Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/26

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 * One day back in 1925, Seabury Quinn wrote a story called "The Horror on the Links," which was published in WEIRD TALES for October of that year. The story told of a weird and uncanny mystery that was solved by a mercurial, egotistical yet altogether human and likable French scientist named Jules de Grandin. This strange figure—occultist, phantom-lighter and ghost-breaker, defective and physician, vain yet lovable—at once captured the sympathies of our readers, and also fired the imagination of Mr. Quinn, whose literary creation the little Frenchman is. Since "The Horror on the Links" appeared, this magazine has printed more than fifty stories about the weird exploits of the indomitable little Frenchman, and hopes to print as many more in the future. Month after month, year after year, Jules de Grandin has grown in the affections of the reading public, and his appearance in a new story is welcomed by many thousands of de Grandin fans as occasion for rejoicing. If you have not yet made the acquaintance of this strangest and most astonishing defective of fiction, you now have the opportunity to meet him in this story: "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul."
 * }and thin-lipped, almost colorless, and even in repose was always tightly drawn against his small and queerly perfect teeth. Now, as he smiled, a flickering light, lambent as the quick reflection of an unseen flame, flared in his yellow eyes, and a hard white line of teeth showed on his lower lip, as though he bit it to hold back a chuckle.

"And you're still determined that you'll marry Arabella?" he asked his son, fixing his sardonic, mocking smile upon the young man's face.

"Yes, Father, but——"

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

He lay back on his piled-up pillows for a moment, swallowing convulsively, as though 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, taking a quick step toward the head of the bed, but the look of concentrated fury mixed with hatred which flashed up 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 the claw-like fingers of his withered hand 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 which she handed him as though it were some precious relic, and for a minute let his yellow 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