Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/32

Rh "'But' be baked and roasted in the hottest oven hell possesses!" interrupted Jules de Grandin. "The wicked dead one's funeral is at two tomorrow afternoon, n'est-ce-pas? "Très bien. At eight tomorrow evening—or earlier, if it will be convenient—you shall be married. I shall esteem it a favor if you permit that I shall be best man. Doctor Trowbridge will be there to give the bride away, and we shall have a merry time, by blue! You shall go upon a gorgeous honeymoon and learn how sweet the joys of love can be—sweeter for having been so long denied, pardieu! And in the meantime we shall keep those papers safe for you, and when your lawyer has returned, I shall see that he receives them in due course. "You fear the so unpleasant joke? Mais non, I think the joke is on the other foot, my friends, and the laugh upon the wicked old one who had thought himself so clever!"

was neither widely known nor popular, but the solitude in which he had lived had invested him with mystery; now the bars of reticence were down and the walls of isolation broken, upward of a hundred neighbors, mostly women, gathered in the Martin funeral chapel as the services began. The afternoon sun beat softly through the stained glass windows and glinted upon the polished mahogany of the pews. Here and there it touched upon bright spots of color that marked a flower, a woman's hat or a man's tie. The solemn hush was unbroken save for occasional soft sibilations: "What'd he die of? Did he leave much? Were the two young folks his only heirs?"

Then the burial office: "Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another . . . for a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing it is as a watch in the night. . . . Oh teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom . . ."

As the final Amen sounded, one of Mr. Martin's young men glided forward, paused beside the casket for a moment, and made the stereotyped announcement: "Those who wish to say good-bye to Mr. Tantavul may do so at this time."

The grisly rite of passing by the bier dragged on. I would have left the place, for I had no wish to look upon the man's dead face and folded hands; but de Grandin took me firmly by the elbow, held me back until the final curiosity-impelled female had filed past the body, then steered me quickly to the casket.

The little Frenchman paused beside the bier, and it seemed to me there was a hint of irony in the smile that touched the corners of his mouth as he leant forward. "Eh bien, my old one; we know a secret, thou and I, n'est-ce-pas?" he asked the silent form before us.

I swallowed back an exclamation of dismay. Perhaps it was a trick of the uncertain light, possibly it was one of those ghastly, inexplicable things which every doctor and embalmer meets with sometime in his practise—the effect of desiccation from formaldehyde, the pressure of some tissue gas within the body, or something of the sort—at any rate, as Jules de Grandin spoke the corpse's upper lids drew back the fraction of an inch, revealing slits of yellow eyes, which seemed to glare at us with mingled hate and fury.

"Good heavens; come away!" I begged. "It seemed as if he looked at us, de Grandin!"

"Et puis—and if he did?" he asked me as we left the chapel. "Me, I damn think that I can trade him look for look, my friend. He was clever, that one, I admit