, his big, florid face in its frame of white hair lighting up at sound of his son’s voice, and took a quick step forward.

  “O-o-oh!” the exclamation was soft, scarcely audible, but freighted with sudden panic consternation, and the little bride cringed quickly against her husband’s arm. The half-nervous, half-playful smile froze on her lips, leaving her little white teeth partially exposed, as though ready to bite. The merry light in her gray eyes blurred to a set, fixed stare of horror as a convulsive shudder of abhorrence ran through her. It was as though, expecting to meet a friend, she had been suddenly confronted by a gruesome specter—an apparition she had reason to dread and hate.

  “Oh, Rance,” she pleaded in a voice thick with terror. “Oh, Rance—please—” Pounding heart and laboring lungs choked her voice, but the wild, imploring glance she gave her husband pleaded for protection with an eloquence no words could equal.

  Startled by the girl’s unreasoning fright, I glanced at Bartrow. He had paused almost in the act of stepping; his forward foot rested lightly on the floor, scarcely touching the polished boards, and in his face had come an expression I could not fathom. Astonishment, incredulous delight, something like exultation, shone in his steel-blue eyes, and the smile which came unbidden to his bearded lips was such as a fanatic inquisitor might have worn when some long-sought and particularly virulent heretic came into his power.

  The tableau lasted but an instant, and for that fleeting second the sultry September air was charged with an electric thrill of concentrated terror and delight, panic fear and savage exultation of vengeance about to be fulfilled.

  Then we were once more normal twentieth century people. With words of welcome and genial thumps upon the back and chest James Bartrow greeted his son, and he was the smiling, jovial, new-found father to the bride. But I noticed that the kiss he placed upon her dutifully upturned cheek was the merest perfunctory salutation, and as his lips came near her face the girl’s very flesh seemed to cringe from the contact, light as it was.

  Bartrow’s heavy voice boomed out an order, and a cobweb-festooned bottle in a wicker cradle was brought from the cellar by the butler. The wine was ruby-red and ruby-clear, and Jules de Grandin’s small blue eyes sparkled appreciatively as they beheld the black-glass bottle. “Arcachon ’89!” he murmured almost piously as he passed the glass under his nostrils, savoring the wine’s aroma reverently before he drank. “Mordieu, it is exquisite!”

  But while the rest of us drank deeply of the almost priceless vintage little Mrs. Bartrow scarcely moistened her lips, and at the bottom of her eyes when they turned toward her father-in-law was a look that made me shiver. And in her soft, low voice there came a thin, metallic rasp whenever she spoke to him which told of fear and abhorrence. By the way she sat, every nerve tense to the snapping-point, I could see she struggled mightily for self-control.

  It made me ill at ease to watch this veiled, silent battle between James Bartrow and his son’s wife, and at the first opportunity I murmured an excuse that I had several calls to make and hastened to the outside air.

  I shot the starter to my car and turned toward home, wondering if I had not imagined it all, but:

  “Tiens, my friend, the situation, it is interesting, n’est-ce-pas?” remarked de Grandin.

  “The situation?” I countered. “How do you mean?”

  “Ah bah, you do play the dummy merely for the pleasure of being stubborn! What should I mean? Does the welcomed-home bride customarily regard her hitherto unknown beau-père as a bird might greet a suddenly-met serpent? And does the father-in-law usually welcome home his son’s wife with an expression which might have done great credit to the wicked, so hungry wolf when la petite Chaperon Rouge came tap-tapping at her grandmamma’s cottage-door? I damn think not.”

  “You’re crazy,” I assured him testily. “It’s unfortunate, I’ll admit; but there’s no ground for you to build one of your confounded mysteries on here.”

  “U’m? And what is your explanation?” he returned in a flat, accentless tone.

  “Why, I can only think that Bartrow reminds his daughter-in-law irresistibly of someone she fears and hates through and through, and—”

  “Précisément,” he agreed with a vigorous nod, “and that someone she must have hated with a hate to make our estimates of hatred pale and watery. More, she must have feared him as a mediæval anchoret feared erotic dreams. Perhaps, also, since you are in explanatory mood at present, you will explain the look of recognition—of diabolic, devilish surprised recognition—which came upon Monsieur Bartrow’s face as he beheld the young Madame for the first time?

  “Hein?” he prodded as I was silent.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I answered shortly. “It was queer, confoundedly queer, but—”

  “But I have small doubt we shall learn more anon than we now know,” he interrupted complacently. “Me, I think we have not seen the last act of this so interesting little play, my friend.”

  WE HAD NOT. THE sun had hardly commenced to stain the eastern sky next morning when the nagging chatter of my bedside telephone roused me and Ransome Bartrow’s frightened voice implored my services. “Sylvia—it’s Sylvia!” he told me breathlessly. “She’s in a dreadful state!” then crashed the ’phone receiver back into its hook before I had a chance to ask him what the trouble was.

  Alert as a cat, however deeply he might seem immersed in sleep, de Grandin was at my side before I finished dressing, and when I told him Ransome wanted me he dashed back to his room, donned his clothes with more speed than a fireman responding to a third alarm and joined me at the curb as I made ready to dash across town to the Bartrow home.

  The chill of early morning drove the last trace of sleep from our eyes as we rushed through the quiet streets, and we were efficiently awake when Ransome Bartrow met us at the door.

  “I don’t know what it is—something’s frightened her terribly—a burglar, perhaps—I can’t get anything out of her!” he answered my preliminary questions as we trailed him up the stairs. “She’s almost in collapse, Doctor. For God’s sake, do something for her!”

  Sylvia Bartrow was a pitiful figure as she lay in her bed. Her little, heart-shaped face seemed to have shrunk, and her big gray eyes appeared to have widened till they almost obscured her other features. Her cheeks were pale as the linen against which they lay, and her gaze was filmed with unspeakable horror. Without being told, I knew her whole being was vibrant with a desperate agony of terror, and I have never seen a glance more heartrending than the dumb, imploring look she cast on her husband as he entered.

  “Shock,” I pronounced after a hurried look, and turned to my medicine kit to fill a syringe with tincture digitalis. Plainly this case was too severe for aromatic ammonia or similar simple remedies.

  “Shock,” young Bartrow repeated stupidly.

  “Mais oui,” de Grandin explained patiently; “it is the relaxation of the controlling influence exercised by the nervous system on the vital organic functions of the body, my friend. Any extraordinary emotional stress may cause it, especially in women. What happened to affright Madame your wife? Surely, you were here?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Ransome confessed. “I couldn’t sleep, and I’d gone downstairs. It’s hot in Arizona, far hotter than here, but this damned damp heat is strange to me, and I couldn’t bear lying in bed any longer. I’d about made up my mind to go out on the front porch and lie in a hammock when I heard Sylvia scream, and rushed up here to find her like this.”

  “U’m? And you heard nothing else?”

  “No—er—yes; I did! As I dashed up the stairs, two at a time, I could have sworn I heard someone or something moving down the hall, but—”

  “Some thing, Monsieur—can you not be more explicit?”

  “Well, it sounded as though it might have been a man in stocking feet or rubber-soled shoes o
r—once while I was in the West a fool puma got into the upper story of the shack where I was sleeping and dashed around like a crazy thing till it found the open window and jumped out again. That’s the way those footsteps—if they were footsteps—sounded. Like a great, soft-footed animal, sir.”

  “Exactement,” the Frenchman nodded gravely. “And Monsieur your father, you did call him?”

  “I did, but Dad sleeps on the floor above, and his door was locked. I could hear him snoring in his room, and I couldn’t seem to get any response to my knocking, so I telephoned Doctor Trowbridge.

  “Will she recover—she’s not dying, Doctor?” he asked in terror, coming, to my side and looking at his wife with brimming eyes and quivering lips.

  “Nonsense—of course, she’s not dying!” I answered, looking up from the watch by which I timed the girl’s pulse. “She’s been badly frightened by something, but her heart action is getting stronger all the time. We’ll give her a sedative in a little while, and she’ll he practically as well as ever when she wakes up. I’d advise her to stay in bed and eat sparingly for the next day or two, though, and I’ll leave some bromides to be taken every hour for the rest of today.”

  “Hadn’t we better notify the police? It might have been a burglar she saw,” Ransome suggested.

  Jules de Grandin walked to the window and thrust his head out. “It is twenty feet sheer to the ground with nothing a cat might climb,” he remarked after a brief survey. “Your burglar did not enter here.” Then: “You were on the lower floor when Madame alarmed you with her cry. Tell me, which way did the footsteps you heard seem to go?”

  Ransome thought a moment, then: “It’s hard to say exactly, but they seemed to go up, though—”

  “A servant, perhaps?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The servants all sleep in the left wing on this floor, and I’m pretty sure none of ’em would have been up at that hour. But it might have been the burglar running toward the roof. Shall we look?”

  We searched the third story of the house, with the exception of the chamber where James Bartrow lay in decidedly audible slumber, but nowhere did we find a trace of the intruder. At the stairway leading to the trap-door in the roof we paused, then turned away in disappointment. The door had long been secured by half a dozen twenty-penny nails driven through frame and casing. Nothing less than a battering-ram could have loosened it.

  “Well, it’s past me,” Ransome confessed.

  “You, perhaps, but not Jules de Grandin,” the Frenchman answered. “I am interested, I am intrigued; my curiosity is aroused. I shall seek an explanation.”

  “Where?”

  “Where but from Madame Sylvia? It was she who saw the intruder; who else can tell us more of him?”

  “But, she’s too ill—”

  “Assuredly; I would not harass her with questions at this time; but when she is recovered we shall learn from her what it was that came. Me, I have already an idea, but I should like her to confirm it. Then we can take such measures as may be needed to guard against a recurrence. Yes. Certainly.”

  OFFICE HOURS WERE OVER and I was preparing to go upstairs and dress for dinner when James Bartrow stalked into my consulting-room. “See here, Trowbridge,” he announced in his customary brusque manner. “I feel like hell on Sunday; I want you to help me snap out of it.”

  “All right,” I acquiesced, “I think that can be arranged. What seems to be the trouble?”

  He bit the end from a cigar of man-killing proportions, set it alight with the flame from his hammered gold lighter and blew a cloud of smoke toward me across the desk. “Ever feel like kicking a cripple’s crutch out from under him?” he demanded. “Ever say to yourself when you were alone in the room with someone—especially if his back were turned to you—“It would take only one blow to knock him dead. Go on, hit him?” He exhaled another smoke-wreath and regarded me through the drifting white wreaths with an intent look which was almost a challenging glare.

  Despite the man’s seriousness, I could not repress a grin. “Certainly, I have,” I answered. “Everybody has those inexplicable impulses to do mischief. Men are only little boys grown up, you know; the principal difference is the normal adult recognizes the childishness of these impulses and dismisses them from his mind. The child gives way to them, so does the subnormal adult whose mind has retained its infantile stature after his body had developed.

  “You’ve been working pretty hard at the office lately, haven’t you?” I added, more as a peg on which to hang whatever treatment I recommended than as an actual question.

  “No, I haven’t,” he assured me shortly. “I’ve been taking things devilish easy, and if you start any of that fool stuff about my needing to go away for a rest I’ll clout you on the head; but—”

  He paused, drew a deep inhalation from his cigar and expelled the smoke almost explosively, then:

  “I might as well get it out,” he exclaimed. “It’s my daughter-in-law, Sylvia. Never saw anything like it. The moment I met the girl yesterday afternoon something seemed to snap like a steel trap inside my head. ‘There she is,’ a voice inside me seemed to say, ‘you’ve got her at last; there she is, ready to your hand! Kill her, kill her; do it now!’ Hanged if I didn’t almost leap on the poor kid and strangle her where she stood, too. I know I frightened her, for I must have shown the insane impulse in my face as soon as my eyes lit on her. It was the scared look in her eyes that brought me to my senses. The impulse passed as quickly as it came, but for a moment I thought I was going to flop down in a faint; it left me weak as a cat.”

  “H’m,” I murmured professionally. “You say this seizure came on you the moment you saw—”

  “Yes, but that’s not all,” he interrupted. “I shouldn’t be here if it were. I managed to shake off the desire to injure her—perhaps I’d better say it left of its own accord in a second—but last night I’d no sooner fallen asleep than I began dreaming of her. Lord!” He passed a handkerchief over his face, and I saw his hands were trembling. I dreamed I was walking through a great, dark wood or grove of some sort. The biggest oak trees I’ve ever seen were everywhere about, their branches seemed to interlace overhead and shut out every vestige of light. Suddenly I came to the biggest tree of all, and as I halted a shaft of moonlight pierced through an opening in its foliage, letting a pencil of luminance down like a spotlight in a darkened theater. Before me, in the center of that beam of light, lay Sylvia, dressed in some sort of long, loose, flowing robe of thin white cloth, with a wreath of wild roses twined in her unbound hair. She was drawn back against the gnarled roots of the tree in a half-reclining position, her wrists and ankles fastened to them with slender wicker withes. As I stopped beside her she looked up in my face with such an expression of mingled pleading and fear that it ought to have melted my heart; but it didn’t. Not by a damn sight. Instead, it seemed to incense me—set me wild with a maniacal desire to kill—and I reached down, tore her dress away from her bosom and was about to plunge a knife into her breast when she screamed, and the dream winked out like an extinguished candle flame. Queer, too; I kept right on dreaming, realizing that I’d been dreaming of killing Sylvia and regretting that I hadn’t been able to finish the crime. In my second dream I seemed to be deliberately wooing the return of the murder-dream, so I could take it up where I left off, like beginning a new installment of a story which had been continued at an exciting incident. Man, I tell you I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted to kill that girl, and I’ve a feeling I shouldn’t have stopped at mere murder if I’d been able to finish that dream!”

  “Pardonnez-moi, Messieurs,” de Grandin entered the consulting-room like an actor responding to a cue. “I was passing, I recognized Monsieur Bartrow’s voice; I could not help but hear what he said.

  “Monsieur,” he directed a level, unwinking stare at the visitor, “what you dreamed last night was not altogether a dream. No, there was action, as well as vision there. This afternoon, because the good Trowbridge
was overburdened with work, I took it on myself to call on Madame Sylvia. It is not the physician’s province to interrogate the servants, but this is more than a mere medical case. I felt it before, now I am assured of it. Therefore, I made discreet inquiries among your domestic staff, and from the laundress I did learn that a chemise de nuit of Madame Sylvia had been torn longitudinally—above the breast, even as you tore her robe in your dream, Monsieur.”

  “Well?” Bartrow demanded.

  “Non, by no means, it is not well, my friend; it is very far otherwise. You are perhaps aware that Madame Sylvia’s indisposition arises from a fright she sustained, from some unknown cause—a burglar, the hypothesis has been thus far?”

  “Well?” Bartrow repeated, his face hardening.

  “Monsieur, that burglar could not be found, neither hide nor hair of him could be discovered, though Doctor Trowbridge, your son and I did search your house with a comb of the fine teeth. No. For why?” He paused, regarding Bartrow and me alternately with his alert, cat-like stare.

  “All right, ‘for why?’” Bartrow demanded sharply when the silence had stretched to an uncomfortable length.

  “Because, Monsieur”—de Grandin paused impressively—“because you were that burglar!”

  “You’re mad!”

  “Not at all, I was never more sane; it is you who stand upon the springboard above the pool of madness, Monsieur. For why you had this impulse to slay a wholly inoffensive young lady whom you had never seen before, neither you nor we can say at this time with any manner of assurance; but that you had it and that it was almost overwhelming in its strength, even at its first onset, you admit. Consider: You understand the psychologie?”