Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Wyllard's Weird
"It would be disgraceful, horrible."
"But it will happen, I'm afraid, unless I can get the money."
"I can find no more, Valeria. That last loan from Davis was most difficult to manage. I had positively no security to offer. The money was advanced on the strength of Wyllard's position, on the speculation that he would not see me broke."
"I am not asking you to pay my debts," she replied with her grand air: the air of a woman accustomed to be admired for every attribute of her character, good or bad, and to do wrong with impunity. "But the money must be found somehow, and perhaps you can tell me where I am to get it."
"From your husband," he answered impetuously. "Yes, Valeria, from your one true and loyal friend. The one man you can ask in all honour to pay for your follies."
"You advise me to go to him!" exclaimed Valeria, livid with anger. "You!"
"Yes, I – I, who have wronged him deeply by a most fatal engagement which I have regretted ever since it was made. Not because you are not lovely, fascinating, all that is fairest and most desirable in womankind: but because I am hateful to myself on account of that treachery. What! to be the affianced lover of a woman whose husband's hand I grasped in seeming friendship: to smile in his face, to accept his kindness, his friendship, his confidence, while all my life was one long waiting for his death, while you and I were saying to each other every day, by and by we will do this, by and by we will go here and there, sail our yacht in the Mediterranean, build our cottage on the Scotch moor, by and by, when that good man who trusted us both is in his grave! O, it has been a hateful position, Valeria, base, miserable, guilty, accursed, for both of us: and, by the God who made us, it must come to an end."
There had been tears in his voice almost from the beginning of his speech, and at the end he broke down altogether and sobbed aloud.
Valeria rose out of her low chair, and stood before him straight as a dart. The movement was so quick, so instinct with an unholy grace, that it recalled the image of a cobra he had once seen rise up straight before him in the midst of his path through the jungle.
"You are in love with another woman!" she hissed, like the serpent. "That is the meaning of this sudden outbreak of virtue!"
He could not deny it.
"You want to break with me, in order that you may marry some one else," she said, whiter than death, her eyes dilating, her lips quivering.
"Yes," he answered quietly. "I could form a happier tie if you set me free. But there is not one word which I said just now about the feeling of my own baseness which was not just as true two years ago as it is to-day. Such a bond as ours never could bring happiness, Valeria, to man or to woman."
"It gave us hope," she said; "a fair dream of the future. Well, it is all over. Whatever it is worth it is gone – like a tuft of thistledown blown into the air. Go, Bothwell Grahame, you are your own man again; go and marry your new love."
"It will not be a marriage of to-day or to-morrow," answered Bothwell gravely. "My new love and I will have to wait for better times. First, I am a pauper; and, secondly, there is a taint upon my name, inasmuch as the good people of Bodmin and the neighbourhood have taken it into their wise heads that I am a murderer, because I refused to answer some very impertinent questions at the inquest. Valeria, will you forgive me – will you believe – "
"That you were heartily tired of me ages ago, before you left India," she said, interrupting him with a feverish rapidity. She had sunk into her low chair again, and was seated with her hands clasped upon the basket-work, bedizened with trappings of Oriental embroidery, like an Arab's horse – her eyes gazing over the wide panorama of land and sea, the dockyards, the river, the lighthouse yonder, and the long line of surf dashing against the breakwater.
"Yes, I know that you were weary of me long before that bitter good-bye," she went on, breathless with passion, her sentences broken into short gasps. "I think I knew even then that you were false, though I pretended to myself that you were true. I don't believe you ever loved me. You just let me love you, that was all. If you had really cared for me – as other men have cared for other women – you would not have been so obedient. You would have flung prudence to the winds – you would have made scenes – you would have wanted to run away with me. No, you never loved me."
It would have been vain now for Bothwell to protest the reality of the old worn-out passion. It had never been of the strongest stuff that love is made of, and it had long been growing threadbare. He had received his release, and that was the boon he had come here to ask. But he could not leave the woman he had once loved without one word of peace.
"Valeria," he said gently, tenderly even, "I shall stay here till you forgive me."
"Would you stay until you have forced me to tell a lie? There can be no blacker lie than any word of mine that offered forgiveness to you. You have deceived me cruelly. You were my strong rock, and I leant upon you for comfort. O Bothwell, what is she like, this other woman for whom you forsake me? Is she so much more beautiful – so much younger – fresher than I?"
"She is good, and pure, and true, and has been brave and loyal when the world spoke evil of me! That is all I can tell you about her."
"But she is handsome, I suppose? You are not going to marry a plain woman, out of gratitude!"
"She is lovely in my eyes; and I believe she is generally considered a pretty girl."
"Who is she?"
"A lady. I can tell you no more yet awhile. Hark! there is the General's voice. I had better go. Stay, there is something you once gave me. You told me to wear it till – "
"Till you were tired of me. Yes, I remember," she said impatiently.
"Till the tie was broken between us, in somewise," he answered, taking out his watch.
There was about three inches of slender Trichinopoly chain on the swivel of the watch, and on the chain hung an old-fashioned hoop-ring of old Brazilian diamonds. The ring had belonged to Lord Carlavarock's grandmother, and had been Valeria's favourite jewel.
She snatched it from Bothwell's hand the moment he had taken it off the chain, and flung it with all her force into the nearest thicket of shrubs.
"So much for the token of worn-out love!" she said. "If one of the gardeners finds it, he will pawn it at Devonport, and spend the money in drink. A worthy end for such a souvenir. Good-bye, Mr. Grahame."
Bothwell bowed and left her; left her to crawl up to her bedroom like a wounded hind creeping to covert, and to fling herself face downwards on the floor, and lie there tearless, despairing, ready to invoke hell itself to help her in some kind of revenge, had she but believed in the devil. But Lady Valeria was an agnostic. She had not even Satan as a friend in the hour of trouble.
CHAPTER XI.
A FATAL LOVE
Monsieur Drubarde and his visitor descended the ladder, and entered the police-officer's apartment, which consisted of two small rooms, the outer an office and salon combined, the inner a bedchamber, which Mr. Heathcote saw through the open door: a neat little bachelor's nest, with a velvet-curtained bedstead, and walls lined with portraits of every kind – engravings, lithographs, photographs.
The salon was decorated with the same style of art, diversified by engravings from newspapers, all representing notorious crimes. "The Murder in the Rue de la Paix," "Germinie Latouche stabbed in the kitchen of the Red Cross Restaurant by her lover, Gilles Perdie;" "The Arrest of Victor Larennes for the great forgeries on the Bank of France;" "The Escape of Jean Bizat, the parricide." Art had represented all these scenes with due dramatic fervour. They were hardly pleasing subjects in the abstract; but to Félix Drubarde they were all delightful; for they recalled some of the most interesting and most profitable hours of his life. He was gratified to see his guest looking at those stories of crime, in artistic shorthand.
"Gilles Perdie would have got off, if it had not been for me," he said, with excusable pride. "The police had been hunting for him ten long days, when I put them on the right scent. We knew that he had not gone far from the scene of the crime – for there had been no time for escape, you see. The murder was found out an hour after the woman's death. He was hunted for in every hole and corner within a radius of a mile. No one had seen him leave the premises. No one had set eyes on him since the murder, which occurred in the early morning in October, when it is not light before six. 'How do you know that he ever did leave that house?' I asked one day, meaning the Red Cross, a workman's eating-house in the Rue Galande. He was cellarman there, cellarman and terreur combined. My comrades laughed at me. They had searched the Red Cross from cellar to garret, they had not left an inch of the building unexplored. 'Have you looked in the empty casks?' I asked. Yes, they had looked in the empty casks. The cellar was very neatly arranged, the empty casks in a row on one side, the full ones on the other. My friends protested that they were not such fools as to have overlooked an empty cask. 'Who knows?' I said; 'we will go there this afternoon and overhaul those barrels.' Need I tell you the result? It is history. There was one empty hogshead, artfully pushed in a corner, last in the rank of unbroached hogsheads. The open end had been turned towards the wall, and in that empty hogshead, in that rat-haunted cellar, Gilles Perdie had contrived to exist for ten days, by the aid of his victim's daughter, a child of seven years old, who lived in the house, and whom he threatened to kill as he had killed her mother, if she told any one about him, or failed to carry him food and drink twice a day. There, amidst vermin and ordure, he had lived, coiled up in his hogshead, and perhaps not much worse off than some among the poor of Paris, whose only crime is poverty."
"You have a right to boast of your scent, Monsieur, after such a triumph as that."
"A bagatelle, Monsieur, one of the feeblest of my cases: but it made a great hit at the time. My portrait appeared in three different newspapers, side by side with that of the murderer."
"A distinguished honour. And now, if you will be kind enough to give me the further information which you promised as to names and details?"
"Monsieur Effcotte, you are Mr. Distin's friend, and for you I will do what I would hardly do for my own brother. I will trust you with one of my books."
"You are extremely obliging."
"I know, sir, that there are some people who think nothing of lending a book; they can hand over a treasured volume to a friend – to an indifferent acquaintance even – without a pang; they can see him turn the leaves and violate the stiffness of the back. I, Monsieur, would almost as soon lend my arm and hand as one of those books; but for you I will make an exception. You shall have the volume which contains the report of the Prévol case, to read and take notes from at your leisure."
"You are more than good."
Monsieur Drubarde's library consisted of four rows of handsomely bound volumes, whose gilded backs shone behind a barricade of plate glass, in a locked bookcase. They were books which he had collected at his leisure, and which bore for the most part on his profession: the memoirs of Vidocq, the memoirs of Canler, of Sanson the executioner, and other biographies of equally thrilling interest. For literature of so lofty a stamp, Félix Drubarde had deemed no binding too luxurious; and he had clothed his favourites in all the pomp of purple, and green, and crimson, and sumptuous gilding. He had caused them to be enriched with the bookbinder's whole gamut of ornament – his fleurs-de-lis and roses, his foliage and acorns, and scrolls and emblems. Even the volume of printed reports which Drubarde handed to Mr. Heathcote was gorgeous in red morocco and gold.
"You will find the case fully reported in that volume," he said. "When you have read it, and made your own conclusions upon it, you can come back to me, and we will talk the matter over together."
"I will call upon you again to-morrow at the same hour, if you will allow me," replied Heathcote, laying a ten-pound note upon the table. "But I must ask you in the mean time to accept this trifle as an earnest of future remuneration. I do not on any account desire to impose on your good-nature."
Monsieur Drubarde shrugged his shoulders, declared that as a matter of feeling he would rather work gratuitously for any friend of Mr. Distin's, but that from a business point of view his time was valuable. He had a little place in the country, fifteen miles out of Paris; he had nephews and nieces dependent upon him; in a word, he had to work for others as well as for himself.
"Before you go, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me your motive for hunting up the history of this old murder," he said, with a keen look. He had been intending to ask this question from the beginning.
"I am searching out the details of an old murder in order to fathom the mystery of a new murder, or of a strange death, which I take to be a murder. Can you read English, Monsieur Drubarde?"
"I have a niece who can – a girl who was educated at a convent in Jersey. I am going to my country home this afternoon, and my niece can read anything you give me."
Mr. Heathcote took from his pocket-book the report of the inquest, cut out of the local papers, and pasted on slips of foolscap.
"If your niece will translate that report for you, I think you will understand the motive of my investigation," he said; and then bade Monsieur Drubarde good-morning.
He went down-stairs with the volume of reports under his arm, hailed a fly, and drove to the Hôtel de Bade, stopping on his way to engage a stall for that evening at the Comédie Française, the only recreation which he cared for in his present frame of mind. He had numerous acquaintances in Paris, but he did not care about seeing one of them just now, nor did he linger in the bright gay streets to mark the changes which a year had made in the aspect of that ever-varying city, as he would have done had his mind been free from care.
He had a sitting-room and bedroom on the second floor of the hotel, two nice little rooms opening into each other, and both overlooking the Boulevard; an outlook which on former occasions he had preferred to the monastic quiet of the courtyard, where there were no sounds but the splashing of the water with which the man-of-all-work sluiced the stone pavement at intervals of an hour or two on sultry summer afternoons, or the scream of a chambermaid arguing with a waiter, both talking as loud as if they had been communicating from the gate of Saint-Martin to the gate of Saint-Denis. To-day, with the report of the Prévol case open before him, Edward Heathcote could have found it in his heart to curse the Boulevard, with its roar and rattle, its incessant "ya-youp!" of coachmen on the point of running over passengers, and everlasting clamour of the lively Gaul. He would have preferred a hermit's cave, with never a sound but the sighing of the wind on the mountain-side.
Yes, here was the interrogation of the waiter at the Pavilion Henri Quatre.
"Do you remember a lady and gentleman who dined in a private room on the 6th of September?"
The waiter remembered perfectly. The lady was very pretty, the gentleman remarkably handsome, and with a distinguished air. They had a little girl with them. The gentleman ordered a private room and a little dinner, bien soigné. He was very particular about the champagne, and about the dessert. The grapes and peaches were to be of the choicest. The gentleman and lady dined early, between five and six. The lady had a somewhat agitated air, seemed out of sorts, and ate very little. The gentleman was very attentive to her, and petted the little girl. At half-past six they went for a drive in the forest. The carriage was ordered directly they sat down to dinner.
"Had you any reason to suppose that this lady and gentleman had been followed or watched, by any one when they arrived at the Henri Quatre?"
"They arrived in a fly. No; I observed no one lurking about or watching when they arrived. I went out to give an order to the coachman while the carriage was standing before the door, waiting to take them for their drive in the forest; and I observed a man on the other side of the road. I should not have noticed him, perhaps, if the collar of his overcoat had not been turned up in a curious manner. I thought it strange that any one should wear an overcoat on such an evening."
"Did this man appear to be watching the hotel?"
"He was standing in front of the hotel-railings when I went out. I saw him look across at the window in which the lady and gentleman were dining. The window was at right angles with the road, opening into a garden. It was open, and there were two candelabra upon the table. Any one could see into the room from the road."
"There was no blind or curtain?"
"No. The evening was particularly mild. All the windows in the sitting-rooms were open."
"What became of this man?"
"He walked rapidly along the road, and turned the corner on to the terrace."
"Should you recognise him if you were to see him again?"
"Impossible. It was twilight when I saw him, and he was on the other side of the road. His coat-collar was turned up, so as to hide the lower half of his face."
"But you must at least have observed his general appearance. Was he tall or short? Had he the air of a gentleman?"
"He was tall. Yes, I should say he was a gentleman."
"Young or old?"
"He walked like a young man. I thought he had an agitated air. He walked very quickly, but stopped suddenly two or three times between the hotel and the corner of the terrace, as if he were thinking deeply – hesitating whether to go this way or that; and then he walked on again, faster than before."
"You saw no more of him that evening?"
"No. At half-past eight o'clock I heard that there had been a double murder in the forest, and that the bodies were lying at the Town Hall. I went to see the bodies, and recognised the lady and gentleman who had dined at our hotel. I also saw the little girl, who was in the charge of the police. She was crying bitterly. The corpses were removed to Paris on the following evening."
The examination of the driver came next. He had very little to tell. He had been told to wait at the cross-roads until the lady and gentleman returned from their stroll. It was a lovely night – a night which might have tempted any one to alight and walk in the forest glade. The moon was rising, but it was dark amid the old trees. The man had been waiting about a quarter of an hour, when he heard a shot a little way off – and then another, and another, and another, in rapid succession – and then he heard a child screaming. He tied his horse to a tree, and he ran into the glade, guided by the screams of the child. He found the lady and gentleman lying on the ground, side by side, the child kneeling by the lady; and screaming with grief and terror. The gentleman groaned two or three times, and then expired. The lady neither stirred nor moaned. Her light-coloured gown and mantle were covered with blood.
The driver was questioned as to whether anybody had passed him while he waited at the crossroads. No, he had not observed any one, except an old woman and a boy who had been gathering sticks in the forest. The place at which he was waiting was a well-known point. The glade in which the murder occurred was considered one of the most picturesque spots in the forest. He always drove there with people who wanted to see the beauties of Saint-Germain. But at that late hour there were very few people driving. He had met no carriage after leaving the terrace.
Then followed the examination of the child, and of Marie Prévol's mother. They were both lengthy, for the Juge d'Instruction had applied himself with peculiar earnestness to the task of unravelling this mystery, and it was only in the details of the dead woman's surroundings that the clue to the secret could be found.
The child had evidently answered the magisterial questions with extreme intelligence. However she might have broken down afterwards, she had been perfectly rational at the time of the interrogatory. It seemed to Heathcote, influenced, perhaps, by his knowledge of after events, that the child's replies indicated a hyper-sensitiveness, and an intellect intensified by feverish excitement.
"You remember going to Saint-Germain with your aunt?"
"Yes."
"Tell me all you can recall about that day. Tell me exactly when and how you started, and what happened to you on the way. I want to hear everything."
"It was three o'clock when we left my aunt's house. Monsieur de Maucroix came a little before that, and asked my aunt to go to dinner with him somewhere in the country. The weather was too lovely for Paris, he said. She did not want to go. She said Georges would be angry."
"Who is Georges?"
"Some one I never saw."
"Was he a friend of your aunt's?"
"Yes, I think so. She often talked of him. Monsieur de Maucroix used to talk of him, and to be angry about him."
"Why angry?"
"I don't know. He used to say Georges will not let you do this; Georges will not let you do that. What right has Georges that he should order you here or there? And then my aunt used to cry."
"Were you often at your aunt's apartment?"
"Very often."
"You lived there sometimes, did you not?"
"Yes, I used to stay there for a week sometimes. It was very nice to be with my aunt, much nicer than being with grandmother. She used to take me out in a carriage sometimes. Her rooms were prettier than grandmother's rooms, for there were flowers all about, and pretty things, and she was prettier, and wore prettier clothes."
"But if you were there for a week at a time, how was it that you never saw this Monsieur Georges, who was such a close friend of your aunt's?"
"He never came till late at night. He used to come to supper often. I heard the servant say so. She said he was a dissipated man, a bad subject. Grandmother said so too. 'Has that night-bird been here again?' she asked my aunt once; and my aunt was angry, and began to cry; and then grandmother got angry too, and said, 'Who is he, and what is he? I want to know that.' And then my aunt said, 'He is a gentleman; that is enough for you to know;' and then she showed my grandmother a pretty necklace that Georges had given her the night before – a necklace of shining white beads, like the water-drops from the fountain at the Tuileries."
"They were diamonds, I suppose?"
"Yes, that is what grandmother called them. She wetted them with her tongue to find out if they were real diamonds, and then she and my aunt kissed each other, and made friends."
"You are sure you never saw this Monsieur Georges?"
"Never. My aunt used to send me to bed very early, before she went to the theatre."
"Did she not take you with her to the theatre sometimes?"
"Never. She said that theatres were not good for little girls."
"Now tell me about your journey to Saint-Germain. How did you go?"
"First in a carriage, and then in a train."
"Had you to wait at the station?"
"A long time. I was tired of waiting so long. I thought it would have been nicer to be at home, where I had story-books to read."
"What did your aunt and Monsieur de Maucroix do while they were waiting?"
"They sat in a corner of a big room, with great windows through which we could see the trains. I watched the trains through the window."
"Were there many other people in the room?"
"Very few."
"Did you take notice of any one?"
"I noticed a little girl. She was bigger than I am, but not much. I thought I should like to play with her. She had a blue balloon, and she let it fly out of the window and broke it."
"Did you notice nobody else?"
"Only one other person – a gentleman who wore dark spectacles."
"What made you observe him in particular?"
"His spectacles were so curious, and he looked at my aunt."
"What do you mean when you say that he looked at your aunt? Did he look as if he knew her?"
"I don't know. He stood just inside the doorway, as if he was hiding behind the door, looking at my aunt and Monsieur de Maucroix."
"How long did he stand there?"
"I don't know."
"For five minutes, do you think? As long as you could count a hundred?"
"Longer than that."
"Was he young or old, tall or short?"
"He was tall. I think he must have been old, because he wore dark spectacles."
"Did your aunt and Monsieur de Maucroix observe him?"
"No. I asked my aunt when we were in the train if she had seen the gentleman with the funny spectacles, and she said no."
"Did you see him again after he left the waiting-room?"
"No."
"Now tell me all you can about your journey to Saint-Germain."
"We went in the train, in a beautiful carriage with soft cushions. I looked out of the window all the time. My aunt and Monsieur de Maucroix sat by the other window talking."
"Did you hear what they said?"
"Not much. I was not listening. It was so nice to see the country, and the trees rushing by. I heard Monsieur de Maucroix ask my aunt to go away with him – he begged her to go – to Italy, I think he said. Is there a place called Italy?"
"Yes. And how did your aunt answer?"
"She said she could not go. She was bound to Georges. Georges would kill her if she left him. Monsieur de Maucroix laughed, and said that people do not do such things nowadays. He laughed – and soon afterwards my aunt and he were both dead. I saw the blood – streams of blood."
At this point, said the report, the girl Lemarque became hysterical, and the rest of her evidence had to be postponed for another day. In the mean time the grandmother, and Barbe Girot, Marie Prévol's servant, were interrogated.
Madame Lemarque stated that her daughter was an actress at the Porte-Saint-Martin. She was very beautiful, and was more renowned for her grace and beauty than for her acting. She danced and sang and acted in fairy scenes. She was only three-and-twenty years of age at the time of her death.
Upon being asked by the judge whether her daughter led a strictly moral life, Madame Lemarque replied that her conduct was purity itself as compared with that of many ladies who acted in fairy pieces.
"But there was some one, perhaps," insinuated the judge, "there is always some one. So beautiful a woman must have had many admirers. I have her photograph here. It is an exquisite face, a beauty quite out of the common, refined, spiritual. Surely among her many admirers there must have been one whom she favoured above all the rest?"
"Yes, there was one, and it was that one who murdered my daughter and Monsieur de Maucroix. No one can doubt it."
"But you have no actual knowledge of the fact? You speak upon conjecture?"
"Who else should murder her? Whom did she ever injure, poor child? She was amiability itself – the kindest of comrades, charitable, good to everybody."
"What do you know of this person whom you suspect?"
"Nothing except that which I heard from my daughter."
"Did you never see him?"
"Never. If he had been the Emperor he could not have been more mysterious in his goings to and fro. I was never allowed to see him."
"Was he often at your daughter's apartment?"
"Very often. He used to go there after the theatre. He was devoted to her. There were some who believed that he was her husband, that he loved her too passionately to deny her anything she might ask. When she was not acting he took her abroad, to Italy – to Spain. If it were only for a holiday for a fortnight, he would carry her off to some remote village in the Italian Alps or the Pyrenees. I used to tell her that he was ashamed of his love for her, or he would not have hidden her in those distant places. He would have taken her to Dieppe or Arcachon, where she would have been seen and admired."
"Did you ever find out who this person is?"
"Never."
"But you must know something about him and his circumstances. Was he a nobleman, or did he belong to the mercantile class?"
"I know nothing except that he was rich. He showered gifts upon my daughter. He would have taken her off the stage if she would have allowed him. He would have given her a house and gardens at Bougival instead of her little apartment on a third floor in the Rue Lafitte; but she loved the theatre, and she had a proud spirit, poor child – she had not the temper of la femme entretenue."
"What was the name of this person?"
"Monsieur Georges. I never heard of him by any other name."
"Did your daughter reciprocate his passion?"
"For a long time she seemed to do so. They were like lovers in a story. That lasted for years – from the time of her first appearance at the Porte-Saint-Martin, which was four years before her death. And then there came a change. Monsieur de Maucroix fell in love with her, followed her about everywhere, worshipped her. And he was young and handsome and fascinating, with the style, and manners of a prince. He had spent all his life in palaces; had been attached to the Emperor's household from his boyhood; had fought bravely through the war."
"Had you reason to know that Monsieur Georges was jealous of Monsieur de Maucroix?"
"Yes, my daughter told me that there had been scenes."
"Had the two men met?"
"I think not."
"How long had Monsieur de Maucroix been an avowed admirer of your daughter?"
"Only a few months – since Easter, I think. My granddaughter used to see him when she was staying with her aunt."
"Could you reconcile it to your conscience to allow your grandchild to live in the house of an aunt who was leading – well, we will say a doubtful life?"
"There was no harm in my daughter's life that I knew of. Monsieur Georges may have been my daughter's husband. There is no reason that he should not have been. At her lodgings she was known as Madame Georges. It was under that name she travelled when she went abroad."
