Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 9

  “Who is that man?” asked Rouletabille, returning to his omelette.

  “The Green Man,” growled the innkeeper. “Don’t you know him? Then all the better for you. He is not an acquaintance to make. — Well, he is Monsieur Stangerson’s forest-keeper.”

  “You don’t appear to like him very much?” asked the reporter, pouring his omelette into the frying-pan.

  “Nobody likes him, monsieur. He’s an upstart who must once have had a fortune of his own; and he forgives nobody because, in order to live, he has been compelled to become a servant. A keeper is as much a servant as any other, isn’t he? Upon my word, one would say that he is the master of the Glandier, and that all the land and woods belong to him. He’ll not let a poor creature eat a morsel of bread on the grass — his grass!”

  “Does he often come here?”

  “Too often. But I’ve made him understand that his face doesn’t please me, and, for a month past, he hasn’t been here. The Donjon Inn has never existed for him! — he hasn’t had time! — been too much engaged in paying court to the landlady of the Three Lilies at Saint-Michel. A bad fellow! — There isn’t an honest man who can bear him. Why, the concierges of the chateau would turn their eyes away from a picture of him!”

  “The concierges of the chateau are honest people, then?”

  “Yes, they are, as true as my name’s Mathieu, monsieur. I believe them to be honest.”

  “Yet they’ve been arrested?”

  “What does that prove? — But I don’t want to mix myself up in other people’s affairs.”

  “And what do you think of the murder?”

  “Of the murder of poor Mademoiselle Stangerson? — A good girl much loved everywhere in the country. That’s what I think of it — and many things besides; but that’s nobody’s business.”

  “Not even mine?” insisted Rouletabille.

  The innkeeper looked at him sideways and said gruffly:

  “Not even yours.”

  The omelette ready, we sat down at table and were silently eating, when the door was pushed open and an old woman, dressed in rags, leaning on a stick, her head doddering, her white hair hanging loosely over her wrinkled forehead, appeared on the threshold.

  “Ah! — there you are, Mother Angenoux! — It’s long since we saw you last,” said our host.

  “I have been very ill, very nearly dying,” said the old woman. “If ever you should have any scraps for the Bete du Bon Dieu — ?”

  And she entered, followed by a cat, larger than any I had ever believed could exist. The beast looked at us and gave so hopeless a miau that I shuddered. I had never heard so lugubrious a cry.

  As if drawn by the cat’s cry a man followed the old woman in. It was the Green Man. He saluted by raising his hand to his cap and seated himself at a table near to ours.

  “A glass of cider, Daddy Mathieu,” he said.

  As the Green Man entered, Daddy Mathieu had started violently; but visibly mastering himself he said:

  “I’ve no more cider; I served the last bottles to these gentlemen.”

  “Then give me a glass of white wine,” said the Green Man, without showing the least surprise.

  “I’ve no more white wine — no more anything,” said Daddy Mathieu, surlily.

  “How is Madame Mathieu?”

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  So the young Woman with the large, tender eyes, whom we had just seen, was the wife of this repugnant and brutal rustic, whose jealousy seemed to emphasise his physical ugliness.

  Slamming the door behind him, the innkeeper left the room. Mother Angenoux was still standing, leaning on her stick, the cat at her feet.

  “You’ve been ill, Mother Angenoux? — Is that why we have not seen you for the last week?” asked the Green Man.

  “Yes, Monsieur keeper. I have been able to get up but three times, to go to pray to Sainte-Genevieve, our good patroness, and the rest of the time I have been lying on my bed. There was no one to care for me but the Bete du bon Dieu!”

  “Did she not leave you?”

  “Neither by day nor by night.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “As I am of Paradise.”

  “Then how was it, Madame Angenoux, that all through the night of the murder nothing but the cry of the Bete du bon Dieu was heard?”

  Mother Angenoux planted herself in front of the forest-keeper and struck the floor with her stick.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “But shall I tell you something? There are no two cats in the world that cry like that. Well, on the night of the murder I also heard the cry of the Bete du bon Dieu outside; and yet she was on my knees, and did not mew once, I swear. I crossed myself when I heard that, as if I had heard the devil.”

  I looked at the keeper when he put the last question, and I am much mistaken if I did not detect an evil smile on his lips. At that moment, the noise of loud quarrelling reached us. We even thought we heard a dull sound of blows, as if some one was being beaten. The Green Man quickly rose and hurried to the door by the side of the fireplace; but it was opened by the landlord who appeared, and said to the keeper:

  “Don’t alarm yourself, Monsieur — it is my wife; she has the toothache.” And he laughed. “Here, Mother Angenoux, here are some scraps for your cat.”

  He held out a packet to the old woman, who took it eagerly and went out by the door, closely followed by her cat.

  “Then you won’t serve me?” asked the Green Man.

  Daddy Mathieu’s face was placid and no longer retained its expression of hatred.

  “I’ve nothing for you — nothing for you. Take yourself off.”

  The Green Man quietly refilled his pipe, lit it, bowed to us, and went out. No sooner was he over the threshold than Daddy Mathieu slammed the door after him and, turning towards us, with eyes bloodshot, and frothing at the mouth, he hissed to us, shaking his clenched fist at the door he had just shut on the man he evidently hated:

  “I don’t know who you are who tell me ‘We shall have to eat red meat — now’; but if it will interest you to know it — that man is the murderer!”

  With which words Daddy Mathieu immediately left us. Rouletabille returned towards the fireplace and said:

  “Now we’ll grill our steak. How do you like the cider? — It’s a little tart, but I like it.”

  We saw no more of Daddy Mathieu that day, and absolute silence reigned in the inn when we left it, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our feast.

  Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson’s estate. He halted for some ten minutes at the corner of a narrow road black with soot, near to some charcoal-burners’ huts in the forest of Sainte-Genevieve, which touches on the road from Epinay to Corbeil, to tell me that the murderer had certainly passed that way, before entering the grounds and concealing himself in the little clump of trees.

  “You don’t think, then, that the keeper knows anything of it?” I asked.

  “We shall see that, later,” he replied. “For the present I’m not interested in what the landlord said about the man. The landlord hates him. I didn’t take you to breakfast at the Donjon Inn for the sake of the Green Man.”

  Then Rouletabille, with great precaution glided, followed by me, towards the little building which, standing near the park gate, served for the home of the concierges, who had been arrested that morning. With the skill of an acrobat, he got into the lodge by an upper window which had been left open, and returned ten minutes later. He said only, “Ah!” — a word which, in his mouth, signified many things.

  We were about to take the road leading to the chateau, when a considerable stir at the park gate attracted our attention. A carriage had arrived and some people had come from the chateau to meet it. Rouletabille pointed out to me a gentleman who descended from it.

  “That’s the Chief of the Surete” he said. “Now we shall see what Frederic Larsan has up his sleeve, and whether he is so
much cleverer than anybody else.”

  The carriage of the Chief of the Surete was followed by three other vehicles containing reporters, who were also desirous of entering the park. But two gendarmes stationed at the gate had evidently received orders to refuse admission to anybody. The Chief of the Surete calmed their impatience by undertaking to furnish to the press, that evening, all the information he could give that would not interfere with the judicial inquiry.

  CHAPTER XI. In Which Frederic Larsan Explains How the Murderer Was Able to Get Out of “The Yellow Room”

  AMONG THE MASS of papers, legal documents, memoirs, and extracts from newspapers, which I have collected, relating to the mystery of The Yellow Room, there is one very interesting piece; it is a detail of the famous examination which took place that afternoon, in the laboratory of Professor Stangerson, before the Chief of the Surete. This narrative is from the pen of Monsieur Maleine, the Registrar, who, like the examining magistrate, had spent some of his leisure time in the pursuit of literature. The piece was to have made part of a book which, however, has never been published, and which was to have been entitled: “My Examinations.” It was given to me by the Registrar himself, some time after the astonishing denouement to this case, and is unique in judicial chronicles.

  Here it is. It is not a mere dry transcription of questions and answers, because the Registrar often intersperses his story with his own personal comments.

  THE REGISTRAR’S NARRATIVE

  The examining magistrate and I (the writer relates) found ourselves in The Yellow Room in the company of the builder who had constructed the pavilion after Professor Stangerson’s designs. He had a workman with him. Monsieur de Marquet had had the walls laid entirely bare; that is to say, he had had them stripped of the paper which had decorated them. Blows with a pick, here and there, satisfied us of the absence of any sort of opening. The floor and the ceiling were thoroughly sounded. We found nothing. There was nothing to be found. Monsieur de Marquet appeared to be delighted and never ceased repeating:

  “What a case! What a case! We shall never know, you’ll see, how the murderer was able to get out of this room!”

  Then suddenly, with a radiant face, he called to the officer in charge of the gendarmes.

  “Go to the chateau,” he said, “and request Monsieur Stangerson and Monsieur Robert Darzac to come to me in the laboratory, also Daddy Jacques; and let your men bring here the two concierges.”

  Five minutes later all were assembled in the laboratory. The Chief of the Surete, who had arrived at the Glandier, joined us at that moment. I was seated at Monsieur Stangerson’s desk ready for work, when Monsieur de Marquet made us the following little speech — as original as it was unexpected:

  “With your permission, gentlemen — as examinations lead to nothing — we will, for once, abandon the old system of interrogation. I will not have you brought before me one by one, but we will all remain here as we are, — Monsieur Stangerson, Monsieur Robert Darzac, Daddy Jacques and the two concierges, the Chief of the Surete, the Registrar, and myself. We shall all be on the same footing. The concierges may, for the moment, forget that they have been arrested. We are going to confer together. We are on the spot where the crime was committed. We have nothing else to discuss but the crime. So let us discuss it freely — intelligently or otherwise, so long as we speak just what is in our minds. There need be no formality or method since this won’t help us in any way.”

  Then, passing before me, he said in a low voice:

  “What do you think of that, eh? What a scene! Could you have thought of that? I’ll make a little piece out of it for the Vaudeville.” And he rubbed his hands with glee.

  I turned my eyes on Monsieur Stangerson. The hope he had received from the doctor’s latest reports, which stated that Mademoiselle Stangerson might recover from her wounds, had not been able to efface from his noble features the marks of the great sorrow that was upon him. He had believed his daughter to be dead, and he was still broken by that belief. His clear, soft, blue eyes expressed infinite sorrow. I had had occasion, many times, to see Monsieur Stangerson at public ceremonies, and from the first had been struck by his countenance, which seemed as pure as that of a child — the dreamy gaze with the sublime and mystical expression of the inventor and thinker.

  On those occasions his daughter was always to be seen either following him or by his side; for they never quitted each other, it was said, and had shared the same labours for many years. The young lady, who was then five and thirty, though she looked no more than thirty, had devoted herself entirely to science. She still won admiration for her imperial beauty which had remained intact, without a wrinkle, withstanding time and love. Who would have dreamed that I should one day be seated by her pillow with my papers, and that I should see her, on the point of death, painfully recounting to us the most monstrous and most mysterious crime I have heard of in my career? Who would have thought that I should be, that afternoon, listening to the despairing father vainly trying to explain how his daughter’s assailant had been able to escape from him? Why bury ourselves with our work in obscure retreats in the depths of woods, if it may not protect us against those dangerous threats to life which meet us in the busy cities?

  “Now, Monsieur Stangerson,” said Monsieur de Marquet, with somewhat of an important air, “place yourself exactly where you were when Mademoiselle Stangerson left you to go to her chamber.”

  Monsieur Stangerson rose and, standing at a certain distance from the door of “The Yellow Room”, said, in an even voice and without the least trace of emphasis — a voice which I can only describe as a dead voice:

  “I was here. About eleven o’clock, after I had made a brief chemical experiment at the furnaces of the laboratory, needing all the space behind me, I had my desk moved here by Daddy Jacques, who spent the evening in cleaning some of my apparatus. My daughter had been working at the same desk with me. When it was her time to leave she rose, kissed me, and bade Daddy Jacques goodnight. She had to pass behind my desk and the door to enter her chamber, and she could do this only with some difficulty. That is to say, I was very near the place where the crime occurred later.”

  “And the desk?” I asked, obeying, in thus mixing myself in the conversation, the express orders of my chief, “as soon as you heard the cry of ‘murder’ followed by the revolver shots, what became of the desk?”

  Daddy Jacques answered.

  “We pushed it back against the wall, here — close to where it is at the present moment — so as to be able to get at the door at once.”

  I followed up my reasoning, to which, however, I attached but little importance, regarding it as only a weak hypothesis, with another question.

  “Might not a man in the room, the desk being so near to the door, by stooping and slipping under the desk, have left it unobserved?”

  “You are forgetting,” interrupted Monsieur Stangerson wearily, “that my daughter had locked and bolted her door, that the door had remained fastened, that we vainly tried to force it open when we heard the noise, and that we were at the door while the struggle between the murderer and my poor child was going on — immediately after we heard her stifled cries as she was being held by the fingers that have left their red mark upon her throat. Rapid as the attack was, we were no less rapid in our endeavors to get into the room where the tragedy was taking place.”

  I rose from my seat and once more examined the door with the greatest care. Then I returned to my place with a despairing gesture.

  “If the lower panel of the door,” I said, “could be removed without the whole door being necessarily opened, the problem would be solved. But, unfortunately, that last hypothesis is untenable after an examination of the door — it’s of oak, solid and massive. You can see that quite plainly, in spite of the injury done in the attempt to burst it open.”

  “Ah!” cried Daddy Jacques, “it is an old and solid door that was brought from the chateau — they don’t make such doors now. We had to use this
bar of iron to get it open, all four of us — for the concierge, brave woman she is, helped us. It pains me to find them both in prison now.”

  Daddy Jacques had no sooner uttered these words of pity and protestation than tears and lamentations broke out from the concierges. I never saw two accused people crying more bitterly. I was extremely disgusted. Even if they were innocent, I could not understand how they could behave like that in the face of misfortune. A dignified bearing at such times is better than tears and groans, which, most often, are feigned.

  “Now then, enough of that sniveling,” cried Monsieur de Marquet; “and, in your interest, tell us what you were doing under the windows of the pavilion at the time your mistress was being attacked; for you were close to the pavilion when Daddy Jacques met you.”

  “We were coming to help!” they whined.

  “If we could only lay hands on the murderer, he’d never taste bread again!” the woman gurgled between her sobs.

  As before we were unable to get two connecting thoughts out of them. They persisted in their denials and swore, by heaven and all the saints, that they were in bed when they heard the sound of the revolver shot.

  “It was not one, but two shots that were fired! — You see, you are lying. If you had heard one, you would have heard the other.”

  “Mon Dieu! Monsieur — it was the second shot we heard. We were asleep when the first shot was fired.”

  “Two shots were fired,” said Daddy Jacques. “I am certain that all the cartridges were in my revolver. We found afterward that two had been exploded, and we heard two shots behind the door. Was not that so, Monsieur Stangerson?”

  “Yes,” replied the Professor, “there were two shots, one dull, and the other sharp and ringing.”

  “Why do you persist in lying?” cried Monsieur de Marquet, turning to the concierges. “Do you think the police are the fools you are? Everything points to the fact that you were out of doors and near the pavilion at the time of the tragedy. What were you doing there? So far as I am concerned,” he said, turning to Monsieur Stangerson, “I can only explain the escape of the murderer on the assumption of help from these two accomplices. As soon as the door was forced open, and while you, Monsieur Stangerson, were occupied with your unfortunate child, the concierge and his wife facilitated the flight of the murderer, who, screening himself behind them, reached the window in the vestibule, and sprang out of it into the park. The concierge closed the window after him and fastened the blinds, which certainly could not have closed and fastened of themselves. That is the conclusion I have arrived at. If anyone here has any other idea, let him state it.”