A Rival from the Grave Page 22

  “EH BIEN, SHE HAS had a shock, that one,” de Grandin murmured as he looked in Margaret Ditmas’ still, set face. “Cut the cursed cords off her and bear her to her bed, Friend Trowbridge. Me, I shall call police and coroner. Her story can await on our convenience, now.”

  The girl seemed curiously light in my arms as I carried her into the garish modernistic bedroom with its chromium-plated furniture and laid her on the big, flat bed, drawing a down-stuffed comforter over her. In the black-and-silver bathroom I found smelling-salts and a bottle of aromatic bromides, and I brought her from her faint with wet towels and the salts, then gave her thirty grains of bromide. Presently she slept.

  I sat beside her, hours, it seemed, while de Grandin and Chenevert moved round the room beyond, inspecting the three bodies, ’phoning to the coroner, examining the branding-iron, shaped like a hiltless knife with exaggeratedly curved blade, attending to the hundred and one things which policemen have to do in such a case.

  Day came without dawn. The somber winter blackness of the night faded imperceptibly to smoky gray, at last to something like full daylight, but there was no sun, and in the sky the snow-clouds hovered threateningly.

  “She is better? She has slept?” de Grandin asked as he and Chenevert came in quietly.

  “Yes,” I answered to both questions. “She should be all right, now, though I think a period of rest would do her good.”

  “Undoubtlessly,” he acquiesced, “but she has all her life to rest if she is so disposed, while we are very busy.

  “Mademoiselle—Mademoiselle Margot!” he called softly.

  She turned restlessly, muttering inaudible words, then, childishly, reached out and took my hand, cuddling it against her cheek, and smiled. A fierce, protective tenderness surged up in me. “For heaven’s sake, de Grandin, let the child rest!” I urged him; but:

  “Mademoiselle, it is morning!” he persisted.

  A KIMONO DRAPED AROUND HER shoulders, Margaret Ditmas sat in bed sipping at the tea de Grandin had prepared for her. “You’re sure they’re dead?” she asked him with an apprehensive look.

  “As dead as forty herring—dead as mutton,” he assured her. “Me, I made them so, and I am most particular about my killings, Mademoiselle.”

  Reassured, she went on with her narrative: “I met Arbuthnot Hilliston in Jerusalem when Helen Cassaway and I were touring through the Orient last year,” she told us.

  “He was a fascinating man, and our acquaintance quickly became an intimate friendship. He knew a lot of places which no tourist ever sees, and the more we went about with him, the more his fascination seemed to grow on us. One day, as we were riding toward the site of the old Joppa Gate, he asked us how we’d like to witness the secret rites of the Assassins. Neither of us had ever heard of them, but the name sounded thrilling, and, of course, we agreed enthusiastically.

  “From what he told us it seemed they were a revival of an ancient secret order founded by some old Persian in the Eleventh Century, and in their heyday they were more powerful even than the orders of military knights of the Crusades. They’d exacted tribute from the mightiest, and when the tribute wasn’t paid, they killed. The Sultan Malik-Shah, the Califs Mostarshid and Rashid, fell beneath their daggers, as did Count Raymond, Christian ruler of Tripoli. Would seeing a lodge meeting of such an order, even though it were only a sort of pale modern copy of the flamboyant ancient original, be a thrill to any girls? You know the answer.

  “Arbuthnot took us to the place. The night was dark, and we went in closed carriages; so neither of us knew where we were going, but when we got there we had to take our Western clothing off and put on long white gowns of some sort of heavy muslin with a scarlet dagger embroidered on the left breast. Then cap-veils were brought us, and we put them on. Not network veils, such as we have here, but heavy cotton haiks, which were fastened over our faces just low enough below the cap-like head-dresses to let our eyes look out. Then we put about a dozen silver bracelets on each arm and two or three heavy silver rings about our ankles so that we clanked like moving hardware stores at every step, and went barefoot into the big, bare hall where a lot of veiled women and masked men sat round the wall and stared at us.

  “The head Assassin—I suppose you’d call him the high priest?—met us in the center of the hall and held out his hands to us. We knelt and put our folded hands between his and he repeated some sort of welcome in Arabic, and when the right times came Arbuthnot told us to nod, and we nodded. That was all—we thought.

  “A little later though, they brought out cups of sherbet spiced with some strong, bitter drug—I learned later that it was hashish!—and it made us crazy as fishes out of water. I remember swaying back and forth in my seat, and having a queer feeling as though the air about me were dissolving; as though I were in a rarer and clearer atmosphere, something like the feeling when you inhale nitrous oxide in the dentist’s chair, you know. When some queer-sounding music started I felt I simply had to dance, and I got up, ripped the smothering veil away from my face and did the best imitation of an Oriental dance I could. Suddenly a masked man leaped up from his seat against the wall, seized me in his arms, and—” She paused, and a dull, red flush came to her face.

  “Perfectly, Mademoiselle, one understands,” de Grandin told her evenly. “And later—”

  “Next day we learned that we’d been through the ceremony of initiation and were duly enrolled members of the sect, or order. We’d sworn to do the will of the society without question, and—well, it didn’t take us long to get away from there.

  “We came home, and here, in peaceful, matter-of-fact America, it seemed as though it were all part of some wild and rather unpleasant dream. Then, one afternoon, Helen called me up from her home in Paterson. ‘Daisy,’ she said, ‘something terrible has happened.’

  “Helen Cassaway was the kind of person to whom something ‘terrible’ was always happening; so I wasn’t particularly impressed, even though her voice seemed charged with terror.

  “‘What is it this time?’ I asked her. ‘Has the boyfriend found another girl?’

  “‘Daisy!’ she replied reproachfully, ‘please listen. You remember that dreadful lodge we joined with Arbuthnot Hilliston in Jerusalem?’

  “You may be sure I began to pay attention then. ‘Well?’ I asked.

  “‘Today an Armenian rug-peddler came to our house, and asked for me. I hadn’t the faintest idea how he knew my name, but I was interested; so I saw him. Daisy, he was from the Assassins’ lodge! He held out a little card with the picture of a red dagger on it—just like the daggers embroidered on the gowns we wore when we joined the society—and said it was the Knife of Hassan. When I asked him what he meant, he said it was the sign of the Assassins, and he had come to demand my services. He wanted me to go downtown with him tonight and help him in a badger game. He’s got the man all picked out, and all I have to do is obey his orders.’

  “‘What in the world’s a badger game?’ I asked.

  “‘It’s a sort of blackmail scheme. A woman flirts with a man, and then goes somewhere with him, and when they’re there alone another man who pretends to be the woman’s husband comes rushing in, and threatens to make a scandal unless the poor dupe who’s fallen for the woman’s charms pays him hush money, and—’

  “‘Did you send him packing?’ I asked.

  “‘I most certainly did, and he was furious—told me that no one could refuse to serve the Red Knife of Hassan, and that the branding-iron, the bow-string and the bay awaited all who were disobedient.’

  “‘Well,’ I told her, ‘you’d better go to the police. It may not be very easy, to confess that you’re mixed up with such a gang of scoundrels, but it’ll be a lot easier than trying to dodge their persecutions on your own account. Besides, that fellow ought to be locked up. He’s a dangerous character.’

  “‘I’m going right now,’ she told me as she hung up, and—”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle and—”

  “She wal
ked out of her house on the way to the police and no one ever saw her again.”

  “And how long ago did all this happen, if you please?”

  “About two months.”

  “U’m, one understands. And then—”

  “Arbuthnot Hilliston came home, and I got in touch with him at once. ‘You got me into this,’ I told him; ‘now you’ve got to get me out. Helen Cassaway’s disappeared as though she’d fallen in the bay, and I don’t know what minute they’ll be putting the finger on me.’

  “‘My dear girl,’ he answered, ‘I’d be pleased to help you, but they’re after me, too. I was told to do some spying on the French high command in Syria, but I’ve no desire to be stood up against a wall at sunrise; so I put for home. They tried to get me twice, and nearly succeeded each time, but I think I’m safe, for a while at least. I’ve got an Armenian servant—they hate the Moslems like sin, you know—and at his suggestion he got in touch with an Armenian workman here who’s made my house over into a veritable fortress. If you’re game to defy the conventions, you’re welcome to come out and stop with me. Nejib, my servant, will attend to everything for us, and we’ll have only some local help come in by the day, so there’ll be no suspicious characters entering the house. If we play lost for a while, maybe the whole business will blow over.’

  “The very night I went to stay at his house, you and Doctor Trowbridge came to dinner. I’d heard of you, of course, Doctor de Grandin, and thought that you could help us if anybody could. I drew Doctor Trowbridge as my dinner partner, and was beginning to lead up to asking him to ask you to help us when we went into the drawing-room. Then Arbuthnot was killed so terribly, and when you showed me the Red Knife of Hassan you’d found on his body, and they almost got me with their infernal machine, I knew that it was hopeless. If they could get into that steel-barred and double-locked house of Arbuthnot’s, there wasn’t any safety for me anywhere.

  “I thought they’d killed poor Nejib when I heard him scream out in the pantry, but this afternoon he called me on the ’phone and said he had managed to escape, though they were hunting for him. He warned me not to tell you anything if you came to see me, and said he and two Armenian friends would come secretly to take me to a place of safety tonight. I was to let Lily, my maid, go home early, and leave the window by the fire escape unlatched, so they could come in without being seen.

  “So I pleaded ignorance when you arrived, and waited in a perfect fever of apprehension till Nejib and the others came—and when they did, I found they were Assassins, and Nejib’s real name was Hassan. Then—”

  “Précisément, Mademoiselle, the rest we know,” de Grandin interrupted with a smile.

  “You have, perhaps, a—how do you call him, little cellar?—cellarette?—around?”

  “Why yes, over in that cabinet you’ll find some Scotch and rye, and some brandy, too, if you prefer.”

  “Prefer? Mon Dieu,” he looked at her reproachfully, “who would drink whisky when brandy is available, Mademoiselle?”

  The Jest of Warburg Tantavul

  WARBURG TANTAVUL WAS DYING. Little more than skin and bones, he lay propped up with pillows in the big sleigh bed and smiled as though he found the thought of dissolution faintly amusing.

  Even in comparatively good health the man was never prepossessing. Now, wasted with disease, that smile of self-sufficient satisfaction on his wrinkled face, he was nothing less than hideous. The eyes, which nature had given him, were small, deep-set and ruthless. The mouth, which his own thoughts had fashioned through the years, was wide and thin-lipped, almost colorless, and even in repose was tightly drawn against his small and curiously perfect teeth. Now, as he smiled, a flickering light, lambent as the quick reflection of an unseen flame, flared in his yellowish eyes, and a hard white line of teeth showed on his lower lip, as if he bit it to hold back a chuckle.

  “You’re still determined that you’ll marry Arabella?” he asked his son, fixing his sardonic, mocking smile on the young man.

  “Yes, Father, but—”

  “No buts, my boy”—this time the chuckle came, low and muted, but at the same time glassy-hard—“no buts. I’ve told you I’m against it, and you’ll rue it to your dying day if you should marry her; but”—he paused, and breath rasped in his wizened throat—“but go ahead and marry her, if your heart’s set on it. I’ve said my say and warned you—heh, boy, never say your poor old father didn’t warn you!”

  He lay back on his piled-up pillows for a moment, swallowing convulsively, as if to force the fleeting life-breath back, then, abruptly: “Get out,” he ordered. “Get out and stay out, you poor fool; but remember what I’ve said.”

  “Father,” young Tantavul began, stepping toward the bed, but the look of sudden concentrated fury in the old man’s tawny eyes halted him in midstride.

  “Get—out—I—said,” his father snarled, then, as the door closed softly on his son:

  “Nurse—hand—me—that—picture.” His breath was coming slowly, now, in shallow labored gasps, but his withered fingers writhed in a gesture of command, pointing to the silver-framed photograph of a woman which stood upon a little table in the bedroom window-bay.

  He clutched the portrait as if it were some precious relic, and for a minute let his eyes rove over it. “Lucy,” he whispered hoarsely, and now his words were thick and indistinct, “Lucy, they’ll be married, spite of all that I have said. They’ll be married, Lucy, d’ye hear?” Thin and high-pitched as a child’s, his voice rose to a piping treble as he grasped the picture’s silver frame and held it level with his face. “They’ll be married, Lucy dear, and they’ll have—”

  Abruptly as a penny whistle’s note is stilled when no more air is blown in it, old Tantavul’s cry was hushed. The picture, still grasped in his hands, fell to the tufted coverlet, the man’s lean jaw relaxed and he slumped back on his pillows with a shadow of the mocking smile still in his glazing eyes.

  Etiquette requires that the nurse await the doctor’s confirmation at such times, so, obedient to professional dictates, Miss Williamson stood by the bed until I felt the dead man’s pulse and nodded; then with the skill of years of practice she began her offices, bandaging the wrists and jaws and ankles that the body might be ready when the representative of Martin’s Funeral Home came for it.

  MY FRIEND DE GRANDIN was annoyed. Arms akimbo, knuckles on his hips, his black-silk kimono draped round him like a mourning garment, he voiced his complaint in no uncertain terms. In fifteen little so small minutes he must leave for the theatre, and that son and grandson of a filthy swine who was the florist had not delivered his gardenia. And was it not a fact that he could not go forth without a fresh gardenia for his lapel? But certainly. Why did that sale chameau procrastinate? Why did he delay delivering that unmentionable flower till this unspeakable time of night? He was Jules de Grandin, he, and not to be oppressed by any species of a goat who called himself a florist. But no. It must not be. It should not be, by blue! He would—

  “Axin’ yer pardon, sir,” Nora McGinnis broke in from the study door, “there’s a Miss an’ Mr. Tantavul to see ye, an’—”

  “Bid them be gone, ma charmeuse. Request that they jump in the bay—Grand Dieu”—he cut his oratory short—“les enfants dans le bois!”

  Truly, there was something reminiscent of the Babes in the Wood in the couple who had followed Nora to the study door. Dennis Tantavul looked even younger and more boyish than I remembered him, and the girl beside him was so childish in appearance that I felt a quick, instinctive pity for her. Plainly they were frightened, too, for they clung hand to hand like frightened children going past a graveyard, and in their eyes was that look of sick terror I had seen so often when the X-ray and blood test confirmed preliminary diagnosis of carcinoma.

  “Monsieur, Mademoiselle!” The little Frenchman gathered his kimono and his dignity about him in a single sweeping gesture as he struck his heels together and bowed stiffly from the hips. “I apologize for my unseemly words. Wer
e it not that I have been subjected to a terrible, calamitous misfortune, I should not so far have forgotten myself—”

  The girl’s quick smile cut through his apology. “We understand,” she reassured. “We’ve been through trouble, too, and have come to Dr. Trowbridge—”

  “Ah, then I have permission to withdraw?” he bowed again and turned upon his heel, but I called him back.

  “Perhaps you can assist us,” I remarked as I introduced the callers.

  “The honor is entirely mine, Mademoiselle,” he told her as he raised her fingers to his lips. “You and Monsieur your brother—”

  “He’s not my brother,” she corrected. “We’re cousins. That’s why we’ve called on Dr. Trowbridge.”

  De Grandin tweaked the already needle-sharp points of his small blond mustache. “Pardonnez-moi?” he begged. “I have resided in your country but a little time; perhaps I do not understand the language fluently. It is because you and Monsieur are cousins that you come to see the doctor? Me, I am dull and stupid like a pig; I fear I do not comprehend.”

  Dennis Tantavul replied: “It’s not because of the relationship, Doctor—not entirely, at any rate, but—”

  He turned to me: “You were at my father’s bedside when he died; you remember what he said about marrying Arabella?”

  I nodded.

  “There was something—some ghastly, hidden threat concealed in his warning, Doctor. It seemed as if he jeered at me—dared me to marry her, yet—”

  “Was there some provision in his will?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the young man answered. “Here it is.” From his pocket he produced a folded parchment, opened it and indicated a paragraph:

  To my son Dennis Tantavul I give, devise and bequeath all my property of every kind and sort, real, personal and mixed, of which I may die seized and possessed, or to which I may be entitled, in the event of his marrying Arabella Tantavul, but should he not marry the said Arabella Tantavul, then it is my will that he receive only one half of my estate, and that the residue thereof go to the said Arabella Tantavul, who has made her home with me since childhood and occupied the relationship of daughter to me.”