A Rival from the Grave Read online

  “Yes, yes, we understand,” de Grandin nodded, “but tell us what occurred next.”

  “I looked around the nursery, but I was all alone here with the babies. Then it came again, louder, this time, and seemingly right above me. I looked up at the skylight, and—there it was!

  “It was a face, sir—just a face, with no body to it, and it seemed to float above the glass, then dip down to it, like a child’s balloon drifting in the wind, and it looked right past me, down at Baby Tantavul, and laughed again.”

  “A face, you say, Mademoiselle—”

  “Yes, sir, yes! The most awful face I’ve ever seen. It was thin and wrinkled—all shrivelled like a monkey—and as it looked at Baby Tantavul its eyes stretched open till their whites glared all around the irises, and the mouth opened, not widely, but as if it were chewing something it relished—and it gave that dreadful, cackling, jubilating laugh again. That’s it! I couldn’t think before, but it seemed as if that bodiless head were laughing with a sort of evil triumph, Dr. de Grandin!”

  “H’m,” he tweaked his tightly waxed mustache, “I should not wonder if it did, Mademoiselle,” To me he whispered, “Stay with her, if you will, my friend, I’ll see the supervisor and have her send another nurse to keep her company. I shall request a special watch for the small Tantavul. At present I do not think the danger is great, but—mice do not play where cats are wakeful.”

  “ISN’T HE JUST LOVELY?” Arabella looked up from the small bald head that rested on her breast, and ecstasy was in her eyes. “I don’t believe I ever saw so beautiful a baby!”

  “Tiens, Madame, his voice is excellent, at any rate,” de Grandin answered with a grin, “and from what one may observe his appetite is excellent, at well.”

  Arabella smiled and patted the small creature’s back. “You know, I never had a doll in my life,” she confided. “Now I’ve got this dear little mite, and I’m going to be so happy with him. Oh, I wish Uncle Warburg were alive. I know this darling baby would soften even his hard heart.

  “But I mustn’t say such things about him, must I? He really wanted me to marry Dennis, didn’t he? His will proved that. You think he wanted us to marry, Doctor?”

  “I am persuaded that he did, Madame. Your marriage was his dearest wish, his fondest hope,” the Frenchman answered solemnly.

  “I felt that way, too. He was harsh and cruel to us when we were growing up, and kept his stony-hearted attitude to the end, but underneath it all there must have been some hidden stratum of kindness, some lingering affection for Dennis and me, or he’d never have put that clause in his will—”

  “Nor have left this memorandum for you,” de Grandin interrupted, drawing from an inner pocket the parchment envelope Dennis had entrusted to him the day before his father’s funeral.

  She started back as if he menaced her with a live scorpion, and instinctively her arms closed protectively around the baby at her bosom. “The—that—letter?” she faltered, her breath coming in short, smothered gasps. “I’d forgotten all about it. Oh, Dr. de Grandin, burn it. Don’t let me see what’s in it. I’m afraid!”

  It was a bright May morning, without sufficient breeze to stir the leaflets on the maple trees outside the window, but as de Grandin held the letter out I thought I heard a sudden sweep of wind around the angle of the hospital, not loud, but shrewd and keen, like wind among the graveyard evergreens in autumn, and, curiously, there seemed a note of soft malicious laughter mingled with it.

  The little Frenchman heard it, too, and for an instant he looked toward the window, and I thought I saw the flicker of an ugly sneer take form beneath the waxed ends of his mustache.

  “Open it, Madame,” he bade. “It is for you and Monsieur Dennis, and the little Monsieur Bébé here.”

  “I—I daren’t—”

  “Tenez, then Jules de Grandin does!” with his penknife he slit the heavy envelope, pressed suddenly against its ends so that its sides bulged, and dumped its contents on the counterpane. Ten fifty-dollar bills dropped on the coverlet. And nothing else.

  “Five hundred dollars!” Arabella gasped. “Why—”

  “A birthday gift for petit Monsieur Bébé, one surmises,” laughed de Grandin. “Eh bien, the old one had a sense of humour underneath his ugly outward shell, it seems. He kept you on the tenterhooks lest the message in this envelope contained dire things, while all the time it was a present of congratulation.”

  “But such a gift from Uncle Warburg—I can’t understand it!”

  “Perhaps that is as well, too, Madame. Be happy in the gift and give your ancient uncle credit for at least one act of kindness. Au ’voir.”

  “HANGED IF I CAN understand it, either,” I confessed as we left the hospital. “If that old curmudgeon had left a message berating them for fools for having offspring, or even a new will that disinherited them both, it would have been in character, but such a gift—well, I’m surprised.”

  Amazingly, he halted in midstep and laughed until the tears rolled down his face. “You are surprised!” he told me when he managed to regain his breath, “Cordieu, my friend, I do not drink that you are half as much surprised as Monsieur Warburg Tantavul!”

  DENNIS TANTAVUL REGARDED ME with misery-haunted eyes. “I just can’t understand it,” he admitted. “It’s all so sudden, so utterly—”

  “Pardonnez-moi,” de Grandin interrupted from the door of the consulting room, “I could not help but hear your voice, and if it is not an intrusion—”

  “Not at all, sir,” the young man answered. “I’d like the benefit of your advice. It’s Arabella, and I’m terribly afraid she’s—”

  “Non, do not try it, mon ami,” de Grandin warned. “Do you give us the symptoms, let us make the diagnosis. He who acts as his own doctor has a fool for a patient, you know.”

  “Well, then, here are the facts: This morning Arabella woke me up, crying as if her heart would break. I asked her what the trouble was, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger—no, not exactly that, rather as if I were some dreadful thing she’d suddenly found at her side. Her eyes were positively round with horror, and when I tried to take her in my arms to comfort her she shrank away as if I were infected with the plague.

  “‘Oh, Dennie, don’t!’ she begged and positively cringed away from me. Then she sprang out of bed and drew her kimono around her as if she were ashamed to have me see her in her pyjamas, and ran out of the room.

  “Presently I heard her crying in the nursery, and when I followed her in there—” He paused and tears came to his eyes. “She was standing by the crib where little Dennis lay, and in her hand she held a long sharp steel letter-opener. ‘Poor little mite, poor little flower of unpardonable sin,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go, Baby darling; you to limbo, I to hell—oh, God wouldn’t, couldn’t be so cruel as to damn you for our sin!—but we’ll all three suffer torment endlessly, because we didn’t know!’

  “She raised the knife to plunge it in the little fellow’s heart, and he stretched out his hands and laughed and cooed as the sunlight shone on the steel. I was on her in an instant, wrenching the knife from her with one hand and holding her against me with the other, but she fought me off.

  “‘Don’t touch me, Dennie, please, please don’t,’ she begged. I know it’s mortal sin, but I love you so, my dear, that I just can’t resist you if I let you put your arms about me.’

  “I tried to kiss her, but she hid her face against my shoulder and moaned as if in pain when she felt my lips against her neck. Then she went limp in my arms, and I carried her, unconscious but still moaning piteously, into her sitting room and laid her on the couch. I left Sarah the nurse-maid with her, with strict orders not to let her leave the room. Can’t you come over right away?”

  De Grandin’s cigarette had burned down till it threatened his mustache, and in his little round blue eyes there was a look of murderous rage. “Bête!” he murmured savagely. “Sale chameau, species of a stinking goat! This is his doing, undoubtedly. Come, m
y friends, let us rush, hasten, fly. I would talk with Madame Arabella.”

  “NAW, SUH, SHE’S DONE gone,” the portly colored nursemaid told us when we asked for Arabella. “Th’ baby started squealin’ sumpin awful right after Mistu Dennis lef’, an’ Ah knowed it wuz time fo’ his breakfas’, so Mis’ Arabella wuz layin’ nice an’ still on the’ sofa, an’ Ah says ter her, Ah says, ‘Yuh lay still dere, honey, whilst Ah goes an’ sees after yo’ baby;’ so Ah goes ter th’ nursery, an’ fixes him all up, an’ carries him back ter th’ settin’-room where Mis’ Arabella wuz, an’ she ain’t there no more. Naw, suh.”

  “I thought I told you—” Dennis began furiously, but de Grandin laid a hand upon his arm.

  “Do not upbraid her, mon ami, she did wisely, though she knew it not; she was with the small one all the while, so no harm came to him. Was it not better so, after what you witnessed in the morning?”

  “Ye-es,” the other grudgingly admitted, “I suppose so. But Arabella—”

  “Let us see if we can find a trace of her,” the Frenchman interrupted. “Look carefully, do you miss any of her clothing?”

  Dennis looked about the pretty chintz-hung room. “Yes,” he decided as he finished his inspection, “her dress was on that lounge and her shoes and stockings on the floor beneath it. They’re all gone.”

  “So,” de Grandin nodded. “Distracted as she seemed, it is unlikely she would have stopped to dress had she not planned on going out. Friend Trowbridge, will you kindly call police headquarters and inform them of the situation? Ask to have all exits to the city watched.”

  As I picked up the telephone he and Dennis started on a room-by-room inspection of the house.

  “Find anything?” I asked as I hung up the ’phone after talking with the missing persons bureau.

  “Corbleu, but I should damn say yes!” de Grandin answered as I joined them in the upstairs living room. “Look yonder, if you please, my friend.”

  The room was obviously the intimate apartment of the house. Electric lamps under painted shades were placed beside deep leather-covered easy chairs, ivory-enamelled bookshelves lined the walls to a height of four feet or so, upon their tops was a litter of gay, unconsidered trifles—cinnabar cigarette boxes, bits of hammered brass. Old china, blue and red and purple, glowed mellowly from open spaces on the shelves, its colors catching up and accenting the muted blues and reds of antique Hamadan carpet. A Paisley shawl was draped scarfwise across the baby grand piano in one corner.

  Directly opposite the door a carven crucifix was standing on the bookcase top. It was an exquisite bit of Italian work, the cross of ebony, the corpus of old ivory, and so perfectly executed that though it was a scant six inches high, one could note the tense, tortured muscles of the pendent body, the straining throat which overfilled with groans of agony, the brow all knotted and bedewed with the cold sweat of torment. Upon the statue’s thorn-crowned head, where it made a bright iridescent halo, was a band of gem-encrusted platinum, a woman’s diamond-studded wedding ring.

  “Hélas, it is love’s crucifixion!” whispered Jules de Grandin.

  THREE MONTHS WENT BY, and though the search kept up unremittingly, no trace of Arabella could be found. Dennis Tantavul installed a fulltime highly trained and recommended nurse in his desolate house, and spent his time haunting police stations and newspaper offices. He aged a decade in the ninety days since Arabella left; his shoulders stooped, his footsteps lagged, and a look of constant misery lay in his eyes. He was a prematurely old and broken man.

  “It’s the most uncanny thing I ever saw,” I told de Grandin as we walked through West Forty-Second Street toward the West Shore Ferry. We had gone over to New York for some surgical supplies, and I do not drive my car in the metropolis. Truck drivers there are far too careless and repair bills for wrecked mudguards far too high. “How a full-grown woman would evaporate this way is something I can’t understand. Of course, she may have done away with herself, dropped off a ferry, or—”

  “S-s-st,” his sibilated admonition cut me short. “That woman there, my friend, observe her, if you please.” He nodded toward a female figure twenty feet or so ahead of us.

  I looked, and wondered at his sudden interest at the draggled hussy. She was dressed in tawdry finery much the worse for wear. The sleazy silken skirt was much too tight, the cheap fur jaquette far too short and snug, and the high heels of her satin shoes were shockingly run over. Makeup was fairly plastered on her cheeks and lips and eyes, and short black hair bristled untidily beneath the brim of her abbreviated hat. Written unmistakably upon her was the nature of her calling, the oldest and least honorable profession known to womanhood.

  “Well,” I answered tartly, “what possible interest can you have in a—”

  “Do not walk so fast,” he whispered as his fingers closed upon my arm, “and do not raise your voice. I would that we should follow her, but I do not wish that she should know.”

  The neighborhood was far from savory, and I felt uncomfortably conspicuous as we turned from Forty-Second Street into Eleventh Avenue in the wake of the young strumpet, followed her provocatively swaying hips down two malodorous blocks, finally pausing as she slipped furtively into the doorway of a filthy, unkempt “rooming house.”

  We trailed her through a dimly lighted barren hall and up a flight of shadowy stairs, then up two further flights until we reached a sort of oblong foyer bounded on one end by the stair-well, on the farther extremity by a barred and very dirty window, and on each side by sagging, paint-blistered doors. On each of these was pinned a card, handwritten with the many flourishes dear to the chirography of the professional card-writer who still does business in the poorer quarters of our great cities. The air was heavy with the odor of cheap whisky, bacon rind and fried onions.

  We made a hasty circuit of the hill, studying the cardboard labels. On the farthest door the notice read Miss Sieglinde.

  “Mon Dieu,” he exclaimed as he read it, “c’est le mot propre!”

  “Eh?” I returned.

  “Sieglinde, do not you recall her?”

  “No-o, can’t say I do. The only Sieglinde I remember is the character in Wagner’s Die Walkure who unwittingly became her brother’s paramour and bore him a son—”

  “Précisément. Let us enter, if you please.” Without pausing to knock he turned the handle of the door and stepped into the squalid room.

  The woman sat upon the unkempt bed, her hat pushed back from her brow. In one hand she held a cracked teacup, with the other she poised a whisky bottle over it. She had kicked her scuffed and broken shoes off; we saw that she was stockingless, and her bare feet were dark with long-accumulated dirt and black-nailed as a miner’s hands. “Get out!” she ordered thickly. “Get out o’ here, I ain’t receivin’—” a gasp broke her utterance, and she turned her head away quickly. Then: “Get out o’ here, you lousy bums!” she screamed. “Who d’ye think you are, breakin’ into a lady’s room like this? Get out, or—”

  De Grandin eyed her steadily, and as her strident command wavered: “Madame Arabella, we have come to take you home,” he announced softly.

  “Good God, man, you’re crazy” I exclaimed. “Arabella? This—”

  “Precisely, my old one; this is Madame Arabella Tantavul whom we have sought these many months in vain.” Crossing the room in two quick strides he seized the cringing woman by the shoulders and turned her face up to the light. I looked, and felt a sudden swift attack of nausea.

  He was right. Thin to emaciation, her face already lined with the deep-bitten scars of evil living, the woman on the bed was Arabella Tantavul, though the shocking change wrought in her features and the black dye in her hair had disguised her so effectively that I should not have known her.

  “We have come to take you home, ma pauvre,” he repeated. “Your husband—”

  “My husband!” her reply was half a scream. “Dear God, as if I had a husband—”

  “And the little one who needs you,” he contin
ued. “You cannot leave them thus, Madame.”

  “I can’t? Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, Doctor. I can never see my baby again, in this world or the next. Please go away and forget you’ve see me, or I shall have to drown myself—I’ve tried it twice already, but the first time I was rescued, and the second time my courage failed. But if you try to take me back, or if you tell Dennis you saw me—”

  “Tell me, Madame,” he broke in, “was not your flight caused by a visitation from the dead?”

  Her faded brown eyes—eyes that had been such a startling contrast to her pale-gold hair—widened. “How did you know?” she whispered.

  “Tiens, one may make surmises. Will not you tell us just what happened? I think there is a way out of your difficulties.”

  “No, no, there isn’t; there can’t be!” Her head drooped listlessly. “He planned his work too well; all that’s left for me is death—and damnation afterward.”

  “But if there were a way—if I could show it to you?”

  “Can you repeal the laws of God?”

  “I am a very clever person, Madame. Perhaps I can accomplish an evasion, if not an absolute repeal. Now tell us, how and when did Monsieur your late but not at all lamented uncle come to you?”

  “The night before—before I went away. I woke about midnight, thinking I heard a cry from Dennie’s nursery. When I reached the room where he was sleeping I saw my uncle’s face glaring at me through the window. It seemed to be illuminated by a sort of inward hellish light, for it stood out against the darkness like a jack-o’-lantern, and it smiled an awful smile at me. ‘Arabella,’ it said, and I could see its dun dead lips writhe back as if the teeth were burning-hot, ‘I’ve come to tell you that your marriage is a mockery and a lie. The man you married is your brother, and the child you bore is doubly illegitimate. You can’t continue living with them, Arabella. That would be an even greater sin. You must leave them right away, or’—Once more his lips crept back until his teeth were bare—’or I shall come to visit you each night, and when the baby has grown old enough to understand I’ll tell him who his parents really are. Take your choice, my daughter. Leave them and let me go back to the grave, or stay and see me every night and know that I will tell your son when he is old enough to understand. If I do it he will loathe and hate you; curse the day you bore him.’