Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 4 (1926-04).djvu/68

Rh in a gown of priceless old lace, a white net mantilla drawn over her smoothly parted black hair, Ramalha Drigo lay at rest in an elabate open-couch casket of mahogany, her slender, oleander-white hands piously crossed upon her virginal bosom, a rosary of carved ebony, terminating in a silver crucifix, intertwined in her waxen fingers.

"Bon Dieu," de Grandin breathed as he bent over the girl's composed oval face, "she was beautiful, this poor one! Hélas that she should die thus early!"

I murmured an assent as I took the form Mr. Johnston proffered me and wrote "unknown" in the space reserved for cause of death and "about one-half hour" in the place allotted for duration of last illness.

"Gosh, Doc, he's a queer one, that foreign friend of yours," the undertaker commented, attracting my attention with a nudge and nodding toward de Grandin. The little Frenchman was bending over the casket, his blond, waxed mustache twitching like the whiskers of an alert tom-cat, his slender, womanish hands patting the girl's arms and breast questingly, as though they sought the clue to her mysterious death beneatli the folds of her robe.

"He's queer, all right," I agreed, "but I've never seen him do anything without good reason. Why"

A faltering step in the hall cut short my remark as Mr. Drigo entered the parlor. "Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge," he greeted with a courteous bow. "Dr. de Grandin"—as I presented the Frenchman—"I am honored to make your acquaintance."

De Grandin nodded an absent-minded acknowledgment of the courtesy and turned away, addressing Mr. Johnston in a whisper. "You are an embalmer, my friend?" he asked, almost eagerly, it seemed to me.

"Yes," answered the other, wonderingly. "I've had a license to practise for ten years."

"And it is customary that you embalm the dead in this country, yes?" de Grandin insisted.

"Yes, sir; but sometimes"

"And when embalmment is not made, it is the exception, rather than the rule?"

"Decidedly, but"

"You would embalm as a matter of course, unless expressly ordered to the contrary, then?"

"Yes," Johnston admitted.

"Ah, then, was it Monsieur Drigo who forbade that you embalm his daughter?"

The undertaker started as though pricked with a needle. "How did you know?" he demanded.

The ghost of one of his impish smiles flickered across de Grandin's face, to be replaced instantly with a look more suited to the occasion. "In France, my friend," he confided, "the science of embalming, as practised in America, is still a rarity. But in Paris we have a young man, a Canadian, who preserves the dead even as you do here, and from him I have learn many things. I have, for example, learned that you inject the preserving fluids in either the brachial, the corotid, the axillary or the femoral artery. Très bien, if you have embalmed this poor child here, you have used one of those arteries, n'est-ce-pas? The chances are that an American embalmer would not utilize the femoral artery to embalm a woman's body, so I feel to see if you have bandaged the arm or breast of that poor dead child where you have inserted your fluid-tube in one of those other arteries. I find no bandage; I feel her cheeks, they are firm as life; therefore, I decide embalmment have not been done, and, knowing your custom here, I ask to know who have ordered the contrary. Voilà, it are not magic which make me know; but the ordinary sense of the horse."

He linked his arm in mine. "Come, Friend Trowbridge," he announced, "there is no more we can do here.