The Woman of Mystery Part 13

"Well, aren't we here, the infantry? This is our job. All we have to do is to send out our sharpshooters and follow up with a good bayonet-charge. . . ."

At last the section set out again, reinforced by the remainder of the ninth company and under the command of the captain. A detachment of hussars galloped by, p.r.i.c.king towards the village to cut off the fugitives. The company swerved towards the chateau.

Opposite them, all was silent as the grave. Was it a trap? Was there not every reason to believe that enemy forces, strongly entrenched and barricaded as these were, would prepare to offer a last resistance? And yet there was nothing suspicious in the avenue of old oaks that led to the front court, not a sign of life to be seen or heard.

Paul and Bernard, still keeping ahead, with their fingers on the trigger of their rifles, searched the dim light of the underwood with a keen glance. Columns of smoke rose above the wall, which was now quite near, yawning with breach upon breach. As they approached, they heard moans, followed by the heart-rending sound of a death-rattle. It was the German wounded.

And suddenly the earth shook as though an inner upheaval had shattered its crust and from the other side of the wall came a tremendous explosion, or rather a series of explosions, like so many peals of thunder. The air was darkened with a cloud of sand and dust which sent forth all sorts of stones and rubbish. The enemy had blown up the chateau.

"That was meant for us, I expect," said Bernard. "We were to have been blown up at the same time. They were out in their calculations."

When they had pa.s.sed the gate, the sight of the mined court-yard, of the shattered turrets, of the demolished chateau, of the out-houses in flames, of the dying in their last throes and the thickly stacked corpses of the dead startled them into recoiling.

"Forward! Forward!" shouted the colonel, galloping up. "There are troops that must have made off across the park."

Paul knew the road, which he had covered a few weeks earlier in such tragic circ.u.mstances. He rushed across the lawns, among blocks of stone and uprooted trees. But, as he pa.s.sed in sight of a little lodge that stood at the entrance to the wood, he stopped, nailed to the ground.

And Bernard and all the men stood stupefied, opening their mouths wide with horror.

Against the lodge, two corpses rested on their feet, fastened to rings in the wall by a single chain wound round their waists. Their bodies were bent over the chains and their arms hung to the ground.

They were the corpses of a man and a woman. Paul recognized Jerome and Rosalie. They had been shot.

The chain continued beyond them. There was a third ring in the wall. The plaster was stained with blood and there were visible traces of bullets.

There had been a third victim, without a doubt, and the body had been removed.

As he approached, Paul noticed a splinter of bomb-sh.e.l.l embedded in the plaster. Around the hole thus formed, between the plaster and the splinter, was a handful of fair hair with golden lights in it, hair torn from the head of elisabeth.

CHAPTER VII

H. E. R. M.

Paul's first feeling was an immense need of revenge, then and there, at all costs, a need outweighing any sense of horror or despair. He gazed around him, as though all the wounded men who lay dying in the park were guilty of the monstrous crime:

"The cowards!" he snarled. "The murderers!"

"Are you sure," stammered Bernard, "are you sure it's elisabeth's hair?"

"Why, of course I am. They've shot her as they shot the two others. I know them both: it's the keeper and his wife. Oh, the blackguards!

He raised the b.u.t.t of his rifle over a German dragging himself in the gra.s.s and was about to strike him, when the Colonel came up to him:

"Hullo, Delroze, what are you doing? Where's your company?"

"Oh, sir, if you only knew! . . ."

He rushed up to his colonel. He looked like a madman and brandished his rifle as he spoke:

"They've killed her, sir, yes, they've shot my wife. . . . Look, against the wall there, with the two people who were in her service. . . .

They've shot her. . . . She was twenty years old, sir. . . . Oh, we must kill them all like dogs!"

But Bernard was dragging him away:

"Don't let us waste time, Paul; we can take our revenge on those who are still fighting. . . . I hear firing over there. Some of them are surrounded, I expect."

Paul hardly knew what he was doing. He started running again, drunk with rage and grief.

Ten minutes later, he had rejoined his company and was crossing the open s.p.a.ce where his father had been stabbed. The chapel was in front of him.

Farther on, instead of the little door that used to be in the wall, a great breach had been made, to admit the convoys of wagons for provisioning the castle. Eight hundred yards beyond it, a violent rifle-fire crackled over the fields, at the crossing of the road and the highway.

A few dozen retreating Germans were trying to force their way through the hussars who had come by the high road. They were attacked from behind by Paul's company, but succeeded in taking shelter in a square patch of trees and copsewood, where they defended themselves with fierce energy, retiring step by step and dropping one after the other.

"Why don't they surrender?" muttered Paul, who was firing continually and who was gradually being calmed by the heat of the fray. "You would think they were trying to gain time."

"Look over there!" said Bernard, in a husky voice.

Under the trees, a motor-car had just come from the frontier, crammed with German soldiers. Was it bringing reinforcements? No, the motor turned almost in its own length; and between it and the last of the combatants stood an officer in a long gray cloak, who, revolver in hand, exhorted them to persevere in their resistance, while he himself effected his retreat towards the car sent to his rescue.

"Look, Paul," Bernard repeated, "look!"

Paul was dumfounded. That officer to whom Bernard was calling his attention was . . . but no, it could not be. And yet . . .

"What do you mean to suggest, Bernard?" he asked.

"It's the same face," muttered Bernard, "the same face as yesterday, you know, Paul: the face of the woman who asked me those questions about you, Paul."

And Paul on his side recognized beyond the possibility of a doubt the mysterious individual who had tried to kill him at the little door leading out of the park, the creature who presented such an unconceivable resemblance to his father's murderess, to the woman of the portrait, to Hermine d'Andeville, elisabeth's mother and Bernard's.

Bernard raised his rifle to fire.

"No, don't do that!" cried Paul, terrified at the movement.

"Why not?"

"Let's try and take him alive."

He darted forward in a mad rush of hatred, but the officer had run to the car. The German soldiers held out their hands and hoisted him into their midst. Paul shot the one who was seated at the wheel. The officer caught hold of it just as the car was about to strike a tree, changed the direction and, skilfully guiding the car past the intervening obstacles, drove it behind a bend in the ground and from there towards the frontier. He was saved.

As soon as he was beyond the range of the bullets, the German soldiers who were still fighting surrendered.

Paul was trembling with impotent fury. To him this individual represented every imaginable form of evil; and, from the first to the last minute of that long series of tragedies, murders, attempts at spying and a.s.sa.s.sination, treacheries and deliberate shootings, all conceived with the same object and the same spirit, that one figure stood out as the very genius of crime.

Nothing short of the creature's death would have appeased Paul's hatred.

It was he, the monster, Paul never entertained a doubt of it, who had ordered elisabeth to be shot. elisabeth shot! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, infernal vision that tormented him! . . .