Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Wyllard's Weird
"Léonie Lemarque!" repeated the Reverend Mother. "I never thought of her when Monsieur showed me the locket. Léonie Lemarque! Yes, she left us in 1879 to go to her old grandmother in Paris. And now she has met with a violent death in England. Monsieur will tell you."
Monsieur repeated his story, this time with further details, for Sister Gudule questioned him closely. She would have every particular. The tears streamed down her cheeks, hung upon her bristly moustache. She was deeply distressed.
"You don't know how I loved that child," she said, excusing herself to the Superior; and then to Heathcote, "Ah, Monsieur, you could never understand how I loved her. I saved her life. From the weakest frailest creature, I made her a sound and healthy child. Indeed, I may say that I did much more than this. With the help of God and the intercession of His Saints I saved her mind."
"It is quite true," said the Reverend Mother. "The child came to us under most peculiar circumstances. Sister Gudule took entire charge of her for the first year."
"And she rewarded me tenfold for my trouble," added Gudule; "she gave me love for love, measure for measure."
"Will you tell me all about her – every detail? The knowledge may help me to avenge her death," said Heathcote eagerly. "It is my belief, and the belief of others, that she was foully murdered."
He was intensely agitated. He felt as if he had taken into his hand the lever which worked some formidable machine – an instrument of death and doom, and that every movement of his hand might bring destruction. Yet the process once begun must go on. He was no longer an individual, working of his own free will; he was only an agent in the hands of Fate.
"Willingly, we will tell you all we can," said the Reverend Mother. "But you must allow us to offer you a little coffee. You have travelled, and you look white and weary."
The convent was proud of its coffee, almost the only refreshment ever offered to visitors. The portress brought a little oval tray covered with a snow-white napkin, a little brown crockery pot, a white cup and saucer, all of the humblest, but spotlessly clean.
"Léonie was with us eight years," said the Reverend Mother, while Sister Gudule dried her eyes and tried to regain her composure. "She was just ten years old when she was brought to us by her grandmother, a person who had been at one time a dressmaker in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris, but who had fallen upon evil days, and lived in a very humble way in a small lodging on the left bank of the Seine. Léonie was an orphan, the daughter of Madame Lemarque's only son, who had died young, broken-hearted at the death of his young wife. The child was brought to us by a priest, who came all the way from Paris with his little charge. She had but just recovered from a long illness, which was said to be brain-fever, caused by a very terrible mental shock which she had endured two months before."
"Were you told the nature of that shock?"
"No; the priest did not offer any information upon that point, and I did not presume to question him. He assured me that the case was one which merited the most benevolent consideration. Madame Lemarque had no means of educating the child herself, nor could she afford the pension demanded by a Parisian convent. The curé thought that our fine air would do much to restore the child to health and strength, and he knew that our system of education was calculated to develop her mind and character in the right direction. He guaranteed the regular payment of the child's pension, and we never had occasion to apply for it a second time."
"Did Madame Lemarque ever come to see her granddaughter?"
"Never. Léonie remained with us from year's end to year's end till after her eighteenth birthday, when, at Madame Lemarque's desire, we made arrangements for her travelling to Paris with other pupils who were returning to the great city."
"Then you never saw Madame Lemarque?"
"Never."
"Nor ever heard from her directly?"
"O yes, we had letters – very nicely-written letters – full of gratitude for what Madame Lemarque was pleased to call our kindness to Léonie. The child used to write to her grandmother monthly, while she was with us, and her letters were the best evidence that she was fairly used and happy."
"She was a sweet child," said Gudule, "and deserved every indulgence."
"Did she ever tell you anything about the shock which caused her illness?" asked Heathcote of the lay-sister.
"In her right senses never one syllable," answered Gudule. "I would not have questioned her upon that subject for worlds, for I believed that she had narrowly escaped madness. But during the six months in which I nursed her – for her health was completely broken, and it required all that time to build up her strength and calm her nerves – she used to sleep in a little bed close to mine, and in her troubled dreams I used to hear very strange things. How far the dreams were inspired by the recollections of real events, I cannot venture to say; but there were phrases that recurred so often – a horrible vision which so continually repeated itself, like a scene in a play – that I can but suppose it to have been the representation of some event which had really happened before the child's waking eyes."
"Can you recall the nature of that vision?" inquired Heathcote breathlessly.
It seemed to him that he was on the threshold of a new mystery – as terrible as the old one, and even darker: a tragedy hidden in the past, reflected only in a child's fever-dream.
"You should ask me if I can forget it, Monsieur," said Sister Gudule. "I wish with all my heart that I could. I have prayed many a prayer for oblivion. The poor child used to be feverish every night – a low fever, which only came on in the evening, but some nights were worse than others – and in her most feverish nights this dream seemed almost inevitable. I used to lie awake expecting it, dreading it."
"She used to talk in her sleep, then?"
"To talk, yes; and to scream – a terrible shriek sometimes, which would disturb every sleeper in the great dormitory adjoining my little room. She would start up on her pillow, and stare straight before her with wide-open eyes, being fast asleep all the time, you understand. 'Don't kill her, don't kill her!' she would cry; 'don't shoot her!' And then she would rock herself backwards and forwards, and moan in a low voice, 'The forest – the dark, dark forest; she is there, always there, with the blood running down her dress! Take her away, take away the dark forest – take away the blood!' Her words varied sometimes, but those words never: 'Take away the dark forest – take away the blood!'"
"And did she never tell you what the dream meant – you, her nurse and comforter, with whom she must have been on such confidential terms?"
"No, dear child. She loved me and trusted me with all the strength of her innocent heart, I believe; but she never told me the cause of that awful dream. And I never dared to question her. I was only anxious that she should forget the past – that if her nights were fevered and restless, her days should be peaceful and bright. I did everything I could to amuse and interest her, in studies, needlework, and play, and to help her to forget the past."
"And you succeeded, Sister," said the head of the convent approvingly. "I never saw a more wonderful cure. From a nervous hysterical child Léonie Lemarque grew into a bright merry girl."
"Yes, with God's help she was cured; but the cure was very slow. The shock which shattered her health, and for a time impaired her mind, must have been an awful one. Never before had I seen gray hairs upon the head of a child, but the thickly curling hair upon Léonie's temples when she came to us was patched with white; and it was years before the hair resumed its natural colour. For the first year her memory was almost a blank. It would have been useless for any one to attempt to teach her in class with the other children. She would have been despised as an idiot, laughed at perhaps, and her heart broken. I obtained the Reverend Mother's permission to keep her in my room, and to teach her in my own way, and little by little I awakened her memory and her mind. Both had been, as it were, benumbed, frozen, paralysed, by that awful shock of which we know so little."
"But you would guess that she had witnessed some dreadful scene, perhaps the death of some one she loved," speculated Heathcote. "Did she never talk to you of her childhood in Paris, her relatives?"
"Rarely of any one except her grandmother," answered Sister Gudule, "and of her she told me very little. Whether her illness had blotted out the memory of her childhood, or whether she shrank from any allusion to the past, I cannot tell. One day I asked her who had given her a blue satin neckerchief which I found in her trunk – a costly neckerchief, and much too fine for a child to wear. She told me that it was a New Year's gift from her aunt, but at the mention of the name she turned deadly pale, her eyes filled with tears, and her whole body shook like an aspen-leaf. I changed the conversation that moment, and I never again heard her speak of her aunt."
"You would infer from her agitation that the aunt was connected with the tragedy of the child's life?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"Was perhaps the person whom she saw assailed when she cried out, 'Don't kill her; don't shoot her!'"
"I have thought that it must have been so. That dreadful cry of hers, 'Take away the blood! take away the dark forest!' No one who did not hear those cries of hers, no one who did not see the awful expression of her eyes, staring, dilated, full of horror; no one who had not seen and heard her as I did could ever understand how dreadful, how real that vision was to me as well as to the sleeper. I used to feel as if I had seen murder done, and had stood by without the power to prevent it."
"In a word, you felt, by pure sympathy, almost exactly what the child felt," said Heathcote.
Already he had begun to adore Sister Gudule, just as the children of the convent adored her. He forgot her hump, he forgave her the potato-shaped nose, he accepted her beard as a detail that gave piquancy to her countenance. He was subdued, subjugated by that intensely sympathetic nature which revealed itself in every word and look of the lay-sister.
But he had a task to perform, and it was necessary that he should proceed with his inquiries in a business-like manner. He had already taken certain notes in his pocket-book.
"Léonie Lemarque left you in 1879, and she had been with you eight years," he said, with pencil in hand. "She must have come to you in 1871."
"Yes, it was in 1871, not long after the troubles in Paris. It was early in November she was brought to us."
"And you were told that she had been ill two months in consequence of a mental shock?"
"Yes."
"Then one may fairly conclude that the event which caused her illness occurred early in the September of 1871."
"I think so."
"Good. I thank you most heartily, Madame," with a courteous bow to the Reverend Mother, "for the help you and Sister Gudule have so graciously bestowed upon me. But I would venture to ask one more favour, namely, that you would honour me with a line by way of introduction to the worthy priest who brought Léonie Lemarque from Paris."
"Alas, Monsieur, that is impossible! Father Sorbier died three years ago, just a year before Léonie left us."
"That is unfortunate. He doubtless knew the mystery of the girl's childhood, and perhaps might have helped me to unravel the secret of her strange death."
"Do you really believe that the two events have any bearing upon each other, Monsieur?" demanded Sister Gudule thoughtfully.
"I know not, Madame," replied Heathcote; "but it is only by working backwards that I can hope to arrive at any clue to the mystery which has puzzled us all in Cornwall. That poor girl must have had some purpose in going to England, in travelling to so remote a neighbourhood as ours. Even if her death were an accident, or an unpremeditated crime, her presence in that place cannot have been accidental."
Mr. Heathcote asked to see the class-rooms and the chapel before he left the convent, a request which was graciously accepted, as a compliment to the Reverend Mother. He was paraded along wide and airy passages, was shown an empty refectory, where plates and mugs and huge piles of bread and butter were arranged on long deal tables, covered with snow-white linen, in readiness for the afternoon goûter. He saw the chapel with its humble decorations, its somewhat crude copy of a well-known Guido, its altar, rich in gilded paper, home-made lace, and cheap china vases. All here spoke of small means; but the flowers on the altar were freshly gathered, and the neatness and cleanliness of all things in chapel and convent charmed the stranger's eye. He slipped a couple of sovereigns into the box by the door, praised the airy corridors, the spacious whitewashed rooms, and left the principal and the lay-sister alike charmed with his good French and his friendly manners.
The clock of the monastery on the opposite hill was striking five as he drove away from the convent, a silvery chime that could be heard all over Dinan.
He dined at the table d'hôte at the Hôtel de la Poste, and walked on the terrace on the town walls after dinner. There is no fairer view in Brittany than the panorama of wooded hills from that walk above the town walls. The cool night air, the silvery moonlight, soothed Edward Heathcote's nerves. He was able to meditate upon his afternoon's work, to think over the story he had heard from Sister Gudule, and to speculate upon the chances of his being able to follow up this thread of a life-history until it led him to some point which would throw a light upon the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death.
Reflecting upon Sister Gudule's story, he could but conclude that the child Léonie had been the witness of some scene of violence in which a woman had been the victim – a murder possibly, or it might be only an attempted murder. Blood had been spilt. Hence that awful cry, "Take away the blood, take away the dark forest!" – a child's appeal to some unknown power to remove an object of terror.
One and one only clue had he obtained from Sister Gudule as to the person of the victim, and even that indication might be a false light leading him astray.
The girl's painful emotion at the utterance of her aunt's name suggested that the victim had been that aunt. The mere mention of the name would conjure up all the horror of that scene which had so nearly wrecked the child's reason.
It therefore seemed plain to Heathcote's mind that a murder, or an attempt at murder, had been committed in a dark wood, and that the victim had been Léonie Lemarque's aunt. So deeply interested was he in this mystery of ten years back, so powerfully moved by this strange story of a child's suffering, that he almost forgot that the business which had brought him across the Channel was to find out the true story of the French girl's death, and not to unravel the mystery of this old and perhaps forgotten crime in the unknown wood. So interested was he that he resolved at any cost of trouble to himself to discover the details of the scene reproduced so often in the child's fevered dreams.
"Who knows whether that may not be the surest way of arriving at the truth about the girl's death?" he argued with himself. "At any rate it is the only way that offers itself at present."
He walked late upon the walls of Dinan, enjoying the quiet of the moonlit scene, hearing the bells chime again and again, silver-clear across the vale, from the monastery where the madmen were dreaming their disjointed dreams, or wandering sane and healed in the spirit-land of the past, amid the faces of friends long dead. He walked late, thinking of a face that had looked at him with trusting eyes in the moment of parting, lovely eyes whose every expression he knew, but most of all that tender pathetic look which had once tried to soothe the agony of loss.
"To serve her and work for her, surely that is enough for a man's bliss," he thought, with a sad, half-satirical smile. "In the good old days of chivalry her knight would have deemed it happiness to bleed and perish for her sake far away in Palestine – glory and honour enough to have worn her colours in his helmet. Are we a meaner race, we men of the present, that we cannot love without hope of reward? Well, I have pledged myself to my crusade. I have put on my lady's colours, and I will work for her as faithfully as if my love were not hopeless. I will prove to her that there is some chivalry still left in this degenerate world, under the modern guise of disinterested friendship."
He started for Paris by the first train next morning, a fourteen hours' journey, a journey of dust and weariness, though the road lay through a fair country, with glimpses of the blue sea, and then by the widening river, till the tall houses and the many church-towers of the great city glimmered whitely before him, under the September moon. He put up at his old resting-place, the Hôtel de Bade, amidst the roar and hustle of the Boulevard; and he set out the next morning after an early breakfast in quest of Monsieur Drubarde's apartment, which was situated in that older and shabbier Paris of the left bank.
Monsieur Drubarde's apartment was on the Quai des Grands Augustins, au cinquième, a rather alarming indication to infirm or elderly legs, but which did not appal Edward Heathcote. He ran up the five flights of a dark wooden staircase, and found himself upon an airy landing, lighted and ventilated by a skylight.
The skylight was half open, and through it Heathcote saw flowers and greenery upon the roof. He also caught the odour of a very respectable cigar, which the soft west wind blew towards him through the same opening.
On a door opposite the top of the steep fifth flight appeared a brass plate, with the name, Félix Drubarde.
Heathcote rang, and his summons was answered almost instantly from an unexpected direction.
A large, round, rubicund face peered through the skylight, and a voice asked if Monsieur desired an interview with Félix Drubarde.
"I have come here in that hope, Monsieur," answered Heathcote, "and I venture to infer that I have the honour of addressing Monsieur Drubarde."
"I am that individual, Monsieur," replied the rubicund gentleman, opening the skylight to its widest extent. "Would it be too much to ask you to ascend to my summer salon upon the leads? It is pleasanter even for a business interview than the confinement of four walls."
There was a steep straight ladder against the wall immediately under the skylight. Heathcote mounted this and emerged upon the roof, face to face with Félix Drubarde.
The retired police-officer's appearance was essentially rustic. His attire resembled the holiday costume of the station de bains rather than the normal garb of a great busy metropolis. He was clothed from head to foot in white linen; his garments were all of the loosest, and he wore a pair of ancient buff slippers, which had doubtless trodden the bitter biting foam on the beach of Dieppe or the sands of Trouville. Altogether, Monsieur Drubarde looked the very picture of comfort and coolness on this warm September morning. He had made for himself a garden upon an open space of flat leaded roof, which was belted round with ancient chimney-stacks of all shapes and sizes, just as a lawn is girdled with good old oaks and beeches. On one side of his garden he had rigged up a light lattice-work from chimney to chimney, and his nasturtiums and Virginia creepers had clothed the lattice with green and gold. This he called his allée verte, and he declared that it reminded him of Fontainebleau in the days of the famous Diana.
His garden was gorgeous with geraniums and roses, and perfumed with mignonette and honeysuckle. He had his morning coffee on a little iron table; he had a wicker-work easy-chair for himself, and another for a friend; and a smart rug, of the usual gaudy pattern to be seen in French lodging-houses, was spread under his slippered feet. He had his cigars and his newspaper, and, above all, he had a large and ancient black poodle of uncanny appearance, which looked as if he were the very dog under whose semblance the arch-fiend visited Dr. Faustus.
Before seating himself in the basket-chair which Monsieur Drubarde offered him, Heathcote took Joseph Distin's letter out of his pocket-book, and handed it to the ex-police-officer, who became convulsive with rapture when he saw the signature.
"Monsieur was welcome on his own account as a doubtless distinguished Englishman; as the friend of Monsieur Distin he is more than welcome. His visit is an honour, a privilege which an old member of the Paris police cannot too highly value," said Drubarde, with enthusiasm. "Ah, Monsieur, what a man is that Joseph Distin! what a commanding genius! I have had the honour to assist him in cases where that mighty intellect revealed itself with startling force, and where, I am proud to say, he must inevitably have failed, but for my humble assistance. Yes, Monsieur, old Drubarde has a flair, which even your great English lawyer envies. What a man, all the same!" Monsieur Drubarde paused for breath, and also to offer Mr. Heathcote a cigar, which was frankly accepted. And then the police-officer continued his eulogy of the English lawyer, with which he contrived to interweave a little gentle egotism.
"Had he been a Frenchman and lived under the first Emperor, he would have been greater than the Duke of Otranto, whom my father had the privilege to serve, and whom I remember seeing when I was a child. My father took me into the great chief's office one day, a little toddling creature, chubby, and, I am told, beautiful, in my little uniform of the Old Guard, a mother's fond fancy, Monsieur; the mothers of France love to make gracious pictures of their children. The Duke laid his hand upon my golden curls. 'What a lovely boy!' he exclaimed, deeply moved by my infantine beauty; 'I prophesy a brilliant future for him. This child will go far.' I hope, Monsieur, that my after-life has not belied the great man's prophecy."
"Mr. Distin assures me that you have won distinction in your calling," replied Heathcote, wondering how long the old gentleman's recollections of childhood were going to last. "Your narrative takes me back to a period that is classical. It assures me also that you who so vividly remember the events of sixty years ago – "
"More than sixty, Monsieur. I am past seventy years of age, I who speak to you."
Mr. Heathcote put on an appropriate expression of wonder.
"With such a memory for the remote past, it will hardly trouble you to recall the events of ten years ago," he continued, very eager to come to the point. "Now, exactly ten years ago, in this very month of September, there was a brutal murder, or attempted murder, of a woman, in a wood near Paris – "
"Do you mean the murder of Marie Prévol the actress, in the forest of Saint-Germain?" inquired the police-officer. "I was engaged in that case. A very strange story."
"And the woman was really murdered?" asked Heathcote, pale with agitation.
He was confounded by the ease with which the man fixed upon a notorious crime, upon a given date. It would have surprised him less to find that the child's vision of murder was a mere fever-dream – the repetition of some morbid hallucination – than to hear of the reality off-hand, in the broad light of day.
"Really murdered! yes, and her lover too, as dead as the Pharaohs. There never was a more genuine crime, a more determined murder. The actress and her lover had gone to Saint-Germain for a holiday jaunt. They went by rail, dined at the Henri Quatre, hired a carriage in the cool of the evening, drove on the terrace, and then into the forest. They left the carriage at a point where there were cross-roads, and pursued their ramble on foot."
"There was a child with them?" interrogated Heathcote breathlessly.
"Yes, a little girl, the actress's niece. She was the only witness of the crime. It was from her lips that the Juge d'Instruction took down the history of the scene. They were walking quietly in the twilight, it was nearly dark, the child said, and she was beginning to feel frightened. The lovers were walking arm in arm, the child by her aunt's side. Suddenly a man sprang out upon them from the darkness of the wood, and confronted them with a pistol in his hand. He wore no hat, and he looked wild and furious. He aimed first at the man, who fell without a groan. The girl had just time to call out to him not to shoot her aunt, when he fired a second time, and then a third and a fourth, and again, quicker than the child could count. It was evidently a six-chambered revolver. Marie Prévol was found with her breast riddled with bullets. The driver heard the shots from his post at the cross-roads."
"And was the murderer never found?"
"Never. In spite of his wild appearance and his bare head, he got clean off, and all the police of Paris failed in tracing him."
"But was there no one suspected of the crime?"
"Yes. There was a former lover of Marie's, her first lover; and, as it was said, the only man she had ever really cared for. They had been a devoted couple – were supposed by some to be married – and until a short time before the murder Marie's character had been considered almost stainless. Then a younger admirer appeared on the scene. There were violent quarrels. The actress seemed to have lost her head, to be infatuated by this aristocratic lover, one of the handsomest men in Paris. She had known him only a few months when they went for this jaunt to Saint-Germain – a stolen adventure. They were supposed to have been followed by the other man, and that the murder was an act of jealous madness."
"And the crime was never brought home to him?"
"Never. Beyond the fact of his relations with Mademoiselle Prévol, and of his disappearance immediately after the murder, there was nothing to connect him with the crime."
"I thought it was difficult, indeed almost impossible, for any man to leave France without the knowledge of the police."
"It is difficult; and at that time it was particularly difficult, as the crimes of the Commune were still of recent date, and the police were more than usually alert. But this man did it. All the great railway-stations and sea-ports were closely watched for the appearance of such a man among the departures; but he was never identified."
"And you have no doubt in your own mind that this man was the murderer?"
"Not the shadow of doubt. There was no one else who had any motive for assailing Marie and her admirer. Except in her relations with these two she had been propriety itself. Unless you can imagine a motiveless maniac dashing through a wood and shooting the first comer, you can hardly conceive any other cause than jealousy for such a crime as this."
"Do you remember the name of the man who was suspected?"
"Not at this moment; but I have the whole history of the case in my workshop below, and if you would like to read it, there are details that might interest you."
"I should like much to read it."
