The Woman of Mystery Part 16

"These clothes, look, peasant clothes, the clothes I saw on the woman at Corvigny. There's no mistaking them: they are the same brown color and the same sort of serge stuff. And then here's the black-lace scarf which I told you about. . . ."

"What's that?" exclaimed Paul, running up to him.

"Here, see for yourself, it's a scarf of sorts and not one of the newest, either. How worn and torn it is! And the brooch I described to you is still in it. Do you see?"

Paul had noticed the brooch at once with the greatest horror. What a terrible significance it lent to the discovery of the clothes in the room occupied by Major Hermann, the room next to Hermine d'Andeville's boudoir! The cameo was carved with a swan with its wings outspread and was set in a gold snake with ruby eyes. Paul had known that cameo since his early boyhood, from seeing it in the dress of the woman who killed his father, and he knew it also because he had seen it again, with every smallest detail reproduced, in the Comtesse Hermine's portrait. And now he was finding the actual brooch, stuck in the black-lace scarf among the Corvigny peasant-woman's clothes and left behind in Major Hermann's room!

"This completes the evidence," said Bernard. "The fact that the clothes are here proves that the woman who asked me about you came back here last night; but what is the connection between her and that officer who is her living likeness? Is the person who questioned me about you the same as the individual who ordered elisabeth to be shot two hours earlier? And who are these people? What band of murderers and spies have we run up against?"

"They are simply Germans," was Paul's reply. "To them spying and murdering are natural and permissible forms of warfare . . . in a war, mark you, which they began and are carrying on in the midst of a perfectly peaceful period. I have told you so before, Bernard: we have been the victims of war for nearly twenty years. My father's murder opened the tragedy. And to-day we are mourning our poor elisabeth. And that is not the end of it."

"Still," said Bernard, "he has taken to flight."

"We shall see him again, be sure of that. If he doesn't come back, I will go and find him. And, when that day comes. . . ."

There were two easy-chairs in the room. Paul and Bernard resolved to spend the night there and, without further delay, wrote their names on the wall of the pa.s.sage. Then Paul went back to his men, in order to see that they were comfortably settled in the barns and out-houses that remained standing. Here the soldier who served as his orderly, a decent Auvergnat called Geriflour, told him that he had dug out two pairs of sheets and a couple of clean mattresses from a little house next to the guard-room and that the beds were ready. Paul accepted the offer for Bernard and himself. It was arranged that Geriflour and one of his companions should go to the chateau and sleep in the two easy-chairs.

The night pa.s.sed without any alarm. It was a feverish and sleepless night for Paul, who was haunted by the thought of elisabeth. In the morning he fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed by nightmares. The reveille woke him with a start. Bernard was waiting for him.

The roll was called in the courtyard of the chateau. Paul noticed that his orderly, Geriflour, and the other man were missing.

"They must be asleep," he said to Bernard. "Let's go and shake them awake."

They went back, through the ruins, to the first floor and along the demolished bedroom. In the room which Major Hermann had occupied they found Private Geriflour, huddled on the bed, covered with blood, dead.

His friend was lying back in one of the chairs, also dead. There was no disorder, no trace of a struggle around the bodies. The two soldiers must have been killed in their sleep.

Paul at once saw the weapon with which they had been murdered. It was a dagger with the letters H, E, R, M. on the handle.

CHAPTER VIII

eLISABETH'S DIARY

This double murder, following upon a series of tragic incidents all of which were closely connected, was the climax to such an acc.u.mulation of horrors and of shocking disasters that the two young men did not utter a word or stir a limb. Death, whose breath they had already felt so often on the battlefield, had never appeared to them under a more hateful or forbidding guise.

Death! They beheld it, not as an insidious disease that strikes at hazard, but as a specter creeping in the shadow, watching its adversary, choosing its moment and raising its arm with deliberate intention. And this specter bore for them the very shape and features of Major Hermann.

When Paul spoke at last, his voice had the dull, scared tone that seems to summon up the evil powers of darkness:

"He came last night. He came and, as we had written our names on the wall, the names of Bernard d'Andeville and Paul Delroze which represent the names of two enemies in his eyes, he took the opportunity to rid himself of those two enemies. Persuaded that it was you and I who were sleeping in this room, he struck . . . and those whom he struck were poor Geriflour and his friend, who have died in our stead."

After a long pause, he whispered:

"They have died as my father died . . . and as elisabeth died . . . and the keeper also and his wife; and by the same hand, by the same hand, Bernard, do you understand? . . . Yes, it's inadmissible, is it not? My brain refuses to admit it. . . . And yet it is always the same hand that holds the dagger . . . then and now."

Bernard examined the dagger. At the sight of the four letters, he said:

"That stands for Hermann, I suppose? Major Hermann?"

"Yes," said Paul, eagerly. "Is it his real name, though? And who is he actually? I don't know. But what I do know is that the criminal who committed all those murders is the same who signs with these four letters, H, E, R, M."

After giving the alarm to the men of his section and sending to inform the chaplain and the surgeons, Paul resolved to ask for a private interview with his colonel and to tell him the whole of the secret story, hoping that it might throw some light on the execution of elisabeth and the a.s.sa.s.sination of the two soldiers. But he learnt that the colonel and his regiment were fighting on the other side of the frontier and that the 3rd Company had been hurriedly sent for, all but a detachment which was to remain at the chateau under Sergeant Delroze's orders. Paul therefore made his own investigation with his men.

It yielded nothing. There was no possibility of discovering the least clue to the manner in which the murderer had made his way first into the park, next into the ruins and lastly into the bedroom. As no civilian had pa.s.sed, were they to conclude that the perpetrator of the two crimes was one of the privates of the 3rd company? Obviously not. And yet what other theory was there to adopt?

Nor did Paul discover anything to tell him of his wife's death or of the place where she was buried. And this was the hardest trial of all.

He encountered the same ignorance among the German wounded as among the prisoners. They had all heard of the execution of a man and two women, but they had all arrived after the execution and after the departure of the troops that occupied the chateau.

He went on to the village, thinking that they might know something there; that the inhabitants had some news to tell of the lady of the chateau, of the life she led, of her martyrdom and death. But Ornequin was empty, with not a woman even, not an old man left in it. The enemy must have sent all the inhabitants into Germany, doubtless from the start, with the manifest object of destroying every witness to his actions during the occupation and of creating a desert around the chateau.

Paul in this way devoted three days to the pursuit of fruitless inquiries.

"And yet," he said to Bernard, "elisabeth cannot have disappeared entirely. Even if I cannot find her grave, can I not find the least trace of her existence? She lived here. She suffered here. I would give anything for a relic of her."

They had succeeded in fixing upon the exact site of the room in which she used to sleep and even, in the midst of the ruins, the exact heap of stones and plaster that remained of it. It was all mixed up with the wreckage of the ground-floor rooms, into which the first-floor ceilings had been precipitated; and it was in this chaos, under the pile of walls and furniture reduced to dust and fragments, that one morning he picked up a little broken mirror, followed by a tortoise-sh.e.l.l hair-brush, a silver pen-knife and a set of scissors, all of which had belonged to elisabeth.

But what affected him even more was the discovery of a thick diary, in which he knew that his wife, before her marriage, used to note down her expenses, the errands or visits that had to be remembered and, occasionally, some more private details of her life. Now all that was left of her diary was the binding, with the date, 1914, and the part containing the entries for the first seven months of the year. All the sheets for the last five months had been not torn out but removed separately from the strings that fastened them to the binding.

Paul at once thought to himself:

"They were removed by elisabeth, removed at her leisure, at a time when there was no hurry and when she merely wished to use those pages for writing on from day to day. What would she want to write? Just those more personal notes which she used formerly to put down in her diary between the entry of a disburs.e.m.e.nt and a receipt. And as there can have been no accounts to keep since my departure and as her existence was nothing but a hideous tragedy, there is no doubt that she confided her distress to those pages, her complaints, possibly her shrinking from me."

That day, in Bernard's absence, Paul increased the thoroughness of his search. He rummaged under every stone and in every hole. The broken slabs of marble, the twisted l.u.s.tres, the torn carpets, the beams blackened by the flames, he lifted them all. He persisted for hours. He divided the ruins into sections which he examined patiently in rotation; and, when the ruins refused to answer his questions, he renewed his minute investigations in the ground.

His efforts were useless; and Paul knew that they were bound to be so.

elisabeth must have attached far too much value to those pages not to have either destroyed them or hidden them beyond the possibility of discovery. Unless:

"Unless," he said to himself, "they have been stolen from her. The major must have kept a constant watch upon her. And, in that case, who knows?"

An idea occurred to Paul's mind. After finding the peasant-woman's clothes and black lace scarf, he had left them on the bed, attaching no further importance to them; and he now asked himself if the major, on the night when he had murdered the two soldiers, had not come with the intention of fetching away the clothes, or at least the contents of their pockets, which he had not been able to do because they were hidden under Private Geriflour, who was sleeping on the top of them. Now Paul seemed to remember that, when unfolding that peasant's skirt and bodice, he had noticed a rustling of paper in one of the pockets. Was it not reasonable to conclude that this was elisabeth's diary, which had been discovered and stolen by Major Hermann?

Paul hastened to the room in which the murders had been committed, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the clothes and looked through them:

"Ah," he at once exclaimed, with genuine delight, "here they are!"

There was a large, yellow envelope filled with the pages removed from the diary. These were crumpled and here and there torn; and Paul saw at a glance that the pages corresponded only with the months of August and September and that even some days in each of these months were missing.

And he saw elisabeth's handwriting.

It was not a full or detailed diary. It consisted merely of notes, poor little notes in which a bruised heart found an outlet. At times, when they ran to greater length, an extra page had been added. The notes had been jotted down by day or night, anyhow, in ink and pencil; they were sometimes hardly legible; and they gave the impression of a trembling hand, of eyes veiled with tears and of a mind crazed with suffering.

Paul was moved to the very depths of his being. He was alone and he read:

"_Sunday, 2 August._