Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/38

Rh tops was a litter of gay, unconsidered little trifles—cinnabar cigarette boxes, bits of hammered brass. Old china, blue and red and purple, glowed mellowly in cabinets of mahogany, its colors catching up and accentuating the muted blues and reds of an antique Hamadan carpet. A Paisley shawl was draped scarfwise across the baby grand piano in the 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 four inches high, one could note the tense, tortured muscles, 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.

HREE months went by, and though we kept the search up unremittingly, no trace of Arabella could be found. Dennis Tantavul installed a full-time, 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 never-ending misery dwelt within his eyes as he trod his daily Via Dolorosa, a prematurely old and broken man.

"It's the most uncanny thing I ever saw," I said to Jules de Grandin as we walked through 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 chauffeurs there are far too careless and repair bills for wrecked mudguards far too high. "How a full-grown woman could evaporate that way is something I can't understand," I added as we stepped briskly through the bracing autumn air. "If it had happened twenty years ago there might be some excuse for it, but today, with our radio police-call systems and all the other modern——"

"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 ahead of us.

I looked, and wondered at his sudden interest in the draggled hussy.

She was dressed in tawdry finery much the worse for wear. Sleazy silken skirt was much too tight, cheap fur jaquette far too short and snug; high heels of her satin slippers shockingly run over, make-up plastered on her cheeks and lips and eyes, and her short black hair fairly bristled with untidiness beneath the rim 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 uncommonly 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 paused as she went in the doorway of a filthy, unkempt "rooming-house."