The Mystery of the Yellow Room
by Gaston Leroux · English · Gutenberg #1685 · 439,336 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystery of the Yellow Room
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Author: Gaston Leroux
Illustrator: Simont
Release date: March 1, 1999 [eBook #1685]
Most recently updated: June 4, 2025
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1685
Credits: Transcribed and produced by Brian Raiter
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM ***
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Extraordinary Adventures of
Joseph Rouletabille
Reporter
by
Gaston Leroux
[Frontispiece: Joseph Rouletabille]
Contents
I. In which we Begin not to Understand
II. In which Joseph Rouletabille Appears for the First Time
III. “A Man Has Passed like a Shadow through the Blinds”
IV. “In the Bosom of Wild Nature”
V. In which Joseph Rouletabille Makes a Remark to Monsieur Robert
Darzac which Produces its Little Effect
VI. In the Heart of the Oak Grove
VII. In which Rouletabille Sets out on an Expedition under the Bed
VIII. The Examining Magistrate Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson
IX. Reporter and Detective
X. “We shall have to eat Red Meat—Now”
XI. In which Frédéric Larsan Explains how the Murderer was Able to
get out of The Yellow Room
XII. Frédéric Larsan’s Cane
XIII. “The Presbytery has Lost Nothing of its Charm, nor the Garden
its Brightness”
XIV. “I Expect the Assassin this Evening”
XV. The Trap
XVI. Strange Phenomenon of the Dissociation of Matter
XVII. The Inexplicable Gallery
XVIII. Rouletabille has Drawn a Circle between the Two Bumps on his
Forehead
XIX. Rouletabille Invites me to Breakfast at the Donjon Inn
XX. An Act of Mademoiselle Stangerson
XXI. On the Watch
XXII. The Incredible Body
XXIII. The Double Scent
XXIV. Rouletabille Knows the Two Halves of the Murderer
XXV. Rouletabille Goes on a Journey
XXVI. In which Joseph Rouletabille is Awaited with Impatience
XXVII. In which Joseph Rouletabille Appears in all his Glory
XXVIII. In which it is Proved that one does not Always Think of
Everything
XXIX. The Mystery of Mademoiselle Stangerson
Chapter I
In Which We Begin not to Understand
It is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the
extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present
time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of
ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen
years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole
truth of the prodigious case known as that of “The Yellow Room,” out
of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with
which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, à propos of a recent
nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grand-cross
of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal—in an article, miserable
for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy—had not resuscitated a
terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished
to be for ever forgotten.
“The Yellow Room!” Who now remembers this affair which caused so much
ink to flow fifteen years ago? Events are so quickly forgotten in
Paris. Has not the very name of the Nayves trial and the tragic history
of the death of little Menaldo passed out of mind? And yet the public
attention was so deeply interested in the details of the trial that
the occurrence of a ministerial crisis was completely unnoticed at the
time. Now “The Yellow Room” trial, which preceded that of the Nayves
by some years, made far more noise. The entire world hung for months
over this obscure problem—the most obscure, it seems to me, that has
ever challenged the perspicacity of our police or taxed the conscience
of our judges. The solution of the problem baffled everybody who tried
to find it. It was like a dramatic rebus with which old Europe and
new America alike became fascinated. That is, in truth—I am permitted
to say, because there cannot be any author’s vanity in all this,
since I do nothing more than transcribe facts on which an exceptional
documentation enables me to throw a new light—that is because, in
truth, I do not know that, in the domain of reality or imagination, one
can discover or recall to mind anything comparable, in its mystery,
with the natural mystery of “The Yellow Room.”
That which nobody could find out, Joseph Rouletabille, aged eighteen,
then a reporter engaged on a leading journal, succeeded in discovering.
But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole
case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it
to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man. The
reasons which he had for his reticence no longer exist. Better still,
the time has come for my friend to speak out fully. You are going to
know all; and, without further preamble, I am going to place before
your eyes the problem of “The Yellow Room” as it was placed before the
eyes of the entire world on the day following the enactment of the
drama at the Château du Glandier.
On the 25th of October, 1892, the following note appeared in the latest
edition of the “Temps”:—
“A frightful crime has been committed at the Glandier, on the border
of the forest of Sainte-Geneviève, above Epinay-sur-Orge, at the house
of Professor Stangerson. On that night, while the master was working
in his laboratory, an attempt was made to assassinate Mademoiselle
Stangerson, who was sleeping in a chamber adjoining this laboratory.
The doctors do not answer for the life of Mdlle. Stangerson.”
The impression made on Paris by this news may be easily imagined.
Already, at that time, the learned world was deeply interested in the
labours of Professor Stangerson and his daughter. These labours—the
first that were attempted in radiography—served to open the way
for Monsieur and Madame Curie to the discovery of radium. It was
expected the Professor would shortly read to the Academy of Sciences
a sensational paper on his new theory,—the Dissociation of Matter,—a
theory destined to overthrow from its base the whole of official
science, which based itself on the principle of the Conservation of
Energy.
On the following day, the newspapers were full of the tragedy. The
“Matin,” among others, published the following article, entitled: “A
Supernatural Crime”:—
“These are the only details,” wrote the anonymous writer in the
“Matin”—“we have been able to obtain concerning the crime of the
Château du Glandier. The state of despair in which Professor Stangerson
is plunged, and the impossibility of getting any information from the
lips of the victim, have rendered our investigations and those of
justice so difficult that, at present, we cannot form the least idea
of what has passed in ‘The Yellow Room’ in which Mdlle. Stangerson, in
her night-dress, was found lying on the floor in the agonies of death.
We have, at least, been able to interview Daddy Jacques—as he is called
in the country—an old servant in the Stangerson family. Daddy Jacques
entered ‘The Yellow Room’ at the same time as the Professor. This
chamber adjoins the laboratory. Laboratory and Yellow Room are in a
pavilion at the end of the park, about three hundred metres (a thousand
feet) from the château.
“‘It was half-past twelve at night,’ this honest old man told us, ‘and
I was in the laboratory, where Monsieur Stangerson was still working,
when the thing happened. I had been cleaning and putting instruments in
order all the evening and was waiting for Monsieur Stangerson to go to
bed. Mademoiselle Stangerson had worked with her father up to midnight;
when the twelve strokes of midnight had sounded by the cuckoo-clock
in the laboratory, she rose, kissed Monsieur Stangerson and bade him
good-night. To me she said “bon soir, Daddy Jacques” as she passed
into “The Yellow Room.” We heard her lock the door and shoot the bolt,
so that I could not help laughing, and said to Monsieur: “There’s
Mademoiselle double-locking herself in,—she must be afraid of the
‘Bête du bon Dieu!’” Monsieur did not even hear me, he was so deeply
absorbed in what he was doing. Just then we heard the distant miawing
of a cat. “Is that going to keep us awake all night?” I said to myself;
for I must tell you, Monsieur, that, to the end of October, I live in
an attic of the pavilion over The Yellow Room, so that Mademoiselle
should not be left alone through the night in the lonely park. It was
the fancy of Mademoiselle to spend the fine weather in the pavilion; no
doubt, she found it more cheerful than the château and, for the four
years it had been built, she had never failed to take up her lodging
there in the spring. With the return of winter, Mademoiselle returns to
the château, for there is no fireplace in The Yellow Room.
“‘We were staying in the pavilion, then—Monsieur Stangerson and me. We
made no noise. He was seated at his desk. As for me, I was sitting on a
chair, having finished my work and, looking at him, I said to myself:
“What a man!—what intelligence!—what knowledge!” I attach importance
to the fact that we made no noise; for, because of that, the assassin
certainly thought that we had left the place. And, suddenly, while
the cuckoo was sounding the half after midnight, a desperate clamour
broke out in The Yellow Room. It was the voice of Mademoiselle, crying
“Murder!—murder!—help!” Immediately afterwards revolver shots rang out
and there was a great noise of tables and furniture being thrown to
the ground, as if in the course of a struggle, and again the voice of
Mademoiselle calling, “Murder!—help!—Papa!—Papa!—”
“‘You may be sure that we quickly sprang up and that Monsieur
Stangerson and I threw ourselves upon the door. But alas! it was
locked, fast locked, on the inside, by the care of Mademoiselle, as I
have told you, with key and bolt. We tried to force it open, but it
remained firm. Monsieur Stangerson was like a madman, and truly, it
was enough to make him one, for we heard Mademoiselle still calling
“Help!—help!” Monsieur Stangerson showered terrible blows on the door,
and wept with rage and sobbed with despair and helplessness.
“‘It was then that I had an inspiration. “The assassin must have
entered by the window!” I cried;—“I will go to the window!” and I
rushed from the pavilion and ran like one out of his mind.
“‘The inspiration was that the window of The Yellow Room looks out in
such a way that the park wall, which abuts on the pavilion, prevented
my at once reaching the window. To get up to it one has first to go
out of the park. I ran towards the gate and, on my way, met Bernier
and his wife, the gate-keepers, who had been attracted by the pistol
reports and by our cries. In a few words I told them what had happened,
and directed the concierge to join Monsieur Stangerson with all speed,
while his wife came with me to open the park gate. Five minutes later
she and I were before the window of The Yellow Room.
“‘The moon was shining brightly and I saw clearly that no one had
touched the window. Not only were the bars that protect it intact, but
the blinds inside of them were drawn, as I had myself drawn them early
in the evening, as I did every day, though Mademoiselle, knowing that
I was tired from the heavy work I had been doing, had begged me not to
trouble myself, but leave her to do it; and they were just as I had
left them, fastened with an iron catch on the inside. The assassin,
therefore, could not have passed either in or out that way; but neither
could I get in.
“‘It was unfortunate,—enough to turn one’s brain! The door of the room
locked on the inside and the blinds on the only window also fastened on
the inside; and Mademoiselle still calling for help!—No! she had ceased
to call. She was dead, perhaps. But I still heard her father, in the
pavilion, trying to break down the door.
“‘With the concierge I hurried back to the pavilion. The door, in spite
of the furious attempts of Monsieur Stangerson and Bernier to burst it
open, was still holding firm; but at length, it gave way before our
united efforts,—and then what a sight met our eyes! I should tell you
that, behind us, the concierge held the laboratory lamp—a powerful
lamp, that lit the whole chamber.
“‘I must also tell you, monsieur, that The Yellow Room is a very small
room. Mademoiselle had furnished it with a fairly large iron bedstead,
a small table, a night-commode, a dressing-table, and two chairs. By
the light of the big lamp we saw all at a glance. Mademoiselle, in
her night-dress, was lying on the floor in the midst of the greatest
disorder. Tables and chairs had been overthrown, showing that there
had been a violent struggle. Mademoiselle had certainly been dragged
from her bed. She was covered with blood and had terrible marks of
finger-nails on her throat,—the flesh of her neck having been almost
torn by the nails. From a wound on the right temple a stream of blood
had run down and made a little pool on the floor. When Monsieur
Stangerson saw his daughter in that state, he threw himself on his
knees beside her, uttering a cry of despair. He ascertained that she
still breathed. As to us, we searched for the wretch who had tried to
kill our mistress, and I swear to you, monsieur, that, if we had found
him, it would have gone hard with him!
“‘But how to explain that he was not there, that he had already
escaped? It passes all imagination!—Nobody under the bed, nobody behind
the furniture!—All that we discovered were traces, blood-stained marks
of a man’s large hand on the walls and on the door; a big handkerchief
red with blood, without any initials, an old cap, and many fresh
footmarks of a man on the floor,—footmarks of a man with large feet
whose boot-soles had left a sort of sooty impression. How had this man
got away? How had he vanished? Don’t forget, monsieur, that there is
no chimney in The Yellow Room. He could not have escaped by the door,
which is narrow, and on the threshold of which the concierge stood with
the lamp, while her husband and I searched for him in every corner of
the little room, where it is impossible for anyone to hide himself. The
door, which had been forced open against the wall, could not conceal
anything behind it, as we assured ourselves. By the window, still in
every way secured, no flight had been possible. What then?—I began to
believe in the Devil.
“‘But we discovered my revolver on the floor!—Yes, _my_ revolver! Oh!
that brought me back to the reality! The Devil would not have needed to
steal my revolver to kill Mademoiselle. The man who had been there had
first gone up to my attic and taken my revolver from the drawer where
I kept it. We then ascertained, by counting the cartridges, that the
assassin had fired two shots. Ah! it was fortunate for me that Monsieur
Stangerson was in the laboratory when the affair took place and had
seen with his own eyes that I was there with him; for otherwise,
with this business of my revolver, I don’t know where we should have
been,—_I_ should now be under lock and bar. Justice wants no more to
send a man to the scaffold!’”
The editor of the “Matin” added to this interview the following lines:—
“We have, without interrupting him, allowed Daddy Jacques to recount
to us roughly all he knows about the crime of The Yellow Room. We have
reproduced it in his own words, only sparing the reader the continual
lamentations with which he garnished his narrative. It is quite
understood, Daddy Jacques, quite understood, that you are very fond of
your masters; and you want them to know it, and never cease repeating
it—especially since the discovery of your revolver. It is your right,
and we see no harm in it. We should have liked to put some further
questions to Daddy Jacques—Jacques—Louis Moustier—but the inquiry of
the examining magistrate, which is being carried on at the château,
makes it impossible for us to gain admission at the Glandier; and, as
to the oak wood, it is guarded by a wide circle of policemen, who are
jealously watching all traces that can lead to the pavilion, and that
may perhaps lead to the discovery of the assassin.
“We have also wished to question the concierges, but they are
invisible. Finally, we have waited in a roadside inn, not far from the
gate of the château, for the departure of Monsieur de Marquet, the
magistrate of Corbeil. At half-past five we saw him and his clerk and,
before he was able to enter his carriage, had an opportunity to ask him
the following question:—
“‘Can you, Monsieur de Marquet, give us any information as to this
affair, without inconvenience to the course of your inquiry?’
“‘It is impossible for us to do it,’ replied Monsieur de Marquet.
‘I can only say that it is the strangest affair I have ever known.
The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing
anything!’
“We asked Monsieur de Marquet to be good enough to explain his last
words; and this is what he said,—the importance of which no one will
fail to recognise:—
“‘If nothing is added to the material facts so far established, I
fear that the mystery which surrounds the abominable crime of which
Mademoiselle Stangerson has been the victim will never be brought
to light; but it is to be hoped, for the sake of our human reason,
that the examination of the walls, and of the ceiling of The Yellow
Room—an examination which I shall to-morrow intrust to the builder who
constructed the pavilion four years ago—will afford us the proof that
may not discourage us. For the problem is this: we know by what way the
assassin gained admission,—he entered by the door and hid himself under
the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How
did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding-place, no opening
of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the
demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not
only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling
shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must
really believe in the Devil, as Daddy Jacques says!’”
And the anonymous writer in the “Matin” added in this article—which I
have selected as the most interesting of all those that were published
on the subject of this affair—that the examining magistrate appeared to
place a peculiar significance to the last sentence: “One must really
believe in the Devil, as Jacques says.”
The article concluded with these lines: “We wanted to know what Daddy
Jacques meant by the cry of the Bête du Bon Dieu. The landlord of the
Donjon Inn explained to us that it is the particularly sinister cry
which is uttered sometimes at night by the cat of an old woman,—Mother
Angenoux, as she is called in the country. Mother Angenoux is a sort of
saint, who lives in a hut in the heart of the forest, not far from the
grotto of Sainte-Geneviève.
“The Yellow Room, the Bête du Bon Dieu, Mother Angenoux, the Devil,
Sainte-Geneviève, Daddy Jacques,—here is a well entangled crime which
the stroke of a pickaxe in the wall may disentangle for us to-morrow.
Let us at least hope that, for the sake of our human reason, as the
examining magistrate says. Meanwhile, it is expected that Mademoiselle
Stangerson—who has not ceased to be delirious and only pronounces one
word distinctly, ‘Murderer! Murderer!’—will not live through the night.”
In conclusion, and at a late hour, the same journal announced that the
Chief of the Sûreté had telegraphed to the famous detective, Frédéric
Larsan, who had been sent to London for an affair of stolen securities,
to return immediately to Paris.
Chapter II
In Which Joseph Rouletabille Appears for the First Time
I remember as well as if it had occurred yesterday, the entry of young
Rouletabille into my bedroom that morning. It was about eight o’clock
and I was still in bed reading the article in the “Matin” relative to
the Glandier crime.
But, before going further, it is time that I present my friend to the
reader.
I first knew Joseph Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At that
time I was a beginner at the Bar and often met him in the corridors of
examining magistrates, when I had gone to get a “permit to communicate”
for the prison of Mazas, or for Saint-Lazare. He had, as they say, “a
good nut.” He seemed to have taken his head—round as a bullet—out of
a box of marbles, and it is from that, I think, that his comrades of
the press—all determined billiard-players—had given him that nickname,
which was to stick to him and be made illustrious by him. He was always
as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge. How, while
still so young—he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him
for the first time—had he already won his way on the press? That was
what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked, if they
had not known his history. At the time of the affair of the woman cut
in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to
one of the editors of the “Epoque,”—a paper then rivalling the “Matin”
for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in
which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the
police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille
had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it.
To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a
number engaged by the administration of the city of Paris, owing to an
overflow of the Seine.
When the editor-in-chief was in possession of the precious foot and
informed as to the train of intelligent deductions the boy had been
led to make, he was divided between the admiration he felt for such
detective cunning in a brain of a lad of sixteen years, and delight at
being able to exhibit, in the “morgue window” of his paper, the left
foot of the Rue Oberkampf.
“This foot,” he cried, “will make a great headline.”
Then, when he had confided the gruesome packet to the medical lawyer
attached to the journal, he asked the lad, who was shortly to become
famous as Rouletabille, what he would expect to earn as a general
reporter on the “Epoque”?
“Two hundred francs a month,” the youngster replied modestly, hardly
able to breathe from surprise at the proposal.
“You shall have two hundred and fifty,” said the editor-in-chief; “only
you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a
month. Let it be quite understood that it was not you but the ‘Epoque’
that discovered the left foot of the Rue Oberkampf. Here, my young
friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.”
Having said this, he begged the new reporter to retire, but before the
youth had reached the door he called him back to ask his name. The
other replied:—
“Joseph Josephine.”
“That’s not a name,” said the editor-in-chief, “but since you will not
be required to sign what you write it is of no consequence.”
The boy-faced reporter speedily made himself many friends, for he was
serviceable and gifted with a good humour that enchanted the most
severe-tempered and disarmed the most zealous of his companions. At
the Bar café, where the reporters assembled before going to any of
the courts, or to the Prefecture, in search of their news of crime,
he began to win a reputation as an unraveller of intricate and
obscure affairs which found its way to the office of the Chief of the
Sûreté. When a case was worth the trouble and Rouletabille—he had
already been given his nickname—had been started on the scent by his
editor-in-chief, he often got the better of the most famous detective.
It was at the Bar café that I became intimately acquainted with him.
Criminal lawyers and journalists are not enemies, the former need
advertisement, the latter information. We chatted together, and I soon
warmed towards him. His intelligence was so keen, and so original!—and
he had a quality of thought such as I have never found in any other
person.
Some time after this I was put in charge of the law news of the “Cri du
Boulevard.” My entry into journalism could not but strengthen the ties
which united me to Rouletabille. After a while, my new friend being
allowed to carry out an idea of a judicial correspondence column, which
he was allowed to sign “Business,” in the “Epoque,” I was often able to
furnish him with the legal information of which he stood in need.
Nearly two years passed in this way, and the better I knew him, the
more I learned to love him; for, in spite of his careless extravagance,
I had discovered in him what was, considering his age, an extraordinary
seriousness of mind. Accustomed as I was to seeing him gay and, indeed,
often too gay, I would many times find him plunged in the deepest
melancholy. I tried then to question him as to the cause of this change
of humour, but each time he laughed and made me no answer. One day,
having questioned him about his parents, of whom he never spoke, he
left me, pretending not to have heard what I said.
While things were in this state between us, the famous case of “The
Yellow Room” took place. It was this case which was to rank him as the
leading newspaper reporter, and to obtain for him the reputation of
being the greatest detective in the world. It should not surprise us to
find in the one man the perfection of two such lines of activity if we
remember that the daily press was already beginning to transform itself
and to become what it is to-day—the gazette of crime.
Morose-minded people may complain of this; for myself I regard it a
matter for congratulation. We can never have too many arms, public or
private, against the criminal. To this some people may answer that,
by continually publishing the details of crimes, the press ends by
encouraging their commission. But then, with some people we can never
do right.
Rouletabille, as I have said, entered my room that morning of the 26th
of October, 1892. He was looking redder than usual, and his eyes were
bulging out of his head, as the phrase is, and altogether he appeared
to be in a state of extreme excitement. He waved the “Matin” with a
trembling hand, and cried:—
“Well, my dear Sainclair,—have you read it?”
“The Glandier crime?”
“Yes; ‘The Yellow Room’!—What do you think of it?”
“I think that it must have been the Devil or the Bête du Bon Dieu that
committed the crime.”
“Be serious!”
“Well, I don’t much believe in murderers who make their escape through
walls of solid brick. I think Daddy Jacques did wrong to leave behind
him the weapon with which the crime was committed and, as he occupied
the attic immediately above Mademoiselle Stangerson’s room, the
builder’s job ordered by the examining magistrate will give us the key
of the enigma and it will not be long before we learn by what natural
trap, or by what secret door, the old fellow was able to slip in and
out, and return immediately to the laboratory to Monsieur Stangerson,
without his absence being noticed. That, of course, is only an
hypothesis.”
Rouletabille sat down in an armchair, lit his pipe, which he was never
without, smoked for a few minutes in silence—no doubt to calm the
excitement which, visibly, dominated him—and then replied:—
“Young man,” he said, in a tone the sad irony of which I will not
attempt to render, “young man, you are a lawyer and I doubt not
your ability to save the guilty from conviction; but if you were a
magistrate on the bench, how easy it would be for you to condemn
innocent persons!—You are really gifted, young man!”
He continued to smoke energetically, and then went on:—
“No trap will be found, and the mystery of ‘The Yellow Room’ will
become more and more mysterious. That’s why it interests me. The
examining magistrate is right; nothing stranger than this crime has
ever been known.”
“Have you any idea of the way by which the murderer escaped?” I asked.
“None,” replied Rouletabille—“none, for the present. But I have an idea
as to the revolver; the murderer did not use it.”
“Good Heavens! By whom, then, was it used?”
“Why—by Mademoiselle Stangerson.”
“I don’t understand,—or rather, I have never understood,” I said.
Rouletabille shrugged his shoulders.
“Is there nothing in this article in the ‘Matin’ by which you were
particularly struck?”
“Nothing,—I have found the whole of the story it tells equally strange.”
“Well, but—the locked door—with the key on the inside?”
“That’s the only perfectly natural thing in the whole article.”
“Really!—And the bolt?”
“The bolt?”
“Yes, the bolt—also inside the room—a still further protection against
entry? Mademoiselle Stangerson took quite extraordinary precautions!
It is clear to me that she feared someone. That was why she took such
precautions—even Daddy Jacques’s revolver—without telling him of it. No
doubt she didn’t wish to alarm anybody, and least of all, her father.
What she dreaded took place, and she defended herself. There was a
struggle, and she used the revolver skilfully enough to wound the
assassin in the hand—which explains the impression on the wall and on
the door of the large, blood-stained hand of the man who was searching
for a means of exit from the chamber. But she didn’t fire soon enough
to avoid the terrible blow on the right temple.”
“Then the wound on the temple was not done with the revolver?”
“The paper doesn’t say it was, and I don’t think it was; because
logically it appears to me that the revolver was used by Mademoiselle
Stangerson against the assassin. Now, what weapon did the murderer use?
The blow on the temple seems to show that the murderer wished to stun
Mademoiselle Stangerson,—after he had unsuccessfully tried to strangle
her. He must have known that the attic was inhabited by Daddy Jacques,
and that was one of the reasons, I think, why he must have used a quiet
weapon,—a life-preserver, or a hammer.”
“All that doesn’t explain how the murderer got out of ‘The Yellow
Room,’” I observed.
“Evidently,” replied Rouletabille, rising, “and that is what has to be
explained. I am going to the Château du Glandier, and have come to see
whether you will go with me.”
“I?”—
“Yes, my boy. I want you. The ‘Epoque’ has definitely entrusted this
case to me, and I must clear it up as quickly as possible.”
“But in what way can I be of any use to you?”
“Monsieur Robert Darzac is at the Château du Glandier.”
“That’s true. His despair must be boundless.”
“I must have a talk with him.”
Rouletabille said it in a tone that surprised me.
“Is it because—you think there is something to be got out of him?” I
asked.
“Yes.”
That was all he would say. He retired to my sitting-room, begging me to
dress quickly.
I knew Monsieur Robert Darzac from having been of great service to
him in a civil action, while I was acting as secretary to Maître
Barbet Delatour. Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was at that time about
forty years of age, was a professor of physics at the Sorbonne.
He was intimately acquainted with the Stangersons, and, after an
assiduous seven years’ courtship of the daughter, had been on the
point of marrying her. In spite of the fact that she has become, as
the phrase goes, “a person of a certain age,” she was still remarkably
good-looking.
While I was dressing I called out to Rouletabille, who was impatiently
moving about my sitting-room:—
“Have you any idea as to the murderer’s station in life?”
“Yes,” he replied; “I think if he isn’t a man in society, he is, at
least, a man belonging to the upper class. But that, again, is only an
impression.”
“What has led you to form it?”
“Well,—the greasy cap, the common handkerchief, and the marks of the
rough boots on the floor,” he replied.
“I understand,” I said; “murderers don’t leave traces behind them which
tell the truth.”
“We shall make something out of you yet, my dear Sainclair,” concluded
Rouletabille.
Chapter III
“A Man Has Passed like a Shadow through the Blinds”
Half an hour later Rouletabille and I were on the platform of the
Orleans station, awaiting the departure of the train which was to take
us to Epinay-sur-Orge.
On the platform we found Monsieur de Marquet and his Registrar, who
represented the Judicial Court of Corbeil. Monsieur de Marquet had
spent the night in Paris, assisting in the final rehearsal, at the
Scala, of a little play of which he was the unknown author, signing
himself simply “Castigat Ridendo.”
Monsieur Marquet was beginning to be a “noble old gentleman.” Generally
he was extremely polite and full of gay humour, and in all his life had
had but one passion,—that of dramatic art. Throughout his magisterial
career he was interested solely in cases capable of furnishing him with
something in the nature of a drama. Though he might very well have
aspired to the highest judicial positions, he had never really worked
for anything but to win a success at the romantic Porte-Saint-Martin,
or at the sombre Odéon.
Because of the mystery which shrouded it, the case of “The Yellow
Room” was certain to fascinate so theatrical a mind. It interested him
enormously, and he threw himself into it, less as a magistrate eager
to know the truth, than as an amateur of dramatic embroglios, tending
wholly to mystery and intrigue, who dreads nothing so much as the
explanatory final act.
So that, at the moment of meeting him, I heard Monsieur de Marquet say
to the Registrar with a sigh:—
“I hope, my dear Monsieur Maleine, this builder with his pickaxe will
not destroy so fine a mystery.”
“Have no fear,” replied Monsieur Maleine, “his pickaxe may demolish the
pavilion, perhaps, but it will leave our case intact. I have sounded
the walls and examined the ceiling and floor and I know all about it. I
am not to be deceived.”
Having thus reassured his chief, Monsieur Maleine, with a discreet
movement of the head, drew Monsieur de Marquet’s attention to us.
The face of that gentleman clouded, and, as he saw Rouletabille
approaching, hat in hand, he sprang into one of the empty carriages
saying, half aloud to his Registrar, as he did so, “Above all, no
journalists!”
Monsieur Maleine replied in the same tone, “I understand!” and then
tried to prevent Rouletabille from entering the same compartment with
the examining magistrate.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,—this compartment is reserved.”
“I am a journalist, Monsieur, engaged on the ‘Epoque,’” said my young
friend with a great show of gesture and politeness, “and I have a word
or two to say to Monsieur de Marquet.”
“Monsieur is very much engaged with the inquiry he has in hand.”
“Ah! his inquiry, pray believe me, is absolutely a matter of
indifference to me. I am no scavenger of odds and ends,” he went on,
with infinite contempt in his lower lip, “I am a theatrical reporter;
and this evening I shall have to give a little account of the play at
the Scala.”
“Get in, sir, please,” said the Registrar.
Rouletabille was already in the compartment. I went in after him and
seated myself by his side. The Registrar followed and closed the
carriage-door.
Monsieur de Marquet looked at him.
“Ah, sir,” Rouletabille began, “You must not be angry with Monsieur de
Maleine. It is not with Monsieur de Marquet that I desire to have the
honour of speaking, but with Monsieur ‘Castigat Ridendo.’ Permit me to
congratulate you—personally, as well as the writer for the ‘Epoque.’”
And Rouletabille, having first introduced me, introduced himself.
Monsieur de Marquet, with a nervous gesture, caressed his beard into
a point, and explained to Rouletabille, in a few words, that he was
too modest an author to desire that the veil of his pseudonym should
be publicly raised, and that he hoped the enthusiasm of the journalist
for the dramatist’s work would not lead him to tell the public that
Monsieur “Castigat Ridendo” and the examining magistrate of Corbeil
were one and the same person.
“The work of the dramatic author may interfere,” he said, after a
slight hesitation, “with that of the magistrate, especially in a
province where one’s labours are little more than routine.”
“Oh, you may rely on my discretion!” cried Rouletabille.
The train was in motion.
“We have started!” said the examining magistrate, surprised at seeing
us still in the carriage.
“Yes, Monsieur,—truth has started,” said Rouletabille, smiling
amiably,—“on its way to the Château du Glandier. A fine case, Monsieur
de Marquet,—a fine case!”
“An obscure—incredible, unfathomable, inexplicable affair—and there is
only one thing _I_ fear, Monsieur Rouletabille,—that the journalists
will be trying to explain it.”
My friend felt this a rap on his knuckles.
“Yes,” he said simply, “that is to be feared. They meddle in
everything. As for my interest, monsieur, I only referred to it by mere
chance,—the mere chance of finding myself in the same train with you,
and in the same compartment of the same carriage.”
“Where are you going, then?” asked Monsieur de Marquet.
“To the Château du Glandier,” replied Rouletabille, without turning.
“You’ll not get in, Monsieur Rouletabille!”
“Will you prevent me?” said my friend, already prepared to fight.
“Not I!—I like the press and journalists too well to be in any way
disagreeable to them; but Monsieur Stangerson has given orders for his
door to be closed against everybody, and it is well guarded. Not a
journalist was able to pass through the gate of the Glandier yesterday.”
Monsieur de Marquet compressed his lips and seemed ready to relapse
into obstinate silence. He only relaxed a little when Rouletabille no
longer left him in ignorance of the fact that we were going to the
Glandier for the purpose of shaking hands with an “old and intimate
friend,” Monsieur Robert Darzac—a man whom Rouletabille had perhaps
seen once in his life.
“Poor Robert!” continued the young reporter, “this dreadful affair may
be his death,—he is so deeply in love with Mademoiselle Stangerson.”
“His sufferings are truly painful to witness,” escaped like a regret
from the lips of Monsieur de Marquet.
“But it is to be hoped that Mademoiselle Stangerson’s life will be
saved.”
“Let us hope so. Her father told me yesterday that, if she does not
recover, it will not be long before he joins her in the grave. What an
incalculable loss to science his death would be!”
“The wound on her temple is serious, is it not?”
“Evidently; but, by a wonderful chance, it has not proved mortal. The
blow was given with great force.”
“Then it was not with the revolver she was wounded,” said Rouletabille,
glancing at me in triumph.
Monsieur de Marquet appeared greatly embarrassed.
“I didn’t say anything—I don’t want to say anything—I will not say
anything,” he said. And he turned towards his Registrar as if he no
longer knew us.
But Rouletabille was not to be so easily shaken off. He moved nearer to
the examining magistrate and, drawing a copy of the “Matin” from his
pocket, he showed it to him and said:—
“There is one thing, Monsieur, which I may enquire of you without
committing an indiscretion. You have, of course, seen the account given
in the ‘Matin’? It is absurd, is it not?”
“Not in the slightest, Monsieur.”
“What! The Yellow Room has but one barred window—the bars of which have
not been moved—and only one door, which had to be broken open—and the
assassin was not found!”
“That’s so, monsieur,—that’s so. That’s how the matter stands.”
Rouletabille said no more but plunged into thought. A quarter of an
hour thus passed.
Coming back to himself again he said, addressing the magistrate:—
“How did Mademoiselle Stangerson wear her hair on that evening?”
“I don’t know,” replied Monsieur de Marquet.
“That’s a very important point,” said Rouletabille. “Her hair was done
up in bands, wasn’t it? I feel sure that on that evening, the evening
of the crime, she had her hair arranged in bands.”
“Then you are mistaken, Monsieur Rouletabille,” replied the magistrate;
“Mademoiselle Stangerson that evening had her hair drawn up in a knot
on the top of her head,—her usual way of arranging it—her forehead
completely uncovered. I can assure you, for we have carefully examined
the wound. There was no blood on the hair, and the arrangement of it
has not been disturbed since the crime was committed.”
“You are sure! You are sure that, on the night of the crime, she had
not her hair in bands?”
“Quite sure,” the magistrate continued, smiling, “because I remember
the Doctor saying to me, while he was examining the wound, ‘It is a
great pity Mademoiselle Stangerson was in the habit of drawing her
hair back from her forehead. If she had worn it in bands, the blow she
received on the temple would have been weakened.’ It seems strange to
me that you should attach so much importance to this point.”
“Oh! if she had not her hair in bands, I give it up,” said
Rouletabille, with a despairing gesture.
“And was the wound on her temple a bad one?” he asked presently.
“Terrible.”
“With what weapon was it made?”
“That is a secret of the investigation.”
“Have you found the weapon—whatever it was?”
The magistrate did not answer.
“And the wound in the throat?”
Here the examining magistrate readily confirmed the decision of the
doctor that, if the murderer had pressed her throat a few seconds
longer, Mademoiselle Stangerson would have died of strangulation.
“The affair as reported in the ‘Matin,’” said Rouletabille eagerly,
“seems to me more and more inexplicable. Can you tell me, Monsieur, how
many openings there are in the pavilion? I mean doors and windows.”
“There are five,” replied Monsieur de Marquet, after having coughed
once or twice, but no longer resisting the desire he felt to talk of
the whole of the incredible mystery of the affair he was investigating.
“There are five, of which the door of the vestibule is the only
entrance to the pavilion,—a door always automatically closed, which
cannot be opened, either from the outer or inside, except with the two
special keys which are never out of the possession of either Daddy
Jacques or Monsieur Stangerson. Mademoiselle Stangerson had no need for
one, since Daddy Jacques lodged in the pavilion and because, during
the daytime, she never left her father. When they, all four, rushed
into The Yellow Room, after breaking open the door of the laboratory,
the door in the vestibule remained closed as usual and, of the two
keys for opening it, Daddy Jacques had one in his pocket, and Monsieur
Stangerson the other. As to the windows of the pavilion, there are
four; the one window of The Yellow Room and those of the laboratory
looking out on to the country; the window in the vestibule looking into
the park.”
“It is by that window that he escaped from the pavilion!” cried
Rouletabille.
“How do you know that?” demanded Monsieur de Marquet, fixing a strange
look on my young friend.
“We’ll see later how he got away from The Yellow Room,” replied
Rouletabille, “but he must have left the pavilion by the vestibule
window.”
“Once more,—how do you know that?”
“How? Oh, the thing is simple enough! As soon as he found he could not
escape by the door of the pavilion his only way out was by the window
in the vestibule, unless he could pass through a grated window. The
window of The Yellow Room is secured by iron bars, because it looks
out upon the open country; the two windows of the laboratory have to
be protected in like manner for the same reason. As the murderer got
away, I conceive that he found a window that was not barred,—that of
the vestibule, which opens on to the park,—that is to say, into the
interior of the estate. There’s not much magic in all that.”
“Yes,” said Monsieur de Marquet, “but what you have not guessed is
that this single window in the vestibule, though it has no iron bars,
has solid iron blinds. Now these iron blinds have remained fastened
by their iron latch; and yet we have proof that the murderer made his
escape from the pavilion by _that_ window! Traces of blood on the
inside wall and on the blinds as well as on the floor, and footmarks,
of which I have taken the measurements, attest the fact that the
murderer made his escape that way. But then, how did he do it, seeing
that the blinds remained fastened on the inside? He passed through
them like a shadow. But what is more bewildering than all is that
it is impossible to form any idea as to how the murderer got out of
The Yellow Room, or how he got across the laboratory to reach the
vestibule! Ah, yes, Monsieur Rouletabille, it is altogether as you
said, a fine case, the key to which will not be discovered for a long
time, I hope.”
“You hope, Monsieur?”
Monsieur de Marquet corrected himself.
“I do not hope so,—I think so.”
“Could that window have been closed and refastened after the flight of
the assassin?” asked Rouletabille.
“That is what occurred to me for a moment; but it would imply an
accomplice or accomplices,—and I don’t see—”
After a short silence he added:—
“Ah—if Mademoiselle Stangerson were only well enough to-day to allow of
her being questioned!”
Rouletabille following up his thought, asked:—
“And the attic?—There must be some opening to that?”
“Yes; there is a window, or rather skylight, in it, which, as it looks
out towards the country, Monsieur Stangerson has had barred, like the
rest of the windows. These bars, as in the other windows, have remained
intact, and the blinds, which naturally open inwards, have not been
unfastened. For the rest, we have not discovered anything to lead us to
suspect that the murderer had passed through the attic.”
“It seems clear to you, then, Monsieur, that the murderer
escaped—nobody knows how—by the window in the vestibule?”
“Everything goes to prove it.”
“I think so, too,” confessed Rouletabille gravely.
After a brief silence, he continued:—
“If you have not found any traces of the murderer in the attic, such as
the dirty footmarks similar to those on the floor of The Yellow Room,
you must come to the conclusion that it was not he who stole Daddy
Jacques’s revolver.”
“There are no footmarks in the attic other than those of Daddy Jacques
himself,” said the magistrate with a significant turn of his head.
Then, after an apparent decision, he added: “Daddy Jacques was with
Monsieur Stangerson in the laboratory—and it was lucky for him he was.”
“Then what part did his revolver play in the tragedy?—It seems very
clear that this weapon did less harm to Mademoiselle Stangerson than it
did to the murderer.”
The magistrate made no reply to this question, which doubtless
embarrassed him. “Monsieur Stangerson,” he said, “tells us that the two
bullets have been found in The Yellow Room, one embedded in the wall
stained with the impression of a red hand—a man’s large hand—and the
other in the ceiling.”
“Oh! oh! in the ceiling!” muttered Rouletabille. “In the ceiling!
That’s very curious!—In the ceiling!”
He puffed awhile in silence at his pipe, enveloping himself in the
smoke. When we reached Savigny-sur-Orge, I had to tap him on the
shoulder to arouse him from his dream and come out on to the platform
of the station.
There the magistrate and his Registrar bowed to us, and, by rapidly
getting into a cab that was awaiting them, made us understand that they
had seen enough of us.
“How long will it take to walk to the Château du Glandier?”
Rouletabille asked one of the railway porters.
“An hour and a half or an hour and three quarters—easy walking,” the
man replied.
Rouletabille looked up at the sky and, no doubt, finding its appearance
satisfactory, took my arm and said:—
“Come on!—I need a walk.”
“Are things getting less entangled?” I asked.
“Not a bit of it!” he said, “more entangled than ever! It’s true, I
have an idea—”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you what it is just at present—it’s an idea involving the
life or death of two persons at least.”
“Do you think there were accomplices?”
“I don’t think it—”
We fell into silence. Presently he went on:—
“It was a bit of luck, our falling in with that examining magistrate
and his Registrar, eh? What did I tell you about that revolver?”
His head was bent down, he had his hands in his pockets, and he was
whistling. After a while I heard him murmur:—
“Poor woman!”
“Is it Mademoiselle Stangerson you are pitying?”
“Yes; she’s a noble woman and worthy of being pitied!—a woman of a
great, a very great character—I imagine—I imagine.”
“You know her then?”
“Not at all. I have never seen her but once.”
“Why, then, do you say that she is a woman of great character?”
“Because she bravely faced the murderer; because she courageously
defended herself—and, above all, because of the bullet in the ceiling.”
I looked at Rouletabille and inwardly wondered whether he was not
mocking me, or whether he had not suddenly gone out of his senses. But
I saw that he had never been less inclined to laugh, and the brightness
of his keenly intelligent eyes assured me that he retained all his
reason. Then, too, I was used to his broken way of talking, which only
left me puzzled as to his meaning, till, with a very few clear, rapidly
uttered words, he would make the drift of his ideas clear to me, and I
saw that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void
of meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how
it was I had not understood him sooner.
Chapter IV
“In the Bosom of Wild Nature”
The Château du Glandier is one of the oldest châteaux in the Ile de
France, where so many building remains of the feudal period are still
standing. Built originally in the heart of the forest, in the reign of
Philip le Bel, it now could be seen a few hundred yards from the road
leading from the village of Sainte-Geneviève to Monthery. A mass of
inharmonious structures, it is dominated by a donjon. When the visitor
has mounted the crumbling steps of this ancient donjon, he reaches a
little plateau where, in the seventeenth century, Georges Philibert de
Sequigny, Lord of the Glandier, Maisons-Neuves and other places, built
the existing town in an abominably rococo style of architecture.
It was in this place, seemingly belonging entirely to the past, that
Professor Stangerson and his daughter installed themselves to lay the
foundations for the science of the future. Its solitude, in the depths
of woods, was what, more than all, had pleased them. They would have
none to witness their labours and intrude on their hopes, but the aged
stones and grand old oaks. The Glandier—ancient Glandierum—was so
called from the quantity of glands (acorns) which, in all times, had
been gathered in that neighbourhood. This land, of present mournful
interest, had fallen back, owing to the negligence or abandonment of
its owners, into the wild character of primitive nature. The buildings
alone, which were hidden there, had preserved traces of their strange
metamorphoses. Every age had left on them its imprint; a bit of
architecture with which was bound up the remembrance of some terrible
event, some bloody adventure. Such was the château in which science had
taken refuge—a place seemingly designed to be the theatre of mysteries,
terror, and death.
Having explained so far, I cannot refrain from making one further
reflexion. If I have lingered a little over this description of the
Glandier, it is not because I have reached the right moment for
creating the necessary atmosphere for the unfolding of the tragedy
before the eyes of the reader. Indeed, in all this matter, my first
care will be to be as simple as is possible. I have no ambition to be
an author. An author is always something of a romancer, and God knows,
the mystery of “The Yellow Room” is quite full enough of real tragic
horror to require no aid from literary effects. I am, and only desire
to be, a faithful “reporter.” My duty is to report the event; and I
place the event in its frame—that is all. It is only natural that you
should know where the things happened.
I return to Monsieur Stangerson. When he bought the estate, fifteen
years before the tragedy with which we are engaged occurred, the
Château du Glandier had for a long time been unoccupied. Another old
château in the neighbourhood, built in the fourteenth century by Jean
de Belmont, was also abandoned, so that that part of the country was
very little inhabited. Some small houses on the side of the road
leading to Corbeil, an inn, called the “Auberge du Donjon,” which
offered passing hospitality to waggoners; these were about all to
represent civilisation in this out-of-the-way part of the country, but
a few leagues from the capital.
But this deserted condition of the place had been the determining
reason for the choice made by Monsieur Stangerson and his daughter.
Monsieur Stangerson was already celebrated. He had returned from
America, where his works had made a great stir. The book which he had
published at Philadelphia, on the “Dissociation of Matter by Electric
Action,” had aroused opposition throughout the whole scientific world.
Monsieur Stangerson was a Frenchman, but of American origin. Important
matters relating to a legacy had kept him for several years in the
United States, where he had continued the work begun by him in France,
whither he had returned in possession of a large fortune. This fortune
was a great boon to him; for, though he might have made millions of
dollars by exploiting two or three of his chemical discoveries relative
to new processes of dyeing, it was always repugnant to him to use for
his own private gain the wonderful gift of invention he had received
from nature. He considered he owed it to mankind, and all that his
genius brought into the world went, by this philosophical view of his
duty, into the public lap.
If he did not try to conceal his satisfaction at coming into possession
of this fortune, which enabled him to give himself up to his passion
for pure science, he had equally to rejoice, it seemed to him, for
another cause. Mademoiselle Stangerson was, at the time when her father
returned from America and bought the Glandier estate, twenty years of
age. She was exceedingly pretty, having at once the Parisian grace of
her mother, who had died in giving her birth, and all the splendour,
all the riches of the young American blood of her parental grandfather,
William Stangerson. A citizen of Philadelphia, William Stangerson had
been obliged to become naturalised in obedience to family exigencies
at the time of his marriage with a French lady, she who was to be the
mother of the illustrious Stangerson. In that way the professor’s
French nationality is accounted for.
Twenty years of age, a charming blonde, with blue eyes, milk-white
complexion, and radiant with divine health, Mathilde Stangerson was one
of the most beautiful marriageable girls in either the old or the new
world. It was her father’s duty, in spite of the inevitable pain which
a separation from her would cause him, to think of her marriage; and
he was fully prepared for it. Nevertheless, he buried himself and his
child at the Glandier at the moment when his friends were expecting
him to bring her out into society. Some of them expressed their
astonishment, and to their questions he answered: “It is my daughter’s
wish. I can refuse her nothing. She has chosen the Glandier.”
Interrogated in her turn, the young girl replied calmly: “Where could
we work better than in this solitude?” For Mademoiselle Stangerson had
already begun to collaborate with her father in his work. It could
not at the time be imagined that her passion for science would lead
her so far as to refuse all the suitors who presented themselves to
her for over fifteen years. So secluded was the life led by the two,
father and daughter, that they showed themselves only at a few official
receptions and, at certain times in the year, in two or three friendly
drawing-rooms, where the fame of the professor and the beauty of
Mathilde made a sensation. The young girl’s extreme reserve did not at
first discourage suitors; but at the end of a few years, they tired of
their quest.
One alone persisted with tender tenacity and deserved the name of
“eternal fiancé,” a name he accepted with melancholy resignation;
that was Monsieur Robert Darzac. Mademoiselle Stangerson was now no
longer young, and it seemed that, having found no reason for marrying
at five-and-thirty, she would never find one. But such an argument
evidently found no acceptance with Monsieur Robert Darzac. He continued
to pay his court—if the delicate and tender attention with which he
ceaselessly surrounded this woman of five-and-thirty could be called
courtship—in face of her declared intention never to marry.
Suddenly, some weeks before the events with which we are occupied, a
report—to which nobody attached any importance, so incredible did it
sound—was spread about Paris, that Mademoiselle Stangerson had at last
consented to “crown” the inextinguishable flame of Monsieur Robert
Darzac! It needed that Monsieur Robert Darzac himself should not deny
this matrimonial rumour to give it an appearance of truth, so unlikely
did it seem to be well founded. One day, however, Monsieur Stangerson,
as he was leaving the Academy of Science, announced that the marriage
of his daughter and Monsieur Robert Darzac would be celebrated in the
privacy of the Château du Glandier, as soon as he and his daughter had
put the finishing touches to their report summing up their labours on
the “Dissociation of Matter.” The new household would install itself in
the Glandier, and the son-in-law would lend his assistance in the work
to which the father and daughter had dedicated their lives.
The scientific world had barely had time to recover from the effect
of this news, when it learned of the attempted assassination of
Mademoiselle under the extraordinary conditions which we have detailed
and which our visit to the château was to enable us to ascertain with
yet greater precision. I have not hesitated to furnish the reader
with all these retrospective details, known to me through my business
relations with Monsieur Robert Darzac. On crossing the threshold of
“The Yellow Room” he was as well posted as I was.
Chapter V
In Which Joseph Rouletabille Makes a Remark to Monsieur Robert Darzac
Which Produces its Little Effect
Rouletabille and I had been walking for several minutes, by the side
of a long wall bounding the vast property of Monsieur Stangerson and
had already come within sight of the entrance gate, when our attention
was drawn to an individual who, half bent to the ground, seemed to be
so completely absorbed in what he was doing as not to have seen us
coming towards him. At one time he stooped so low as almost to touch
the ground; at another he drew himself up and attentively examined the
wall; then he looked into the palm of one of his hands, and walked away
with rapid strides. Finally he set off running, still looking into the
palm of his hand. Rouletabille had brought me to a standstill by a
gesture.
“Hush! Frédéric Larsan is at work! Don’t let us disturb him!”
Rouletabille had a great admiration for the celebrated detective. I
had never before seen him, but I knew him well by reputation. At that
time, before Rouletabille had given proof of his unique talent, Larsan
was reputed as the most skilful unraveller of the most mysterious and
complicated crimes. His reputation was world-wide, and the police of
London, and even of America, often called him in to their aid when
their own national inspectors and detectives found themselves at the
end of their wits and resources.
No one was astonished, then, that the head of the Sûreté had, at the
outset of the mystery of “The Yellow Room,” telegraphed his precious
subordinate to London, where he had been sent on a big case of stolen
securities, to return with all haste. Frédéric who, at the Sûreté, was
called the “great Frédéric,” had made all speed, doubtless knowing by
experience that, if he was interrupted in what he was doing, it was
because his services were urgently needed in another direction; so, as
Rouletabille said, he was that morning already “at work.” We soon found
out in what it consisted.
What he was continually looking at in the palm of his right hand was
nothing but his watch, the minute hand of which he appeared to be
noting intently. Then he turned back still running, stopping only when
he reached the park gate, where he again consulted his watch and then
put it away in his pocket, shrugging his shoulders with a gesture of
discouragement. He pushed open the park gate, reclosed and locked it,
raised his head and, through the bars, perceived us. Rouletabille
rushed after him, and I followed. Frédéric Larsan waited for us.
“Monsieur Fred,” said Rouletabille, raising his hat and showing the
profound respect, based on admiration, which the young reporter felt
for the celebrated detective, “can you tell me whether Monsieur Robert
Darzac is at the château at this moment? Here is one of his friends, of
the Paris Bar, who desires to speak with him.”
“I really don’t know, Monsieur Rouletabille,” replied Fred, shaking
hands with my friend, whom he had several times met in the course of
his difficult investigations. “I have not seen him.”
“The concierges will be able to inform us no doubt?” said Rouletabille,
pointing to the lodge the door and windows of which were close shut.
“The concierges will not be able to give you any information, Monsieur
Rouletabille.”
“Why not?”
“Because they were arrested half an hour ago.”
“Arrested!” cried Rouletabille; “then they are the murderers!”
Frédéric Larsan shrugged his shoulders.
“When you can’t arrest the real murderer,” he said with an air of
supreme irony, “you can always indulge in the luxury of discovering
accomplices.”
“Did you have them arrested, Monsieur Fred?”
“Not I!—I haven’t had them arrested. In the first place, I am pretty
sure that they have not had anything to do with the affair, and then
because—”
“Because of what?” asked Rouletabille eagerly.
“Because of nothing,” said Larsan, shaking his head.
“Because there were no accomplices!” said Rouletabille.
“Aha!—you have an idea, then, about this matter?” said Larsan, looking
at Rouletabille intently, “yet you have seen nothing, young man,—you
have not yet gained admission here!”
“I shall get admission.”
“I doubt it. The orders are strict.”
“I shall gain admission, if you let me see Monsieur Robert Darzac. Do
that for me. You know we are old friends. I beg of you, Monsieur Fred.
Do you remember the article I wrote about you on the gold bar case?”
The face of Rouletabille at the moment was really funny to look at.
It showed such an irresistible desire to cross the threshold beyond
which some prodigious mystery had occurred; it appealed with so much
eloquence, not only of the mouth and eyes, but with all its features,
that I could not refrain from bursting into laughter. Frédéric Larsan,
no more than myself, could retain his gravity. Meanwhile, standing on
the other side of the gate, he calmly put the key in his pocket. I
closely scrutinised him.
He might be about fifty years of age. He had a fine head, his hair
turning grey; a colourless complexion, and a firm profile. His forehead
was prominent, his chin and cheeks clean shaven. His upper lip, without
moustache, was finely chiselled. His eyes were rather small and round,
with a look in them that was at once searching and disquieting. He was
of middle height and well built, with a general bearing elegant and
gentlemanly. There was nothing about him of the vulgar policeman. In
his way, he was an artist, and one felt that he had a high opinion of
himself. The sceptical tone of his conversation was that of a man who
had been taught by experience. His strange profession had brought him
into contact with so many crimes and villainies that it would have been
remarkable if his nature had not been a little hardened.
Larsan turned his head at the sound of a vehicle which had come from
the château and reached the gate behind him. We recognised the cab
which had conveyed the examining magistrate and his Registrar from the
station at Epinay.
“Ah!” said Frédéric Larsan, “if you want to speak with Monsieur Robert
Darzac, he is here.”
The cab was already at the park gate and Robert Darzac was begging
Frédéric Larsan to open it for him, explaining that he was pressed
for time to catch the next train leaving Epinay for Paris. Then he
recognised me. While Larsan was unlocking the gate, Monsieur Darzac
inquired what had brought me to the Glandier at such a tragic moment. I
noticed that he was frightfully pale, and that his face was lined as if
from the effects of some terrible suffering.
“Is Mademoiselle getting better?” I immediately asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She will be saved perhaps. She _must_ be saved!”
He did not add “or it will be my death”; but I felt that the phrase
trembled on his pale lips.
Rouletabille intervened:—
“You are in a hurry, Monsieur; but I must speak with you. I have
something of the greatest importance to tell you.”
Frédéric Larsan interrupted:—
“May I leave you?” he asked of Robert Darzac. “Have you a key, or do
you wish me to give you this one.”
“Thank you. I have a key and will lock the gate.”
Larsan hurried off in the direction of the château, the imposing pile
of which could be perceived a few hundred yards away.
Robert Darzac, with knit brow, was beginning to show impatience. I
presented Rouletabille as a good friend of mine, but, as soon as he
learnt that the young man was a journalist, he looked at me very
reproachfully, excused himself, under the necessity of having to
reach Epinay in twenty minutes, bowed, and whipped up his horse. But
Rouletabille had seized the bridle and, to my utter astonishment,
stopped the carriage with a vigorous hand. Then he gave utterance to a
sentence which was utterly meaningless to me.
“The presbytery has lost nothing of its charm, nor the garden its
brightness.”
The words had hardly left the lips of Rouletabille than I saw Robert
Darzac quail. Pale as he was, he became paler. His eyes were fixed on
the young man in terror, and he immediately descended from the vehicle
in an inexpressible state of agitation.
“Come!—come in!” he stammered.
Then, suddenly, and with a sort of fury, he repeated:—
“Let us go, monsieur.”
He turned up by the road he had come from the château, Rouletabille
still retaining his hold on the horse’s bridle. I addressed a few
words to Monsieur Darzac, but he made no answer. My looks questioned
Rouletabille, but his gaze was elsewhere.
Chapter VI
In the Heart of the Oak Grove
We reached the château, and, as we approached it, saw four gendarmes
pacing in front of a little door in the ground floor of the donjon. We
soon learned that in this ground floor, which had formerly served as a
prison, Monsieur and Madame Bernier, the concierges, were confined.
Monsieur Robert Darzac led us into the modern part of the château by
a large door, protected by a projecting awning—a “marquise” as it is
called. Rouletabille who had resigned the horse and the cab to the care
of a servant, never took his eyes off Monsieur Darzac. I followed his
look and perceived that it was directed solely towards the gloved hands
of the Sorbonne professor. When we were in a tiny sitting-room fitted
with old furniture, Monsieur Darzac turned to Rouletabille and said
sharply:—
“What do you want?”
The reporter answered in an equally sharp tone:—
“To shake you by the hand.”
Darzac shrank back.
“What does that mean?”
Evidently he understood, what I also understood, that my friend
suspected him of the abominable attempt on the life of Mademoiselle
Stangerson. The impression of the blood-stained hand on the walls of
“The Yellow Room” was in his mind. I looked at the man closely. His
haughty face with its expression ordinarily so straightforward was
at this moment strangely troubled. He held out his right hand and,
referring to me, said:—
“As you are a friend of Monsieur Sainclair who has rendered me
invaluable services in a just cause, monsieur, I see no reason for
refusing you my hand—”
Rouletabille did not take the extended hand. Lying with the utmost
audacity, he said:—
“Monsieur, I have lived several years in Russia, where I have acquired
the habit of never taking any but an ungloved hand.”
I thought that the Sorbonne professor would express his anger openly,
but, on the contrary, by a visibly violent effort, he calmed himself,
took off his gloves, and showed his hands; they were unmarked by any
cicatrice.
“Are you satisfied?”
“No!” replied Rouletabille. “My dear friend,” he said, turning to me,
“I am obliged to ask you to leave us alone for a moment.”
I bowed and retired, stupefied by what I had seen and heard. I could
not understand why Monsieur Robert Darzac had not already shown the
door to my impertinent, insulting, and stupid friend. I was angry
myself with Rouletabille at that moment, for his suspicions, which had
led to this scene of the gloves.
For some twenty minutes I walked about in front of the château, trying
vainly to link together the different events of the day. What was in
Rouletabille’s mind? Was it possible that he thought Monsieur Robert
Darzac to be the murderer? How could it be thought that this man, who
was to have married Mademoiselle Stangerson in the course of a few
days, had introduced himself into “The Yellow Room” to assassinate his
fiancée? I could find no explanation as to how the murderer had been
able to leave “The Yellow Room”; and so long as that mystery, which
appeared to me so inexplicable, remained unexplained, I thought it was
the duty of all of us to refrain from suspecting anybody. But, then,
that seemingly senseless phrase—“The presbytery has lost nothing of its
charm, nor the garden its brightness”—still rung in my ears. What did
it mean? I was eager to rejoin Rouletabille and question him.
At that moment the young man came out of the château in the company
of Monsieur Robert Darzac, and, extraordinary to relate, I saw, at a
glance, that they were the best of friends.
“We are going to ‘The Yellow Room.’ Come with us,” Rouletabille said
to me. “You know, my dear boy, I am going to keep you with me all day.
We’ll breakfast together somewhere about here—”
“You’ll breakfast with me, here, gentlemen—”
“No, thanks,” replied the young man. “We shall breakfast at the Donjon
Inn.”
“You’ll fare very badly there; you’ll not find anything—”
“Do you think so? Well, I hope to find something there,” replied
Rouletabille. “After breakfast, we’ll set to work again. I’ll write my
article and if you’ll be so good as to take it to the office for me—”
“Won’t you come back with me to Paris?”
“No; I shall remain here.”
I turned towards Rouletabille. He spoke quite seriously, and Monsieur
Robert Darzac did not appear to be in the least degree surprised.
We were passing by the donjon and heard wailing voices. Rouletabille
asked:
“Why have these people been arrested?”
“It is a little my fault,” said Monsieur Darzac. “I happened to remark
to the examining magistrate yesterday that it was inexplicable that
the concierges had had time to hear the revolver shots, to dress
themselves, and to cover so great a distance as that which lies between
their lodge and the pavilion, in the space of two minutes; for not more
than that interval of time had elapsed after the firing of the shots
when they were met by Daddy Jacques.”
“That was suspicious evidently,” acquiesced Rouletabille. “And were
they dressed?”
“That is what is so incredible—they were dressed—completely—not one
part of their costume wanting. The woman wore sabots, but the man had
on laced boots. Now they assert that they went to bed at half-past
nine. On arriving this morning, the examining magistrate brought with
him from Paris a revolver of the same calibre as that found in the room
(for he couldn’t use the one held for evidence), and made his Registrar
fire two shots in ‘The Yellow Room’ while the doors and windows were
closed. We were with him in the lodge of the concierges, and yet we
heard nothing, not a sound. The concierges have lied, of that there
can be no doubt. They must have been already waiting, not far from
the pavilion, waiting for something! Certainly they are not to be
accused of being the authors of the crime, but their complicity is not
improbable. That was why Monsieur de Marquet had them arrested at once.”
“If they had been accomplices,” said Rouletabille, “they would not
have been there at all. When people throw themselves into the arms of
justice with the proofs of complicity on them, you can be sure they are
_not_ accomplices. I don’t believe there are any accomplices in this
affair.”
“Then, why were they abroad at midnight? Why don’t they say?”
“They have certainly some reason for their silence. What that reason
is, has to be found out; for, even if they are not accomplices, it
may be of importance. Everything that took place on such a night is
important.”
We had crossed an old bridge thrown over the Douve and were entering
the part of the park called the Oak Grove. The oaks here were centuries
old. Autumn had already shrivelled their tawny leaves, and their high
branches, black and contorted, looked like horrid heads of hair,
mingled with quaint reptiles such as the ancient sculptors have made
on the head of Medusa. This place, which Mademoiselle found cheerful
and in which she lived in the summer season, appeared to us as sad and
funereal now. The soil was black and muddy from the recent rains and
the rotting of the fallen leaves; the trunks of the trees were black
and the sky above us was now, as if in mourning, charged with great,
heavy clouds.
And it was in this sombre and desolate retreat that we saw the white
walls of the pavilion as we approached. A queer-looking building
without a window visible on the side by which we neared it. A little
door alone marked the entrance to it. It might have passed for a tomb,
a vast mausoleum in the midst of a thick forest. As we came nearer,
we were able to make out its disposition. The building obtained all
the light it needed from the south, that is to say, from the open
country. The little door closed on the park. Monsieur and Mademoiselle
Stangerson must have found it an ideal seclusion for their work and
their dreams.
[Illustration: A ground plan of the pavilion, a square building,
situated such that its north and east sides connect with a wall that
encloses the surrounding park. The building contains four rooms,
labeled “1” through “4”. The front door is in the southwest corner and
leads into room 3. A door in the north side of room 3 leads into room
4, a narrow room by a staircase labeled “5”. Room 1 is in the northwest
corner and contains a bed in one corner. Room 2 fully occupies the
right half of the building. It has doors connecting to rooms 1 and 3,
and windows on the north and east walls. Against its south wall is a
rectangle labeled “6”. There is a trail of footsteps marked on the
plan, starting just outside a window in room 3 and leading off into the
park.]
Here is the ground plan of the pavilion. It had a ground-floor which
was reached by a few steps, and above it was an attic, with which we
need not concern ourselves. The plan of the ground-floor only, sketched
roughly, is what I here submit to the reader.
1. The Yellow Room, with its one window and its one door opening into
the laboratory.
2. Laboratory, with its two large, barred windows and its doors, one
serving for the vestibule, the other for The Yellow Room.
3. Vestibule, with its unbarred window and door opening into the park.
4. Lavatory.
5. Stairs leading to the attic.
6. Large and the only chimney in the pavilion, serving for the
experiments of the laboratory.
The plan was drawn by Rouletabille, and I assured myself that there
was not a line in it that was wanting to help to the solution of the
problem then set before the police. With the lines of this plan and the
description of its parts before them, my readers will know as much as
Rouletabille knew when he entered the pavilion for the first time. With
him they may now ask: How did the murderer escape from The Yellow Room?
Before mounting the three steps leading up to the door of the pavilion,
Rouletabille stopped and asked Monsieur Darzac point blank:—
“What was the motive for the crime?”
“Speaking for myself, Monsieur, there can be no doubt on the matter,”
said Mademoiselle Stangerson’s fiancé, greatly distressed. “The
marks of the fingers, the deep scratches on the chest and throat of
Mademoiselle Stangerson show that the wretch who attacked her attempted
to commit a frightful crime. The medical experts who examined these
traces yesterday affirm that they were made by the same hand as that
which left its red imprint on the wall; an enormous hand, Monsieur,
much too large to go into my gloves,” he added with an indefinable
smile.
“Could not that blood-stained hand,” I interrupted, “have been the hand
of Mademoiselle Stangerson who, in the moment of falling, had pressed
it against the wall, and, in slipping, enlarged the impression?”
“There was not a drop of blood on either of her hands when she was
lifted up,” replied Monsieur Darzac.
“We are now sure,” said I, “that it was Mademoiselle Stangerson who was
armed with Daddy Jacques’s revolver, since she wounded the hand of the
murderer. She was in fear, then, of somebody or something.”
“Probably.”
“Do you suspect anybody?”
“No,” replied Monsieur Darzac, looking at Rouletabille.
Rouletabille then said to me:—
“You must know, my friend, that the inquiry is a little more advanced
than Monsieur de Marquet has chosen to tell us. He not only knows that
Mademoiselle Stangerson defended herself with the revolver, but he
knows what the weapon was that was used to attack her. Monsieur Darzac
tells me it was a mutton-bone. Why is Monsieur de Marquet surrounding
this mutton-bone with so much mystery? No doubt for the purpose of
facilitating the inquiries of the agents of the Sûreté? He imagines,
perhaps, that the owner of this instrument of crime, the most terrible
invented, is going to be found amongst those who are well-known in the
slums of Paris who use it. But who can ever say what passes through the
brain of an examining magistrate?” Rouletabille added with contemptuous
irony.
“Has a mutton-bone been found in The Yellow Room?” I asked him.
“Yes, Monsieur,” said Robert Darzac, “at the foot of the bed; but I beg
of you not to say anything about it.” (I made a gesture of assent.) “It
was an enormous mutton-bone, the top of which, or rather the joint,
was still red with the blood of the frightful wound. It was an old
bone, which may, according to appearances, have served in other crimes.
That’s what Monsieur de Marquet thinks who has had it sent to the
municipal laboratory at Paris to be analysed. In fact, he thinks he has
detected on it, not only the blood of the last victim, but other stains
of dried blood, evidences of previous crimes.”
“A mutton-bone in the hand of a _skilled_ assassin is a frightful
weapon,” said Rouletabille, “a more certain weapon than a heavy hammer.”
“The scoundrel has proved it to be so,” said Monsieur Robert Darzac,
sadly. “The joint of the bone found exactly fits the wound inflicted.
My belief is that the wound would have been mortal, if the murderer’s
blow had not been arrested in the act by Mademoiselle Stangerson’s
revolver. Wounded in the hand, he dropped the mutton-bone and fled.
Unfortunately, the blow had been already given, and Mademoiselle was
stunned after having been nearly strangled. If she had succeeded in
wounding the man with the first shot of the revolver, she would,
doubtless, have escaped the blow with the bone. But she had certainly
employed her revolver too late; the first shot deviated and lodged in
the ceiling; it was the second only that took effect.”
Having said this, Monsieur Darzac knocked at the door of the pavilion.
I must confess to feeling a strong impatience to reach the spot where
the crime had been committed. It was some time before the door was
opened by a man whom I at once recognised as Daddy Jacques.
He appeared to be well over sixty years of age. He had a long white
beard and white hair, on which he wore a flat Basque cap. He was
dressed in a complete suit of chestnut-coloured velveteen, worn at the
sides; sabots were on his feet. He had rather a waspish-looking face,
the expression of which lightened, however, as soon as he saw Monsieur
Darzac.
“Friends,” said our guide. “Nobody in the pavilion, Daddy Jacques?”
“I ought not to allow anybody to enter, Monsieur Robert, but of course
the order does not apply to you. These gentlemen of justice have seen
everything there is to be seen, and made enough drawings, and drawn up
enough reports—”
“Excuse me, Monsieur Jacques, one question before anything else,” said
Rouletabille.
“What is it, young man? If I can answer it—”
“Did your mistress wear her hair in bands, that evening? You know what
I mean—over her forehead?”
“No, young man. My mistress never wore her hair in the way you suggest,
neither on that day nor on any other. She had her hair drawn up, as
usual, so that her beautiful forehead could be seen, pure as that of an
unborn child!”
Rouletabille grunted and set to work examining the door, finding that
it fastened itself automatically. He satisfied himself that it could
never remain open and needed a key to open it. Then we entered the
vestibule, a small, well-lit room paved with square red tiles.
“Ah! This is the window by which the murderer escaped!” said
Rouletabille.
“So they keep on saying, monsieur, so they keep on saying! But if he
had gone off that way, we should have been sure to have seen him. We
are not blind, neither Monsieur Stangerson nor me, nor the concierges
who are in prison. Why have they not put me in prison, too, on account
of my revolver?”
Rouletabille had already opened the window and was examining the
shutters.
“Were these closed at the time of the crime?”
“And fastened with the iron catch inside,” said Daddy Jacques, “and I
am quite sure that the murderer did not get out that way.”
“Are there any blood stains?”
“Yes, on the stones outside; but blood of what?”
“Ah!” said Rouletabille, “there are footmarks visible on the path—the
ground was very moist. I will look into that presently.”
“Nonsense!” interrupted Daddy Jacques; “the murderer did not go that
way.”
“Which way did he go, then?”
“How do I know?”
Rouletabille looked at everything, smelled everything. He went down on
his knees and rapidly examined every one of the paving tiles. Daddy
Jacques went on:—
“Ah!—you can’t find anything, monsieur. Nothing has been found. And now
it is all dirty; too many persons have tramped over it. They wouldn’t
let me wash it, but on the day of the crime I had washed the floor
thoroughly, and if the murderer had crossed it with his hobnailed
boots, I should not have failed to see where he had been; he has left
marks enough in Mademoiselle’s chamber.”
Rouletabille rose.
“When was the last time you washed these tiles?” he asked, and he fixed
on Daddy Jacques a most searching look.
“Why—as I told you—on the day of the crime, towards half-past
five—while Mademoiselle and her father were taking a little walk before
dinner, here in this room; they had dined in the laboratory. The next
day, the examining magistrate came and saw all the marks there were on
the floor as plainly as if they had been made with ink on white paper.
Well, neither in the laboratory nor in the vestibule, which were both
as clean as a new pin, were there any traces of a man’s footmarks.
Since they have been found near this window outside, he must have made
his way through the ceiling of The Yellow Room into the attic, then
cut his way through the roof and dropped to the ground outside the
vestibule window. But—there’s no hole, neither in the ceiling of The
Yellow Room nor in the roof of my attic—that’s absolutely certain! So
you see we know nothing—nothing! And nothing will ever be known! It’s a
mystery of the devil’s own making.”
Rouletabille went down upon his knees again almost in front of a small
lavatory at the back of the vestibule. In that position he remained for
about a minute.
“Well?” I asked him when he got up.
“Oh! nothing very important,—a drop of blood,” he replied, turning
towards Daddy Jacques as he spoke. “While you were washing the
laboratory and this vestibule, was the vestibule window open?” he asked.
“No, Monsieur, it was closed; but after I had done washing the floor,
I lit some charcoal for Monsieur in the laboratory furnace, and, as I
lit it with old newspapers, it smoked, so I opened both the windows
in the laboratory and this one, to make a current of air; then I shut
those in the laboratory and left this one open when I went out. When I
returned to the pavilion, this window had been closed and Monsieur and
Mademoiselle were already at work in the laboratory.”
“Monsieur or Mademoiselle Stangerson had, no doubt, shut it?”
“No doubt.”
“You did not ask them?”
“No.”
After a close scrutiny of the little lavatory and of the staircase
leading up to the attic, Rouletabille—to whom we seemed no longer to
exist—entered the laboratory. I followed him. It was, I confess, in
a state of great excitement. Robert Darzac lost none of my friend’s
movements. As for me, my eyes were drawn at once to the door of The
Yellow Room. It was closed and, as I immediately saw, partially
shattered and out of commission.
My friend, who went about his work methodically, silently studied
the room in which we were. It was large and well-lighted. Two big
windows—almost bays—were protected by strong iron bars and looked
out upon a wide extent of country. Through an opening in the forest,
they commanded a wonderful view through the length of the valley and
across the plain to the large town which could be clearly seen in fair
weather. To-day, however, a mist hung over the ground—and blood in that
room!
The whole of one side of the laboratory was taken up with a large
chimney, crucibles, ovens, and such implements as are needed for
chemical experiments; tables, loaded with phials, papers, reports,
an electrical machine,—an apparatus, as Monsieur Darzac informed me,
employed by Professor Stangerson to demonstrate the Dissociation of
Matter under the action of solar light—and other scientific implements.
Along the walls were cabinets, plain or glass-fronted, through which
were visible microscopes, special photographic apparatus, and a large
quantity of crystals.
Rouletabille, who was ferreting in the chimney, put his fingers into
one of the crucibles. Suddenly he drew himself up, and held up a piece
of half-consumed paper in his hand. He stepped up to where we were
talking by one of the windows.
“Keep that for us, Monsieur Darzac,” he said.
I bent over the piece of scorched paper which Monsieur Darzac took
from the hand of Rouletabille, and read distinctly the only words that
remained legible:—
“Presbytery—lost nothing—charm, nor the gar—its brightness.”
Twice since the morning these same meaningless words had struck me,
and, for the second time, I saw that they produced on the Sorbonne
professor the same paralysing effect. Monsieur Darzac’s first anxiety
showed itself when he turned his eyes in the direction of Daddy
Jacques. But, occupied as he was at another window, he had seen
nothing. Then tremblingly opening his pocket-book he put the piece of
paper into it, sighing: “My God!”
During this time, Rouletabille had mounted into the opening of the
fire-grate—that is to say, he had got upon the bricks of a furnace—and
was attentively examining the chimney, which grew narrower towards the
top, the outlet from it being closed with sheets of iron, fastened into
the brickwork, through which passed three small chimneys.
“Impossible to get out that way,” he said, jumping back into the
laboratory. “Besides, even if he _had_ tried to do it, he would have
brought all that ironwork down to the ground. No, no; it is not on that
side we have to search.”
Rouletabille next examined the furniture and opened the doors of the
cabinet. Then he came to the windows, through which he declared no one
could possibly have passed. At the second window he found Daddy Jacques
in contemplation.
“Well, Daddy Jacques,” he said, “what are you looking at?”
“That policeman who is always going round and round the lake. Another
of those fellows who think they can see better than anybody else!”
“You don’t know Frédéric Larsan, Daddy Jacques, or you wouldn’t speak
of him in that way,” said Rouletabille in a melancholy tone. “If there
is anyone who will find the murderer, it will be he.” And Rouletabille
heaved a deep sigh.
“Before they find him, they will have to learn how they lost him,” said
Daddy Jacques, stolidly.
At length we reached the door of The Yellow Room itself.
“There is the door behind which some terrible scene took place,” said
Rouletabille, with a solemnity which, under any other circumstances,
would have been comical.
Chapter VII
In Which Rouletabille Sets out on an Expedition under the Bed
Rouletabille having pushed open the door of The Yellow Room paused on
the threshold saying, with an emotion which I only later understood,
“Ah, the perfume of the lady in black!”
The chamber was dark. Daddy Jacques was about to open the blinds when
Rouletabille stopped him.
“Did not the tragedy take place in complete darkness?” he asked.
“No, young man, I don’t think so. Mademoiselle always had a night-light
on her table, and I lit it every evening before she went to bed. I
was a sort of chambermaid, you must understand, when the evening
came. The real chambermaid did not come here much before the morning.
Mademoiselle worked late—far into the night.”
“Where did the table with the night-light stand,—far from the bed?”
“Some way from the bed.”
“Can you light the burner now?”
“The lamp is broken and the oil that was in it was spilled when the
table was upset. All the rest of the things in the room remain just as
they were. I have only to open the blinds for you to see.”
“Wait.”
Rouletabille went back into the laboratory, closed the shutters of the
two windows and the door of the vestibule. When we were in complete
darkness, he lit a wax vesta, and asked Daddy Jacques to move to the
middle of the chamber with it to the place where the night-light was
burning that night.
Daddy Jacques who was in his stockings—he usually left his sabots in
the vestibule—entered The Yellow Room with his bit of a vesta. We
vaguely distinguished objects overthrown on the floor, a bed in one
corner, and, in front of us, to the left, the gleam of a looking-glass
hanging on the wall, near to the bed.
“That will do!—you may now open the blinds,” said Rouletabille.
“Don’t come any further,” Daddy Jacques begged, “you may make marks
with your boots, and nothing must be deranged; it’s an idea of the
magistrate’s—though he has nothing more to do here.”
And he pushed open the shutter. The pale daylight entered from without,
throwing a sinister light on the saffron-coloured walls. The floor—for
though the laboratory and the vestibule were tiled, The Yellow Room had
a flooring of wood—was covered with a single yellow mat which was large
enough to cover nearly the whole room, under the bed and under the
dressing-table—the only piece of furniture that remained upright. The
centre round table, the night-table and two chairs had been overturned.
These did not prevent a large stain of blood being visible on the mat,
made, as Daddy Jacques informed us, by the blood which had flowed from
the wound on Mademoiselle Stangerson’s forehead. Besides these stains,
drops of blood had fallen in all directions, in line with the visible
traces of the footsteps—large and black—of the murderer. Everything led
to the presumption that these drops of blood had fallen from the wound
of the man who had, for a moment, placed his red hand on the wall.
There were other traces of the same hand on the wall, but much less
distinct.
“See!—see this blood on the wall!” I could not help exclaiming. “The
man who pressed his hand so heavily upon it in the darkness must
certainly have thought that he was pushing at a door! That’s why
he pressed on it so hard, leaving on the yellow paper the terrible
evidence. I don’t think there are many hands in the world of that sort.
It is big and strong and the fingers are nearly all one as long as the
other! The thumb is wanting and we have only the mark of the palm; but
if we follow the trace of the hand,” I continued, “we see that, after
leaving its imprint on the wall, the _touch_ sought the door, found it,
and then felt for the lock—”
“No doubt,” interrupted Rouletabille, chuckling,—“only there is no
blood, either on the lock or on the bolt!”
“What does that prove?” I rejoined with a good sense of which I was
proud; “he might have opened the lock with his left hand, which would
have been quite natural, his right hand being wounded.”
“He didn’t open it at all!” Daddy Jacques again exclaimed. “We are not
fools; and there were four of us when we burst open the door!”
“What a queer hand!—Look what a queer hand it is!” I said.
“It is a very natural hand,” said Rouletabille, “of which the shape has
been deformed by its having slipped on the wall. The man dried his hand
on the wall. He must be a man about five feet eight in height.”
“How do you come at that?”
“By the height of the marks on the wall.”
My friend next occupied himself with the mark of the bullet in the
wall. It was a round hole.
“This ball was fired straight, not from above, and consequently, not
from below.”
Rouletabille went back to the door and carefully examined the lock and
the bolt, satisfying himself that the door had certainly been burst
open from the outside, and, further, that the key had been found in the
lock on the inside of the chamber. He finally satisfied himself that
with the key in the lock, the door could not possibly be opened from
without with another key. Having made sure of all these details, he let
fall these words: “That’s better!”—Then sitting down on the ground, he
hastily took off his boots and, in his socks, went into the room.
The first thing he did was to examine minutely the overturned
furniture. We watched him in silence.
“Young fellow, you are giving yourself a great deal of trouble,” said
Daddy Jacques ironically.
Rouletabille raised his head and said:—
“You have spoken the simple truth, Daddy Jacques; your mistress did not
have her hair in bands that evening. I was a donkey to have believed
she did.”
Then, with the suppleness of a serpent, he slipped under the bed.
Presently we heard him ask:—
“At what time, Monsieur Jacques, did Monsieur and Mademoiselle
Stangerson arrive at the laboratory?”
“At six o’clock.”
The voice of Rouletabille continued:
“Yes,—he’s been under here,—that’s certain; in fact, there was no where
else where he could have hidden himself. Here, too, are the marks of
his hobnails. When you entered—all four of you—did you look under the
bed?”
“At once,—we drew it right out of its place—”
“And between the mattresses?”
“There was only one on the bed, and on that Mademoiselle was placed;
and Monsieur Stangerson and the concierge immediately carried it
into the laboratory. Under the mattress there was nothing but the
metal netting, which could not conceal anything or anybody. Remember,
monsieur, that there were four of us and we couldn’t fail to see
everything—the chamber is so small and scantily furnished, and all was
locked behind in the pavilion.”
I ventured on a hypothesis:—
“Perhaps he got away with the mattress—in the mattress!—Anything is
possible, in the face of such a mystery! In their distress of mind
Monsieur Stangerson and the concierge may not have noticed they
were bearing a double weight; especially if the concierge were an
accomplice! I throw out this hypothesis for what it is worth, but
it explains many things,—and particularly the fact that neither the
laboratory nor the vestibule bear any traces of the footmarks found
in the room. If, in carrying Mademoiselle on the mattress from the
laboratory of the château, they rested for a moment, there might have
been an opportunity for the man in it to escape.”
“And then?” asked Rouletabille, deliberately laughing under the bed.
I felt rather vexed and replied:—
“I don’t know,—but anything appears possible”—
“The examining magistrate had the same idea, monsieur,” said Daddy
Jacques, “and he carefully examined the mattress. He was obliged to
laugh at the idea, monsieur, as your friend is doing now,—for whoever
heard of a mattress having a double bottom?”
I was myself obliged to laugh, on seeing that what I had said was
absurd; but in an affair like this one hardly knows where an absurdity
begins or ends.
My friend alone seemed able to talk intelligently. He called out from
under the bed.
“The mat here has been moved out of place,—who did it?”
“We did, monsieur,” explained Daddy Jacques. “When we could not find
the assassin, we asked ourselves whether there was not some hole in the
floor—”
“There is not,” replied Rouletabille. “Is there a cellar?”
“No, there’s no cellar. But that has not stopped our searching, and has
not prevented the examining magistrate and his Registrar from studying
the floor plank by plank, as if there had been a cellar under it.”
The reporter then reappeared. His eyes were sparkling and his nostrils
quivered. He remained on his hands and knees. He could not be better
likened than to an admirable sporting dog on the scent of some unusual
game. And, indeed, he was scenting the steps of a man,—the man whom he
has sworn to report to his master, the manager of the “Epoque.” It must
not be forgotten that Rouletabille was first and last a journalist.
Thus, on his hands and knees, he made his way to the four corners of
the room, so to speak, sniffing and going round everything—everything
that we could see, which was not much, and everything that we could not
see, which must have been infinite.
The toilette table was a simple table standing on four legs; there was
nothing about it by which it could possibly be changed into a temporary
hiding-place. There was not a closet or cupboard. Mademoiselle
Stangerson kept her wardrobe at the château.
Rouletabille literally passed his nose and hands along the walls,
constructed of solid brickwork. When he had finished with the walls,
and passed his agile fingers over every portion of the yellow paper
covering them, he reached to the ceiling, which he was able to touch by
mounting on a chair placed on the toilette table, and by moving this
ingeniously constructed stage from place to place he examined every
foot of it. When he had finished his scrutiny of the ceiling, where he
carefully examined the hole made by the second bullet, he approached
the window, and, once more, examined the iron bars and blinds, all of
which were solid and intact. At last, he gave a grunt of satisfaction
and declared “Now I am at ease!”
“Well,—do you believe that the poor dear young lady was shut up when
she was being murdered—when she cried out for help?” wailed Daddy
Jacques.
“Yes,” said the young reporter, drying his forehead, “The Yellow Room
was as tightly shut as an iron safe.”
“That,” I said, “is why this mystery is the most surprising I know.
Edgar Allan Poe, in the ‘Double Assassination of the Rue Morgue,’
invented nothing like it. The place of that crime was sufficiently
closed to prevent the escape of a man; but there was that window
through which the monkey, the perpetrator of the murder, could slip
away! But here, there can be no question of an opening of any sort. The
door was fastened, and through the window blinds, secure as they were,
not even a fly could enter or get out.”
“True, true,” assented Rouletabille as he kept on drying his forehead,
which seemed to be perspiring less from his recent bodily exertion than
from his mental agitation. “Indeed, it’s a great, a beautiful, and a
very curious mystery.”
“The Bête du bon Dieu,” muttered Daddy Jacques, “the Bête du bon Dieu
herself, if she had committed the crime, could not have escaped.
Listen! Do you hear it? Hush!”
Daddy Jacques made us a sign to keep quiet and, stretching his arm
towards the wall nearest the forest, listened to something which we
could not hear.
“It’s answering,” he said at length. “I must kill it. It is too wicked,
but it’s the Bête du bon Dieu, and, every night, it goes to pray on the
tomb of Sainte-Geneviève and nobody dares to touch her, for fear that
Mother Angenoux should cast an evil spell on them.”
“How big is the Bête du bon Dieu?”
“Nearly as big as a small retriever,—a monster, I tell you. Ah!—I have
asked myself more than once whether it was not her that took our poor
Mademoiselle by the throat with her claws. But the Bête du bon Dieu
does not wear hobnailed boots, nor fire revolvers, nor has she a hand
like _that_!” exclaimed Daddy Jacques, again pointing out to us the red
mark on the wall. “Besides, we should have seen her as well as we would
have seen a man—”
“Evidently,” I said. “Before we had seen this Yellow Room, I had also
asked myself whether the cat of Mother Angenoux—”
“You also!” cried Rouletabille.
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
“Not for a moment. After reading the article in the ‘Matin,’ I knew
that a cat had nothing to do with the matter. But I swear now that a
frightful tragedy has been enacted here. You say nothing about the
Basque cap, or the handkerchief, found here, Daddy Jacques?”
“Of course, the magistrate has taken them,” the old man answered,
hesitatingly.
“I haven’t seen either the handkerchief or the cap, yet I can tell you
how they are made,” the reporter said to him gravely.
“Oh, you are very clever,” said Daddy Jacques, coughing and embarrassed.
“The handkerchief is a large one, blue with red stripes and the cap is
an old Basque cap, like the one you are wearing now.”
“You are a wizard!” said Daddy Jacques, trying to laugh and not quite
succeeding. “How do you know that the handkerchief is blue with red
stripes?”
“Because, if it had not been blue with red stripes, it would not have
been found at all.”
Without giving any further attention to Daddy Jacques, my friend took a
piece of paper from his pocket, and taking out a pair of scissors, bent
over the footprints. Placing the paper over one of them he began to
cut. In a short time he had made a perfect pattern which he handed to
me, begging me not to lose it.
He then returned to the window and, pointing to the figure of Frédéric
Larsan, who had not quitted the side of the lake, asked Daddy Jacques
whether the detective had, like himself, been working in The Yellow
Room?
“No,” replied Robert Darzac, who, since Rouletabille had handed him
the piece of scorched paper, had not uttered a word, “He pretends that
he does not need to examine The Yellow Room. He says that the murderer
made his escape from it in quite a natural way, and that he will, this
evening, explain how he did it.”
As he listened to what Monsieur Darzac had to say, Rouletabille turned
pale.
“Has Frédéric Larsan found out the truth, which I can only guess
at?” he murmured. “He is very clever—very clever—and I admire him.
But what we have to do to-day is something more than the work of a
policeman,—something quite different from the teachings of experience.
We have to take hold of our reason by the right end.”
The reporter rushed into the open air, agitated by the thought that
the great and famous Fred might anticipate him in the solution of the
problem of The Yellow Room.
I managed to reach him on the threshold of the pavilion.
“Calm yourself, my dear fellow,” I said. “Aren’t you satisfied?”
“Yes,” he confessed to me, with a deep sigh. “I am quite satisfied. I
have discovered many things.”
“Moral or material?”
“Several moral,—one material. This, for example.”
And rapidly he drew from his waistcoat pocket a piece of paper in which
he had placed a _light coloured hair from a woman’s head_.
Chapter VIII
The Examining Magistrate Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson
Two minutes later, as Rouletabille was bending over the footprints
discovered in the park, under the window of the vestibule, a man,
evidently a servant at the château, came towards us rapidly and called
out to Monsieur Darzac then coming out of the pavilion:—
“Monsieur Robert, the magistrate, you know, is questioning
Mademoiselle.”
Monsieur Darzac uttered a muttered excuse to us and set off running
towards the château, the man running after him.
“If the corpse can speak,” I said, “it would be interesting to be
there.”
“We must know,” said my friend. “Let’s go to the château.” And he drew
me with him. But, at the château, a gendarme placed in the vestibule
denied us admission up the staircase of the first floor. We were
obliged to wait down stairs.
This is what passed in the chamber of the victim while we were waiting
below.
The family doctor, finding that Mademoiselle Stangerson was much
better, but fearing a relapse which would no longer permit of her being
questioned, had thought it his duty to inform the examining magistrate
of this, who decided to proceed immediately with a brief examination.
At this examination, the Registrar, Monsieur Stangerson, and the
doctor were present. Later, I obtained the text of the report of the
examination, and I give it here, in all its legal dryness:—
“Question. Are you able, mademoiselle, without too much fatiguing
yourself, to give some necessary details of the frightful attack of
which you have been the victim?
“Answer. I feel much better, monsieur, and I will tell you all I know.
When I entered my chamber I did not notice anything unusual there.
“Q. Excuse me, mademoiselle,—if you will allow me, I will ask you some
questions and you will answer them. That will fatigue you less than
making a long recital.
“A. Do so, monsieur.
“Q. What did you do on that day?—I want you to be as minute and precise
as possible. I wish to know all you did that day, if it is not asking
too much of you.
“A. I rose late, at ten o’clock, for my father and I had returned home
late on the night previously, having been to dinner at the reception
given by the President of the Republic, in honour of the Academy of
Science of Philadelphia. When I left my chamber, at half-past ten,
my father was already at work in the laboratory. We worked together
till midday. We then took half-an-hour’s walk in the park, as we were
accustomed to do, before breakfasting at the château. After breakfast,
we took another walk for half an hour, and then returned to the
laboratory. There we found my chambermaid, who had come to set my room
in order. I went into The Yellow Room to give her some slight orders
and she directly afterwards left the pavilion, and I resumed my work
with my father. At five o’clock, we again went for a walk in the park
and afterward had tea.
“Q. Before leaving the pavilion at five o’clock, did you go into your
chamber?
“A. No, monsieur, my father went into it, at my request to bring me my
hat.
“Q. And he found nothing suspicious there?
“A. Evidently no, monsieur.
“Q. It is, then, almost certain that the murderer was not yet concealed
under the bed. When you went out, was the door of the room locked?
“A. No, there was no reason for locking it.
“Q. You were absent from the pavilion some length of time, Monsieur
Stangerson and you?
“A. About an hour.
“Q. It was during that hour, no doubt, that the murderer got into the
pavilion. But how? Nobody knows. Footmarks have been found in the park,
leading away from the window of the vestibule, but none has been found
going towards it. Did you notice whether the vestibule window was open
when you went out?
“A. I don’t remember.
“Monsieur Stangerson. It was closed.
“Q. And when you returned?
“Mademoiselle Stangerson. I did not notice.
“M. Stangerson. It was still closed. I remember remarking aloud: ‘Daddy
Jacques must surely have opened it while we were away.’
“Q. Strange!—Do you recollect, Monsieur Stangerson, if during your
absence, and before going out, he had opened it? You returned to the
laboratory at six o’clock and resumed work?
“Mademoiselle Stangerson. Yes, monsieur.
“Q. And you did not leave the laboratory from that hour up to the
moment when you entered your chamber?
“M. Stangerson. Neither my daughter nor I, monsieur. We were engaged on
work that was pressing, and we lost not a moment,—neglecting everything
else on that account.
“Q. Did you dine in the laboratory?
“A. For that reason.
“Q. Are you accustomed to dine in the laboratory?
“A. We rarely dine there.
“Q. Could the murderer have known that you would dine there that
evening?
“M. Stangerson. Good Heavens!—I think not. It was only when we returned
to the pavilion at six o’clock, that we decided, my daughter and I,
to dine there. At that moment I was spoken to by my gamekeeper, who
detained me a moment, to ask me to accompany him on an urgent tour of
inspection in a part of the woods which I had decided to thin. I put
this off until the next day, and begged him, as he was going by the
château, to tell the steward that we should dine in the laboratory.
He left me, to execute the errand and I rejoined my daughter, who was
already at work.
“Q. At what hour, mademoiselle, did you go to your chamber while your
father continued to work there?
“A. At midnight.
“Q. Did Daddy Jacques enter The Yellow Room in the course of the
evening?
“A. To shut the blinds and light the night-light.
“Q. He saw nothing suspicious?
“A. He would have told us if he had seen. Daddy Jacques is an honest
man and very attached to me.
“Q. You affirm, Monsieur Stangerson, that Daddy Jacques remained with
you all the time you were in the laboratory?
“M. Stangerson. I am sure of it. I have no doubt of that.
“Q. When you entered your chamber, mademoiselle, you immediately shut
the door and locked and bolted it? That was taking unusual precautions,
knowing that your father and your servant were there? Were you in fear
of something, then?
“A. My father would be returning to the château and Daddy Jacques would
be going to his bed. And, in fact, I _did_ fear something.
“Q. You were so much in fear of something that you borrowed Daddy
Jacques’s revolver without telling him you had done so?
“A. That is true. I did not wish to alarm anybody,—the more, because my
fears might have proved to have been foolish.
“Q. What was it you feared?
“A. I hardly know how to tell you. For several nights, I seemed to
hear, both in the park and out of the park, round the pavilion, unusual
sounds, sometimes footsteps, at other times the cracking of branches.
The night before the attack on me, when I did not get to bed before
three o’clock in the morning, on our return from the Élysée, I stood
for a moment before my window, and I felt sure I saw shadows.
“Q. How many?
“A. Two. They moved round the lake,—then the moon became clouded and
I lost sight of them. At this time of the season, every year, I have
generally returned to my apartment in the château for the winter; but
this year I said to myself that I would not quit the pavilion before
my father had finished the résumé of his works on the ‘Dissociation
of Matter’ for the Academy. I did not wish that that important work,
which was to have been finished in the course of a few days, should be
delayed by a change in our daily habit. You can well understand that
I did not wish to speak of my childish fears to my father, nor did I
say anything to Daddy Jacques who, I knew, would not have been able to
hold his tongue. Knowing that he had a revolver in his room, I took
advantage of his absence and borrowed it, placing it in the drawer of
my night-table.
“Q. You know of no enemies you have?
“A. None.
“Q. You understand, mademoiselle, that these precautions are calculated
to cause surprise?
“M. Stangerson. Evidently, my child, such precautions are very
surprising.
“A. No;—because I have told you that I had been uneasy for two nights.
“M. Stangerson. You ought to have told me of that! This misfortune
would have been avoided.
“Q. The door of The Yellow Room locked, did you go to bed?
“A. Yes, and, being very tired, I at once went to sleep.
“Q. The night-light was still burning?
“A. Yes, but it gave a very feeble light.
“Q. Then, mademoiselle, tell us what happened.
“A. I do not know whether I had been long asleep, but suddenly I
awoke—and uttered a loud cry.
“M. Stangerson. Yes—a horrible cry—‘Murder!’—It still rings in my ears.
“Q. You uttered a loud cry?
“A. A man was in my chamber. He sprang at me and tried to strangle
me. I was nearly stifled when suddenly I was able to reach the drawer
of my night-table and grasp the revolver which I had placed in it. At
that moment the man had forced me to the foot of my bed and brandished
over my head a sort of mace. But I had fired. He immediately struck a
terrible blow at my head. All that, monsieur, passed more rapidly than
I can tell it, and I know nothing more.
“Q. Nothing?—Have you no idea as to how the assassin could escape from
your chamber?
“A. None whatever—I know nothing more. One does not know what is
passing around one, when one is unconscious.
“Q. Was the man you saw tall or short, little or big?
“A. I only saw a shadow which appeared to me formidable.
“Q. You cannot give us any indication?
“A. I know nothing more, monsieur, than that a man threw himself upon
me and that I fired at him. I know nothing more.”
Here the interrogation of Mademoiselle Stangerson concluded.
Rouletabille waited patiently for Monsieur Robert Darzac, who soon
appeared.
From a room near the chamber of Mademoiselle Stangerson, he had heard
the interrogatory and now came to recount it to my friend with great
exactitude, aided by an excellent memory. His docility still surprised
me. Thanks to hasty pencil-notes, he was able to reproduce, almost
textually, the questions and the answers given.
It looked as if Monsieur Darzac were being employed as the secretary of
my young friend and acted as if he could refuse him nothing; nay, more,
as if under a compulsion to do so.
The fact of the closed window struck the reporter as it had struck the
magistrate. Rouletabille asked Darzac to repeat once more Mademoiselle
Stangerson’s account of how she and her father had spent their time on
the day of the tragedy, as she had stated it to the magistrate. The
circumstance of the dinner in the laboratory seemed to interest him in
the highest degree; and he had it repeated to him three times. He also
wanted to be sure that the forest-keeper knew that the professor and
his daughter were going to dine in the laboratory, and how he had come
to know it.
When Monsieur Darzac had finished, I said: “The examination has not
advanced the problem much.”
“It has put it back,” said Monsieur Darzac.
“It has thrown light upon it,” said Rouletabille, thoughtfully.
Chapter IX
Reporter and Detective
The three of us went back towards the pavilion. At some distance from
the building the reporter made us stop and, pointing to a small clump
of trees to the right of us, said:—
“That’s where the murderer came from to get into the pavilion.”
As there were other patches of trees of the same sort between the great
oaks, I asked why the murderer had chosen that one, rather than any of
the others. Rouletabille answered me by pointing to the path which ran
quite close to the thicket to the door of the pavilion.
“That path is, as you see, topped with gravel,” he said; “the man
_must_ have passed along it going to the pavilion, since no traces
of his steps have been found on the soft ground. The man didn’t have
wings; he walked; but he walked on the gravel which left no impression
of his tread. The gravel has, in fact, been trodden by many other
feet, since the path is the most direct way between the pavilion
and the château. As to the thicket, made of the sort of shrubs that
don’t flourish in the rough season—laurels and fuchsias—it offered
the murderer a sufficient hiding-place until it was time for him to
make his way to the pavilion. It was while hiding in that clump of
trees that he saw Monsieur and Mademoiselle Stangerson, and then
Daddy Jacques, leave the pavilion. Gravel has been spread nearly,
very nearly, up to the windows of the pavilion. The footprints of a
man, parallel with the wall—marks which we will examine presently,
and which I have already seen—prove that he only needed to make one
stride to find himself in front of the vestibule window, left open by
Daddy Jacques. The man drew himself up by his hands and entered the
vestibule.”
“After all it is very possible,” I said.
“After all what? After all what?” cried Rouletabille.
I begged of him not to be angry; but he was too much irritated to
listen to me and declared, ironically, that he admired the prudent
doubt with which certain people approached the most simple problems,
risking nothing by saying “that is so,” or “that is not so.” Their
intelligence would have produced about the same result if nature had
forgotten to furnish their brain-pan with a little grey matter. As I
appeared vexed, my young friend took me by the arm and admitted that he
had not meant that for me; he thought more of me than that.
“If I did not reason as I do in regard to this gravel,” he went on, “I
should have to assume a balloon!—My dear fellow, the science of the
aerostation of dirigible balloons is not yet developed enough for me to
consider it and suppose that a murderer would drop from the clouds! So
don’t say a thing is possible, when it could not be otherwise. We know
now how the man entered by the window, and we also know the moment at
which he entered,—during the five o’clock walk of the professor and his
daughter. The fact of the presence of the chambermaid—who had come to
clean up The Yellow Room—in the laboratory, when Monsieur Stangerson
and his daughter returned from their walk, at half-past one, permits
us to affirm that at half-past one the murderer was not in the chamber
under the bed, unless he was in collusion with the chambermaid. What do
you say, Monsieur Darzac?”
Monsieur Darzac shook his head and said he was sure of the
chambermaid’s fidelity, and that she was a thoroughly honest and
devoted servant.
“Besides,” he added, “at five o’clock Monsieur Stangerson went into the
room to fetch his daughter’s hat.”
“There is that also,” said Rouletabille.
“That the man entered by the window at the time you say, I admit,”
I said; “but why did he shut the window? It was an act which would
necessarily draw the attention of those who had left it open.”
“It may be the window was not shut at once,” replied the young
reporter. “_But if he did shut the window, it was because of the bend
in the gravel path, a dozen yards from the pavilion, and on account of
the three oaks that are growing at that spot._”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Monsieur Darzac, who had followed us
and listened with almost breathless attention to all that Rouletabille
had said.
“I’ll explain all to you later on, Monsieur, when I think the moment
to be ripe for doing so; but I don’t think I have anything of more
importance to say on this affair, if my hypothesis is justified.”
“And what is your hypothesis?”
“You will never know if it does not turn out to be the truth. It is of
much too grave a nature to speak of it, so long as it continues to be
only a hypothesis.”
“Have you, at least, some idea as to who the murderer is?”
“No, monsieur, I don’t know who the murderer is; but don’t be afraid,
Monsieur Robert Darzac—I shall know.”
I could not but observe that Monsieur Darzac was deeply moved; and I
suspected that Rouletabille’s confident assertion was not pleasing to
him. Why, I asked myself, if he was really afraid that the murderer
should be discovered, was he helping the reporter to find him? My
young friend seemed to have received the same impression, for he said,
bluntly:—
“Monsieur Darzac don’t you want me to find out who the murderer was?”
“Oh!—I should like to kill him with my own hand!” cried Mademoiselle
Stangerson’s fiancé, with a vehemence that amazed me.
“I believe you,” said Rouletabille gravely; “but you have not answered
my question.”
We were passing by the thicket, of which the young reporter had spoken
to us a minute before. I entered it and pointed out evident traces of a
man who had been hidden there. Rouletabille, once more, was right.
“Yes, yes!” he said. “We have to do with a thing of flesh and blood,
who uses the same means that we do. It’ll all come out on those lines.”
Having said this, he asked me for the paper pattern of the footprint
which he had given me to take care of, and applied it to a very clear
footmark behind the thicket. “Aha!” he said, rising.
I thought he was now going to trace back the track of the murderer’s
footmarks to the vestibule window; but he led us instead, far to the
left, saying that it was useless ferreting in the mud, and that he was
sure, now, of the road taken by the murderer.
“He went along the wall to the hedge and dry ditch, over which he
jumped. See, just in front of the little path leading to the lake, that
was his nearest way to get out.”
“How do you know he went to the lake?”
“Because Frédéric Larsan has not quitted the borders of it since this
morning. There must be some important marks there.”
A few minutes later we reached the lake.
It was a little sheet of marshy water, surrounded by reeds, on which
floated some dead water-lily leaves. The great Fred may have seen us
approaching, but we probably interested him very little, for he took
hardly any notice of us and continued to be stirring with his cane
something which we could not see.
“Look!” said Rouletabille, “here again are the footmarks of the
escaping man; they skirt the lake here and finally disappear just
before this path, which leads to the high road to Epinay. The man
continued his flight to Paris.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked, “since these footmarks are not
continued on the path?”
“What makes me think that?—Why these _footprints_, which I expected to
find!” he cried, pointing to the sharply outlined imprint of a neat
boot. “See!”—and he called to Frédéric Larsan.
“Monsieur Fred, these neat footprints seem to have been made since the
discovery of the crime.”
“Yes, young man, yes, they have been carefully made,” replied Fred
without raising his head. “You see, there are steps that come, and
steps that go back.”
“And the man had a bicycle!” cried the reporter.
Here, after looking at the marks of the bicycle, which followed, going
and coming, the neat footprints, I thought I might intervene.
“The bicycle explains the disappearance of the murderer’s big
footprints,” I said. “The murderer, with his rough boots, mounted a
bicycle. His accomplice, the wearer of the neat boots, had come to wait
for him on the edge of the lake with the bicycle. It might be supposed
that the murderer was working for the other.”
“No, no!” replied Rouletabille with a strange smile. “I have expected
to find these footmarks from the very beginning. These are not the
footmarks of the murderer!”
“Then there were two?”
“No—there was but one, and he had no accomplice.”
“Very good!—Very good!” cried Frédéric Larsan.
“Look!” continued the young reporter, showing us the ground where it
had been disturbed by big and heavy heels; “the man seated himself
there, and took off his hobnailed boots, which he had worn only for the
purpose of misleading detection, and then no doubt, taking them away
with him, he stood up in his own boots, and quietly and slowly regained
the high road, holding his bicycle in his hand, for he could not
venture to ride it on this rough path. That accounts for the lightness
of the impression made by the wheels along it, in spite of the softness
of the ground. If there had been a man on the bicycle, the wheels would
have sunk deeply into the soil. No, no; there was but one man there,
the murderer on foot.”
“Bravo!—bravo!” cried Fred again, and coming suddenly towards us and,
planting himself in front of Monsieur Robert Darzac, he said to him:—
“If we had a bicycle here, we might demonstrate the correctness of the
young man’s reasoning, Monsieur Robert Darzac. Do you know whether
there is one at the château?”
“No!” replied Monsieur Darzac. “There is not. I took mine, four days
ago, to Paris, the last time I came to the château before the crime.”
“That’s a pity!” replied Fred, very coldly. Then, turning to
Rouletabille, he said: “If we go on at this rate, we’ll both come to
the same conclusion. Have you any idea, as to how the murderer got away
from The Yellow Room?”
“Yes,” said my young friend; “I have an idea.”
“So have I,” said Fred, “and it must be the same as yours. There are no
two ways of reasoning in this affair. I am waiting for the arrival of
my chief before offering any explanation to the examining magistrate.”
“Ah! Is the Chief of the Sûreté coming?”
“Yes, this afternoon. He is going to summon, before the magistrate, in
the laboratory, all those who have played any part in this tragedy. It
will be very interesting. It is a pity you won’t be able to be present.”
“I shall be present,” said Rouletabille confidently.
“Really—you are an extraordinary fellow—for your age!” replied the
detective in a tone not wholly free from irony. “You’d make a wonderful
detective—if you had a little more method—if you didn’t follow your
instincts and that bump on your forehead. As I have already several
times observed, Monsieur Rouletabille, you reason too much; you do not
allow yourself to be guided by what you have seen. What do you say to
the handkerchief full of blood, and the red mark of the hand on the
wall? You have seen the stain on the wall, but I have only seen the
handkerchief.”
“Bah!” cried Rouletabille, “the murderer was wounded in the hand by
Mademoiselle Stangerson’s revolver!”
“Ah!—a simply instinctive observation! Take care!—You are becoming
too strictly logical, Monsieur Rouletabille; logic will upset you
if you use it indiscriminatively. You are right, when you say that
Mademoiselle Stangerson fired her revolver, but you are wrong when you
say that she wounded the murderer in the hand.”
“I am sure of it,” cried Rouletabille.
Fred, imperturbable, interrupted him:—
“Defective observation—defective observation!—the examination of
the handkerchief, the numberless little round scarlet stains, the
impression of drops which I found in the tracks of the footprints,
at the moment when they were made on the floor, prove to me that the
murderer was not wounded at all. Monsieur Rouletabille, the murderer
bled at the nose!”
The great Fred spoke quite seriously. However, I could not refrain from
uttering an exclamation.
The reporter looked gravely at Fred, who looked gravely at him. And
Fred immediately concluded:—
“The man allowed the blood to flow into his hand and handkerchief, and
dried his hand on the wall. The fact is highly important,” he added,
“because there is no need of his being wounded in the hand for him to
be the murderer.”
Rouletabille seemed to be thinking deeply. After a moment he said:—
“There is something—a something, Monsieur Frédéric Larsan, much graver
than the misuse of logic—the disposition of mind in some detectives
which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities
of their preconceived ideas. You, already, have your idea about the
murderer, Monsieur Fred. Don’t deny it; and your theory demands that
the murderer should _not_ have been wounded in the hand, otherwise
it comes to nothing. And you have searched, and have found something
else. It’s dangerous, very dangerous, Monsieur Fred, to go from a
preconceived idea to find the proofs to fit it. That method may lead
you far astray. Beware of judicial error, Monsieur Fred, it will trip
you up!”
And laughing a little, in a slightly bantering tone, his hands in his
pockets, Rouletabille fixed his cunning eyes on the great Fred.
Frédéric Larsan silently contemplated the young reporter who pretended
to be as wise as himself. Shrugging his shoulders, he bowed to us and
moved quickly away, hitting the stones on his path with his stout cane.
Rouletabille watched his retreat, and then turned toward us, his face
joyous and triumphant.
“I shall beat him!” he cried. “I shall beat the great Fred, clever as
he is; I shall beat them all!”
And he danced a double shuffle. Suddenly he stopped. My eyes followed
his gaze; they were fixed on Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was looking
anxiously at the impression left by his feet side by side with the
elegant footmarks. There was not a particle of difference between them!
We thought he was about to faint. His eyes, bulging with terror,
avoided us, while his right hand, with a spasmodic movement, twitched
at the beard that covered his honest, gentle, and now despairing face.
At length regaining his self-possession, he bowed to us, and remarking,
in a changed voice, that he was obliged to return to the château, left
us.
“The deuce!” exclaimed Rouletabille.
He, also, appeared to be deeply concerned. From his pocket-book he
took a piece of white paper as I had seen him do before, and with
his scissors, cut out the shape of the neat bootmarks that were on
the ground. Then he fitted the new paper pattern with the one he had
previously made—the two were exactly alike. Rising, Rouletabille
exclaimed again: “The deuce!” Presently he added: “Yet I believe
Monsieur Robert Darzac to be an honest man.” He then led me on the road
to the Donjon Inn, which we could see on the highway, by the side of a
small clump of trees.
Chapter X
“We Shall Have to Eat Red Meat—Now”
The Donjon Inn was of no imposing appearance; but I like these
buildings with their rafters blackened with age and the smoke of their
hearths—these inns of the coaching-days, crumbling erections that will
soon exist in the memory only. They belong to the bygone days, they are
linked with history. They make us think of the _Road_, of those days
when highwaymen rode.
I saw at once that the Donjon Inn was at least two centuries
old—perhaps older. Under its sign-board, over the threshold, a man with
a crabbed-looking face was standing, seemingly plunged in unpleasant
thought, if the wrinkles on his forehead and the knitting of his brows
were any indication.
When we were close to him, he deigned to see us and asked us, in a tone
anything but engaging, whether we wanted anything. He was, no doubt,
the not very amiable landlord of this charming dwelling-place. As we
expressed a hope that he would be good enough to furnish us with a
breakfast, he assured us that he had no provisions, regarding us, as he
said this, with a look that was unmistakably suspicious.
“You may take _us_ in,” Rouletabille said to him, “we are not
policemen.”
“I’m not afraid of the police—I’m not afraid of anyone!” replied the
man.
I had made my friend understand by a sign that we should do better not
to insist; but, being determined to enter the inn, he slipped by the
man on the doorstep and was in the common room.
“Come on,” he said, “it is very comfortable here.”
A good fire was blazing in the chimney, and we held our hands to the
warmth it sent out; it was a morning in which the approach of winter
was unmistakable. The room was a tolerably large one, furnished with
two heavy tables, some stools, a counter decorated with rows of
bottles of syrup and alcohol. Three windows looked out on to the road.
A coloured advertisement lauded the many merits of a new vermouth.
On the mantelpiece was arrayed the innkeeper’s collection of figured
earthenware pots and stone jugs.
“That’s a fine fire for roasting a chicken,” said Rouletabille.
“We have no chicken—not even a wretched rabbit,” said the landlord.
“I know,” said my friend slowly; “I know—We shall have to eat red
meat—now.”
I confess I did not in the least understand what Rouletabille meant
by what he had said; but the landlord, as soon as he heard the words,
uttered an oath, which he at once stifled, and placed himself at our
orders as obediently as Monsieur Robert Darzac had done, when he heard
Rouletabille’s prophetic sentence—“The presbytery has lost nothing of
its charm, nor the garden its brightness.” Certainly my friend knew how
to make people understand him by the use of wholly incomprehensible
phrases. I observed as much to him, but he merely smiled. I should have
proposed that he give me some explanation; but he put a finger to his
lips, which evidently signified that he had not only determined not to
speak, but also enjoined silence on my part.
Meantime the man had pushed open a little side door and called to
somebody to bring him half a dozen eggs and a piece of beefsteak. The
commission was quickly executed by a strongly-built young woman with
beautiful blonde hair and large, handsome eyes, who regarded us with
curiosity.
The innkeeper said to her roughly:—
“Get out!—and if the Green Man comes, don’t let me see him.”
She disappeared. Rouletabille took the eggs, which had been brought to
him in a bowl, and the meat which was on a dish, placed all carefully
beside him in the chimney, unhooked a frying-pan and a gridiron, and
began to beat up our omelette before proceeding to grill our beefsteak.
He then ordered two bottles of cider, and seemed to take as little
notice of our host as our host did of him. The landlord let us do our
own cooking and set our table near one of the windows.
Suddenly I heard him mutter:
“Ah!—there he is.”
His face had changed, expressing fierce hatred. He went and glued
himself to one of the windows, watching the road. There was no need for
me to draw Rouletabille’s attention; he had already left our omelette
and had joined the landlord at the window. I went with him.
A man dressed entirely in green velvet, his head covered with a
huntsman’s cap of the same colour, was advancing leisurely, lighting a
pipe as he walked. He carried a fowling-piece slung at his back. His
movements displayed an almost aristocratic ease. He wore eye-glasses
and appeared to be about five and forty years of age. His hair as well
as his moustache were salt grey. He was remarkably handsome. As he
passed near the inn, he hesitated, as if asking himself whether or no
he should enter it; gave a glance towards us, took a few whiffs at his
pipe, and then resumed his walk at the same nonchalant pace.
Rouletabille and I looked at our host. His flashing eyes, his clenched
hands, his trembling lips, told us of the tumultuous feelings by which
he was being agitated.
“He has done well not to come in here to-day!” he hissed.
“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 château would turn their eyes away from a picture of him!”
“The concierges of the château 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 Bête 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-Geneviève, 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 Bête 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 Bête 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 Bête 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-Geneviève, 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 château, when a
considerable stir at the park gate attracted our attention. A carriage
had arrived and some people had come from the château to meet it.
Rouletabille pointed out to me a gentleman who descended from it.
“That’s the Chief of the Sûreté,” he said. “Now we shall see what
Frédéric Larsan has up his sleeve, and whether he is so much cleverer
than anybody else.”
The carriage of the Chief of the Sûreté 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 Sûreté 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 Frédéric 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 Sûreté.
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 dénouement 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 non-existence 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 château,” 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 Sûreté, 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 Sûreté, 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, who had 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 chances to life and death 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 good-night. 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 while 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 endeavours 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 château—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 snivelling,” 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.”
Monsieur Stangerson intervened:—
“What you say was impossible. I do not believe either in the guilt or
in the connivance of my concierges, though I cannot understand what
they were doing in the park at that late hour of the night. I say it
was impossible, because Madame Bernier held the lamp and did not move
from the threshold of the room; because I, as soon as the door was
forced open, threw myself on my knees beside my daughter, and no one
could have left or entered the room by the door, without passing over
her body and forcing his way by me! Daddy Jacques and the concierge had
but to cast a glance round the chamber and under the bed, as I had done
on entering, to see that there was nobody in it but my daughter lying
on the floor.”
“What do you think, Monsieur Darzac?” asked the magistrate.
Monsieur Darzac replied that he had no opinion to express.
Monsieur Dax, the Chief of the Sûreté, who, so far, had been listening
and examining the room, at length deigned to open his lips:—
“While search is being made for the criminal, we had better try to
find out the motive for the crime; that will advance us a little,” he
said. Turning towards Monsieur Stangerson, he continued, in the even,
intelligent tone indicative of a strong character, “I understand that
Mademoiselle was shortly to have been married?”
The professor looked sadly at Monsieur Robert Darzac.
“With my friend here, whom I should have been happy to call my son—with
Monsieur Robert Darzac.”
“Mademoiselle Stangerson is much better and is rapidly recovering from
her wounds. The marriage is simply delayed, is it not, Monsieur?”
insisted the Chief of the Sûreté.
“I hope so.”
“What! Is there any doubt about that?”
Monsieur Stangerson did not answer. Monsieur Robert Darzac seemed
agitated. I saw that his hand trembled as it fingered his watch-chain.
Monsieur Dax coughed, as did Monsieur de Marquet. Both were evidently
embarrassed.
“You understand, Monsieur Stangerson,” he said, “that in an affair
so perplexing as this, we cannot neglect anything; we must know all,
even the smallest and seemingly most futile thing concerning the
victim—information apparently the most insignificant. Why do you doubt
that this marriage will take place? You expressed a hope; but the hope
implies a doubt. Why do you doubt?”
Monsieur Stangerson made a visible effort to recover himself.
“Yes, Monsieur,” he said at length. “You are right. It will be best
that you should know something which, if I concealed it, might appear
to be of importance; Monsieur Darzac agrees with me in this.”
Monsieur Darzac, whose pallor at that moment seemed to me to be
altogether abnormal, made a sign of assent. I gathered he was unable to
speak.
“I want you to know then,” continued Monsieur Stangerson, “that my
daughter has sworn never to leave me, and adheres firmly to her oath,
in spite of all my prayers and all that I have argued to induce her to
marry. We have known Monsieur Robert Darzac many years. He loves my
child; and I believed that she loved him, because she only recently
consented to this marriage which I desire with all my heart. I am an
old man, Monsieur, and it was a happy hour to me when I knew that,
after I had gone, she would have at her side, one who loved her and
who would help her in continuing our common labours. I love and esteem
Monsieur Darzac both for his greatness of heart and for his devotion to
science. But, two days before the tragedy, for I know not what reason,
my daughter declared to me that she would never marry Monsieur Darzac.”
A dead silence followed Monsieur Stangerson’s words. It was a moment
fraught with suspense.
“Did Mademoiselle give you any explanation,—did she tell you what her
motive was?” asked Monsieur Dax.
“She told me she was too old to marry—that she had waited too long.
She said she had given much thought to the matter and while she had a
great esteem, even affection, for Monsieur Darzac, she felt it would
be better if things remained as they were. She would be happy, she
said, to see the relations between ourselves and Monsieur Darzac become
nearer to us, but only on the understanding that there would be no more
talk of marriage.”
“That is very strange!” muttered Monsieur Dax.
“Strange!” repeated Monsieur de Marquet.
“You’ll certainly not find the motive there, Monsieur Dax,” Monsieur
Stangerson said with a cold smile.
“In any case, the motive was not theft!” said the Chief impatiently.
“Oh! we are quite convinced of that!” cried the examining magistrate.
At that moment the door of the laboratory opened and the officer in
charge of the gendarmes entered and handed a card to the examining
magistrate. Monsieur de Marquet read it and uttered a half angry
exclamation:
“This is really too much!” he cried.
“What is it?” asked the Chief.
“It’s the card of a young reporter engaged on the ‘Epoque,’ a Monsieur
Joseph Rouletabille. It has these words written on it: ‘One of the
motives of the crime was robbery.’”
The Chief smiled.
“Ah!—young Rouletabille—I’ve heard of him—he is considered rather
clever. Let him come in.”
Monsieur Joseph Rouletabille was allowed to enter. I had made his
acquaintance in the train that morning on the way to Epinay-sur-Orge.
He had introduced himself almost against my wish into our compartment.
I had better say at once that his manners, and the arrogance with which
he assumed to know what was incomprehensible even to us, impressed him
unfavourably on my mind. I do not like journalists. They are a class
of writers to be avoided as the pest. They think that everything is
permissible and they respect nothing. Grant them the least favour,
allow them even to approach you, and you never can tell what annoyance
they may give you. This one appears to be scarcely twenty years old,
and the effrontery with which he dared to question us and discuss the
matter with us made him particularly obnoxious to me. Besides, he
had a way of expressing himself that left us guessing as to whether
he was mocking us or not. I know quite well that the “Epoque” is an
influential paper with which it is well to be on good terms, but the
paper ought not to allow itself to be represented by sneaking reporters.
Monsieur Joseph Rouletabille entered the laboratory, bowed to us, and
waited for Monsieur de Marquet to ask him to explain his presence.
“You pretend, Monsieur, that you know the motive for the crime,
and that that motive—in the face of all the evidence that has been
forthcoming—was robbery?”
“No, Monsieur, I do not pretend that. I do not say that robbery was the
motive for the crime, and I don’t believe it was.”
“Then, what is the meaning of this card?”
“It means that robbery was _one_ of the motives for the crime.”
“What leads you to think that?”
“If you will be good enough to accompany me, I will show you.”
The young man asked us to follow him into the vestibule, and we did.
He led us towards the lavatory and begged Monsieur de Marquet to kneel
beside him. This lavatory is lit by the glass door, and, when the
door was open, the light which penetrated was sufficient to light it
perfectly. Monsieur de Marquet and Monsieur Joseph Rouletabille knelt
down on the threshold, and the young man pointed to a spot on the
pavement.
“The stones of the lavatory have not been washed by Daddy Jacques for
some time,” he said; “that can be seen by the layer of dust that covers
them. Now, notice here, the marks of two large footprints and the black
ash they left where they have been. That ash is nothing else than the
charcoal dust that covers the path along which you must pass through
the forest, in order to get directly from Epinay to the Glandier. You
know there is a little village of charcoal-burners at that place, who
make large quantities of charcoal. What the murderer did was to come
here at midday, when there was nobody at the pavilion, and attempt his
robbery.”
“But what robbery?—Where do you see any signs of robbery? What proves
to you that a robbery has been committed?” we all cried at once.
“What put me on the trace of it,” continued the journalist,—
“Was this?” interrupted Monsieur de Marquet, still on his knees.
“Evidently,” said Rouletabille.
And Monsieur de Marquet explained that there were on the dust of
the pavement marks of two footsteps, as well as the impression,
freshly-made, of a heavy rectangular parcel, the marks of the cord with
which it had been fastened being easily distinguished.
“You have been here, then, Monsieur Rouletabille? I thought I had given
orders to Daddy Jacques, who was left in charge of the pavilion, not to
allow anybody to enter.”
“Don’t scold Daddy Jacques, I came here with Monsieur Robert Darzac.”
“Ah!—Indeed!” exclaimed Monsieur de Marquet, disagreeably, casting a
side-glance at Monsieur Darzac, who remained perfectly silent.
“When I saw the mark of the parcel by the side of the footprints, I had
no doubt as to the robbery,” replied Monsieur Rouletabille. “The thief
had not brought a parcel with him; he had made one here—a parcel with
the stolen objects, no doubt; and he put it in this corner intending
to take it away when the moment came for him to make his escape. He
had also placed his heavy boots beside the parcel,—for, see—there are
no marks of steps leading to the marks left by the boots, which were
placed side by side. That accounts for the fact that the murderer left
no trace of his steps when he fled from The Yellow Room, nor any in
the laboratory, nor in the vestibule. After entering The Yellow Room
in his boots, he took them off, finding them troublesome, or because
he wished to make as little noise as possible. The marks made by him
_in going_ through the vestibule and the laboratory were subsequently
washed out by Daddy Jacques. Having, for some reason or other, taken
off his boots, the murderer carried them in his hand and placed them
by the side of the parcel he had made,—by that time the robbery had
been accomplished. The man then returned to The Yellow Room and slipped
under the bed, where the mark of his body is perfectly visible on the
floor and even on the mat, which has been slightly moved from its place
and creased. Fragments of straw also, recently torn, bear witness to
the murderer’s movements under the bed.”
“Yes, yes,—we know all about that,” said Monsieur de Marquet.
“The robber had another motive for returning to hide under the bed,”
continued the astonishing boy-journalist. “You might think that he was
trying to hide himself quickly on seeing, through the vestibule window,
Monsieur and Mademoiselle Stangerson about to enter the pavilion. It
would have been much easier for him to have climbed up to the attic and
hidden there, waiting for an opportunity to get away, if his purpose
had been only flight.—No! No!—he _had_ to be in The Yellow Room.”
Here the Chief intervened.
“That’s not at all bad, young man. I compliment you. If we do not know
yet how the murderer succeeded in getting away, we can at any rate see
how he came in and committed the robbery. But what did he steal?”
“Something very valuable,” replied the young reporter.
At that moment we heard a cry from the laboratory. We rushed in and
found Monsieur Stangerson, his eyes haggard, his limbs trembling,
pointing to a sort of bookcase which he had opened, and which, we saw,
was empty. At the same instant he sank into the large armchair that was
placed before the desk and groaned, the tears rolling down his cheeks,
“I have been robbed again! For God’s sake, do not say a word of this to
my daughter. She would be more pained than I am.” He heaved a deep sigh
and added, in a tone I shall never forget: “After all, what does it
matter,—so long as she lives!”
“She will live!” said Monsieur Darzac, in a voice strangely touching.
“And we will find the stolen articles,” said Monsieur Dax. “But what
was in the cabinet?”
“Twenty years of my life,” replied the illustrious professor sadly, “or
rather of _our_ lives—the lives of myself and my daughter! Yes, our
most precious documents, the records of our secret experiments and our
labours of twenty years were in that cabinet. It is an irreparable loss
to us and, I venture to say, to science. All the processes by which I
had been able to arrive at the precious proof of the destructibility of
matter were there—all. The man who came wished to take all from me,—my
daughter and my work—my heart and my soul.”
And the great scientist wept like a child.
We stood around him in silence, deeply affected by his great distress.
Monsieur Darzac pressed closely to his side, and tried in vain to
restrain his tears—a sight which, for the moment, almost made me like
him, in spite of an instinctive repulsion which his strange demeanour
and his inexplicable anxiety had inspired me.
Monsieur Rouletabille alone,—as if his precious time and mission
on earth did not permit him to dwell in the contemplation on human
suffering—had, very calmly, stepped up to the empty cabinet and,
pointing at it, broke the almost solemn silence. He entered into
explanations, for which there was no need, as to why he had been led
to believe that a robbery had been committed, which included the
simultaneous discovery he had made in the lavatory, and the empty
precious cabinet in the laboratory. The first thing that had struck
him, he said, was the unusual form of that piece of furniture. It was
very strongly built of fire-proof iron, clearly showing that it was
intended for the keeping of most valuable objects. Then he noticed that
the key had been left in the lock. “One does not ordinarily have a
safe and leave it open!” he had said to himself. This little key, with
its brass head and complicated wards, had strongly attracted him,—its
presence had suggested robbery.
Monsieur de Marquet appeared to be greatly perplexed, as if he did not
know whether he ought to be glad of the new direction given to the
inquiry by the young reporter, or sorry that it had not been done by
himself. In our profession and for the general welfare, we have to put
up with such mortifications and bury selfish feelings. That was why
Monsieur de Marquet controlled himself and joined his compliments with
those of Monsieur Dax. As for Monsieur Rouletabille, he simply shrugged
his shoulders and said: “There’s nothing at all in that!” I should have
liked to box his ears, especially when he added: “You will do well,
Monsieur, to ask Monsieur Stangerson who usually kept that key?”
“My daughter,” replied Monsieur Stangerson, “she was never without it.”
“Ah! then that changes the aspect of things which no longer corresponds
with Monsieur Rouletabille’s ideas!” cried Monsieur de Marquet. “If
that key never left Mademoiselle Stangerson, the murderer must have
waited for her in her room for the purpose of stealing it; and the
robbery could not have been committed until after the attack had been
made on her. But after the attack four persons were in the laboratory!
I can’t make it out!”
“The robbery,” said the reporter, “could only have been committed
before the attack upon Mademoiselle Stangerson in her room. When the
murderer entered the pavilion he already possessed the brass-headed
key.”
“That is impossible,” said Monsieur Stangerson in a low voice.
“It is quite possible, Monsieur, as this proves.”
And the young rascal drew a copy of the “Epoque” from his pocket, dated
the 21st of October (I recall the fact that the crime was committed on
the night between the 24th and 25th), and showing us an advertisement,
he read:—
“‘Yesterday a black satin reticule was lost in the Grands Magasins de
la Louvre. It contained, amongst other things, a small key with a brass
head. A handsome reward will be given to the person who has found it.
This person must write, poste restante, bureau 40, to this address: M.
A. T. H. S. N.’ Do not these letters suggest Mademoiselle Stangerson?”
continued the reporter. “The ‘key with a brass head’—is not _this_
the key? I always read advertisements. In my business, as in yours,
Monsieur, one should always read the ‘personals.’ They are often the
keys to intrigues, that are not always brass-headed, but which are none
the less interesting. This advertisement interested me specially; the
woman of the key surrounded it with a kind of mystery. Evidently she
valued the key, since she promised a big reward for its restoration!
And I thought on these six letters: M. A. T. H. S. N. The first four at
once pointed to a Christian name; evidently I said Math is Mathilde.
But I could make nothing of the two last letters. So I threw the
journal aside and occupied myself with other matters. Four days later,
when the evening paper appeared with enormous head-lines announcing the
murder of Mademoiselle Stangerson, the letters in the advertisement
mechanically recurred to me. I had forgotten the two last letters, S.
N. When I saw them again I could not help exclaiming, ‘Stangerson!’ I
jumped into a cab and rushed into the bureau No. 40, asking: ‘Have you
a letter addressed to M. A. T. H. S. N.?’ The clerk replied that he
had not. I insisted, begged and entreated him to search. He wanted to
know if I were playing a joke on him, and then told me that he had had
a letter with the initials M. A. T. H. S. N., but he had given it up
three days ago, to a lady who came for it. ‘You come to-day to claim
the letter, and the day before yesterday another gentleman claimed it!
I’ve had enough of this,’ he concluded angrily. I tried to question him
as to the two persons who had already claimed the letter; but whether
he wished to entrench himself behind professional secrecy,—he may have
thought that he had already said too much,—or whether he was disgusted
at the joke that had been played on him—he would not answer any of my
questions.”
Rouletabille paused. We all remained silent. Each drew his own
conclusions from the strange story of the poste restante letter. It
seemed, indeed, that we now had a thread by means of which we should be
able to follow up this extraordinary mystery.
“Then it is almost certain,” said Monsieur Stangerson, “that my
daughter did lose the key, and that she did not tell me of it, wishing
to spare any anxiety, and that she begged whoever had found it to
write to the poste restante. She evidently feared that, by giving our
address, inquiries would have resulted that would have apprised me of
the loss of the key. It was quite logical, quite natural for her to
have taken that course—for I have been robbed once before.”
“Where was that, and when?” asked the Chief of the Sûreté.
“Oh! many years ago, in America, in Philadelphia. There were stolen
from my laboratory the drawings of two inventions that might have
made the fortune of a man. Not only have I never learnt who the thief
was, but I have never heard even a word of the object of the robbery,
doubtless because, in order to defeat the plans of the person who had
robbed me, I myself brought these two inventions before the public,
and so rendered the robbery of no avail. From that time on I have been
very careful to shut myself in when I am at work. The bars to these
windows, the lonely situation of this pavilion, this cabinet, which I
had specially constructed, this special lock, this unique key, all are
precautions against fears inspired by a sad experience.”
“Most interesting!” remarked Monsieur Dax.
Monsieur Rouletabille asked about the reticule. Neither Monsieur
Stangerson nor Daddy Jacques had seen it for several days, but a few
hours later we learned from Mademoiselle Stangerson herself that the
reticule had either been stolen from her, or she had lost it. She
further corroborated all that had passed just as her father had stated.
She had gone to the poste restante and, on the 23rd of October, had
received a letter which, she affirmed, contained nothing but a vulgar
pleasantry, which she had immediately burned.
To return to our examination, or rather to our conversation. I must
state that the Chief of the Sûreté, having inquired of Monsieur
Stangerson under what conditions his daughter had gone to Paris on the
20th of October, we learned that Monsieur Robert Darzac had accompanied
her, and Darzac had not been again seen at the château from that time
to the day after the crime had been committed. The fact that Monsieur
Darzac was with her in the Grands Magasins de la Louvre when the
reticule disappeared, could not pass unnoticed, and, it must be said,
strongly awakened our interest.
This conversation between magistrates, accused, victim, witnesses and
journalist, was coming to a close when quite a theatrical sensation—an
incident of a kind displeasing to Monsieur de Marquet—was produced.
The officer of the gendarmes came to announce that Frédéric Larsan
requested to be admitted,—a request that was at once complied with. He
held in his hand a heavy pair of muddy boots, which he threw on the
pavement of the laboratory.
“Here,” he said, “are the boots worn by the murderer. Do you recognise
them, Daddy Jacques?”
Daddy Jacques bent over them and, stupefied, recognised a pair of old
boots which he had, some time back, thrown into a corner of his attic.
He was so taken aback that he could not hide his agitation.
Then pointing to the handkerchief in the old man’s hand, Frédéric
Larsan said:—
“That’s a handkerchief astonishingly like the one found in The Yellow
Room.”
“I know,” said Daddy Jacques, trembling, “they are almost alike.”
“And then,” continued Frédéric Larsan, “the old Basque cap also found
in The Yellow Room might at one time have been worn by Daddy Jacques
himself. All this, gentlemen, proves, I think, that the murderer wished
to disguise his real personality. He did it in a very clumsy way—or,
at least, so it appears to us. Don’t be alarmed, Daddy Jacques; we
are quite sure that you were not the murderer; you never left the
side of Monsieur Stangerson. But if Monsieur Stangerson had not been
working that night and had gone back to the château after parting
with his daughter, and Daddy Jacques had gone to sleep in his attic,
no one would have doubted that he was the murderer. He owes his
safety, therefore, to the tragedy having been enacted too soon,—the
murderer, no doubt, from the silence in the laboratory, imagined that
it was empty, and that the moment for action had come. The man who
had been able to introduce himself here so mysteriously and to leave
so many evidences against Daddy Jacques, was, there can be no doubt,
familiar with the house. At what hour exactly he entered, whether in
the afternoon or in the evening, I cannot say. One familiar with the
proceedings and persons of this pavilion could choose his own time for
entering The Yellow Room.”
“He could not have entered it if anybody had been in the laboratory,”
said Monsieur de Marquet.
“How do we know that?” replied Larsan. “There was the dinner in the
laboratory, the coming and going of the servants in attendance. There
was a chemical experiment being carried on between ten and eleven
o’clock, with Monsieur Stangerson, his daughter, and Daddy Jacques
engaged at the furnace in a corner of the high chimney. Who can say
that the murderer—an intimate!—a friend!—did not take advantage of that
moment to slip into The Yellow Room, after having taken off his boots
in the lavatory?”
“It is very improbable,” said Monsieur Stangerson.
“Doubtless—but it is not impossible. I assert nothing. As to the escape
from the pavilion—that’s another thing, the most natural thing in the
world.”
For a moment Frédéric Larsan paused,—a moment that appeared to us a
very long time. The eagerness with which we awaited what he was going
to tell us may be imagined.
“I have not been in The Yellow Room,” he continued, “but I take it for
granted that you have satisfied yourselves that he could have left
the room only by way of the door; it is by the door, then, that the
murderer made his way out. At what time? At the moment when it was most
easy for him to do so; at the moment when it became most explainable—so
completely explainable that there can be no other explanation. Let
us go over the _moments_ which followed after the crime had been
committed. There was the first moment, when Monsieur Stangerson and
Daddy Jacques were close to the door, ready to bar the way. There was
the second moment, during which Daddy Jacques was absent and Monsieur
Stangerson was left alone before the door. There was a third moment,
when Monsieur Stangerson was joined by the concierge. There was a
fourth moment, during which Monsieur Stangerson, the concierge and his
wife and Daddy Jacques were before the door. There was a fifth moment,
during which the door was burst open and The Yellow Room entered. The
moment at which the flight is explainable is the very moment when there
was the least number of persons before the door. There was one moment
when there was but one person,—Monsieur Stangerson. Unless a complicity
of silence on the part of Daddy Jacques is admitted—in which I do not
believe—the door was opened in the presence of Monsieur Stangerson
alone and the man escaped.
“Here we must admit that Monsieur Stangerson had powerful reasons for
not arresting, or not causing the arrest of the murderer, since he
allowed him to reach the window in the vestibule and closed it after
him!—That done, Mademoiselle Stangerson, though horribly wounded, had
still strength enough, and no doubt in obedience to the entreaties
of her father, to refasten the door of her chamber, with both the
bolt and the lock, before sinking on the floor. We do not know who
committed the crime; we do not know of what wretch Monsieur and
Mademoiselle Stangerson are the victims, but there is no doubt that
_they_ both know! The secret must be a terrible one, for the father had
not hesitated to leave his daughter to die behind the door which she
had shut upon herself,—terrible for him to have allowed the assassin
to escape. For there is no other way in the world to explain the
murderer’s flight from The Yellow Room!”
The silence which followed this dramatic and lucid explanation was
appalling. We all of us felt grieved for the illustrious professor,
so driven into a corner by the pitiless logic of Frédéric Larsan, so
forced to confess the whole truth of his martyrdom or to keep silent,
and thus make a yet more terrible admission. The man himself, a
veritable statue of sorrow, raised his hand with a gesture so solemn
that we bowed our heads to it as before something sacred. He then
pronounced these words, in a voice so loud that it seemed to exhaust
him:—
“I swear by the head of my suffering child that I never for an instant
left the door of her chamber after hearing her cries for help; that
that door was not opened while I was alone in the laboratory; and that,
finally, when we entered The Yellow Room, my three domestics and I, the
murderer was no longer there! I swear I do not know the murderer!”
Must I say it,—in spite of the solemnity of Monsieur Stangerson’s
words, we did not believe in his denial? Frédéric Larsan had shown us
the truth and it was not so easily given up.
Monsieur de Marquet announced that the conversation was at an end,
and as we were about to leave the laboratory, Joseph Rouletabille
approached Monsieur Stangerson, took him by the hand with the greatest
respect, and I heard him say:—
“_I_ believe you, Monsieur.”
I here close the citation which I have thought it my duty to make from
Monsieur Maleine’s narrative. I need not tell the reader that all that
passed in the laboratory was immediately and faithfully reported to me
by Rouletabille.
Chapter XII
Frédéric Larsan’s Cane
It was not till six o’clock that I left the château, taking with me the
article hastily written by my friend in the little sitting-room which
Monsieur Robert Darzac had placed at our disposal. The reporter was
to sleep at the château, taking advantage of the to me inexplicable
hospitality offered him by Monsieur Robert Darzac, to whom Monsieur
Stangerson, in that sad time, left the care of all his domestic
affairs. Nevertheless he insisted on accompanying me to the station at
Epinay. In crossing the park, he said to me:—
“Frédéric is really very clever and has not belied his reputation.
Do you know how he came to find Daddy Jacques’s boots?—Near the spot
where we noticed the traces of the neat boots and the disappearance
of the rough ones, there was a square hole, freshly made in the moist
ground, where a stone had evidently been removed. Larsan searched for
that stone without finding it, and at once imagined that it had been
used by the murderer with which to sink the boots in the lake. Fred’s
calculation was an excellent one, as the success of his search proves.
That escaped me; but my mind was turned in another direction by the
large number of false indications of his track which the murderer left,
and by the measure of the black foot-marks corresponding with that of
Daddy Jacques’s boots, which I had established without his suspecting
it, on the floor of The Yellow Room. All which was a proof, in my eyes,
that the murderer had sought to turn suspicion on to the old servant.
Up to that point, Larsan and I are in accord; but no further. It is
going to be a terrible matter; for I tell you he is working on wrong
lines, and I—I, must fight him with _nothing_!”
I was surprised at the profoundly grave accent with which my young
friend pronounced the last words.
He repeated:
“Yes—terrible!—terrible! For it is fighting with nothing, when you have
only an idea to fight with.”
At that moment we passed by the back of the château. Night had come. A
window on the first floor was partly open. A feeble light came from it
as well as some sounds which drew our attention. We approached until
we had reached the side of a door that was situated just under the
window. Rouletabille, in a low tone, made me understand, that this was
the window of Mademoiselle Stangerson’s chamber. The sounds which had
attracted our attention ceased, then were renewed for a moment, and
then we heard stifled sobs. We were only able to catch these words,
which reached us distinctly: “My poor Robert!”—Rouletabille whispered
in my ear:—
“If we only knew what was being said in that chamber, my inquiry would
soon be finished.”
He looked about him. The darkness of the evening enveloped us; we could
not see much beyond the narrow path bordered by trees, which ran behind
the château. The sobs had ceased.
“If we can’t hear we may at least try to see,” said Rouletabille.
And, making a sign to me to deaden the sound of my steps, he led me
across the path to the trunk of a tall beech tree, the white bole of
which was visible in the darkness. This tree grew exactly in front of
the window in which we were so much interested, its lower branches
being on a level with the first floor of the château. From the
height of those branches one might certainly see what was passing in
Mademoiselle Stangerson’s chamber. Evidently that was what Rouletabille
thought, for, enjoining me to remain hidden, he clasped the trunk with
his vigorous arms and climbed up. I soon lost sight of him amid the
branches, and then followed a deep silence.
In front of me, the open window remained lighted, and I saw no shadow
move across it. I listened, and presently from above me these words
reached my ears:—
“After you!”
“After you, pray!”
Somebody was overhead, speaking,—exchanging courtesies. What was my
astonishment to see on the slippery column of the tree two human forms
appear and quietly slip down to the ground. Rouletabille had mounted
alone, and had returned with another.
“Good evening, Monsieur Sainclair!”
It was Frédéric Larsan. The detective had already occupied the post
of observation when my young friend had thought to reach it alone.
Neither noticed my astonishment. I explained that to myself by the fact
that they must have been witnesses of some tender and despairing scene
between Mademoiselle Stangerson, lying in her bed, and Monsieur Darzac
on his knees by her pillow. I guessed that each had drawn different
conclusions from what they had seen. It was easy to see that the scene
had strongly impressed Rouletabille in favour of Monsieur Robert
Darzac; while, to Larsan, it showed nothing but consummate hypocrisy,
acted with finished art by Mademoiselle Stangerson’s fiancé.
As we reached the park gate, Larsan stopped us.
“My cane!” he cried. “I left it near the tree.”
He left us, saying he would rejoin us presently.
“Have you noticed Frédéric Larsan’s cane?” asked the young reporter,
as soon as we were alone. “It is quite a new one, which I have never
seen him use before. He seems to take great care of it—it never leaves
him. One would think he was afraid it might fall into the hands of
strangers. I never saw it before to-day. Where did he find it? It isn’t
natural that a man who had never before used a walking-stick should,
the day after the Glandier crime, never move a step without one. On the
day of our arrival at the château, as soon as he saw us, he put his
watch in his pocket and picked up his cane from the ground—a proceeding
to which I was perhaps wrong not to attach some importance.”
We were now out of the park. Rouletabille had dropped into silence. His
thoughts were certainly still occupied with Frédéric Larsan’s new cane.
I had proof of that when, as we came near to Epinay, he said:—
“Frédéric Larsan arrived at the Glandier before me; he began his
inquiry before me; he has had time to find out things about which I
know nothing. Where did he find that cane?” Then he added: “It is
probable that his suspicion—more than that, his reasoning—has led him
to lay his hand on something tangible. Has this cane anything to do
with it? Where the deuce could he have found it?”
As I had to wait twenty minutes for the train at Epinay, we entered a
cabaret. Almost immediately the door opened and Frédéric Larsan made
his appearance, brandishing his famous cane.
“I found it!” he said laughingly.
The three of us seated ourselves at a table. Rouletabille never took
his eyes off the cane; he was so absorbed that he did not notice a sign
Larsan made to a railway employé, a young man with a chin decorated
by a tiny blond and ill-kept beard. On the sign he rose, paid for his
drink, bowed, and went out. I should not myself have attached any
importance to the circumstance, if it had not been recalled to my mind,
some months later, by the reappearance of the man with the beard at one
of the most tragic moments of this case. I then learned that the youth
was one of Larsan’s assistants and had been charged by him to watch
the going and coming of travellers at the station of Epinay-sur-Orge.
Larsan neglected nothing in any case on which he was engaged.
I turned my eyes again on Rouletabille.
“Ah!—Monsieur Fred!” he said, “when did you begin to use a
walking-stick? I have always seen you walking with your hands in your
pockets!”
“It is a present,” replied the detective.
“Recent?” insisted Rouletabille.
“No, it was given to me in London.”
“Ah, yes, I remember—you have just come from London. May I look at it?”
“Oh!—certainly!”
Fred passed the cane to Rouletabille. It was a large yellow bamboo with
a crutch handle and ornamented with a gold ring.
Rouletabille, after examining it minutely, returned it to Larsan, with
a bantering expression on his face, saying:—
“You were given a French cane in London!”
“Possibly,” said Fred, imperturbably.
“Read the mark there, in tiny letters: Cassette, 6a, Opera.”
“Cannot English people buy canes in Paris?”
When Rouletabille had seen me into the train, he said:—
“You’ll remember the address?”
“Yes,—Cassette, 6a, Opera. Rely on me; you shall have word to-morrow
morning.”
That evening, on reaching Paris, I saw Monsieur Cassette, dealer in
walking-sticks and umbrellas, and wrote to my friend:—
“A man unmistakably answering to the description of Monsieur Robert
Darzac—same height, slightly stooping, putty-coloured overcoat, bowler
hat—purchased a cane similar to the one in which we are interested, on
the evening of the crime, about eight o’clock. Monsieur Cassette had
not sold another such cane during the last two years. Fred’s cane is
new. It is quite clear that it’s the same cane. Fred did not buy it,
since he was in London. Like you, I think that he found it somewhere
near Monsieur Robert Darzac. But if, as you suppose, the murderer was
in The Yellow Room for five, or even six hours, and the crime was not
committed until towards midnight, the purchase of this cane proves an
incontestable alibi for Darzac.”
Chapter XIII
“The Presbytery Has Lost Nothing of its Charm, nor the Garden its
Brightness”
A week after the occurrence of the events I have just recounted—on
the 2nd of November, to be exact—I received at my home in Paris the
following telegraphic message: “Come to the Glandier by the earliest
train. Bring revolvers. Friendly greetings. Rouletabille.”
I have already said, I think, that at that period, being a young
barrister with but few briefs, I frequented the Palais de Justice
rather for the purpose of familiarising myself with my professional
duties than for the defence of the widow and orphan. I could,
therefore, feel no surprise at Rouletabille disposing of my time.
Moreover, he knew how keenly interested I was in his journalistic
adventures in general and, above all, in the murder at the Glandier.
I had not heard from him for a week, nor of the progress made with
that mysterious case, except by the innumerable paragraphs in the
newspapers and by the very brief notes of Rouletabille in the “Epoque.”
Those notes had divulged the fact that traces of human blood had
been found on the mutton-bone, as well as fresh traces of the blood
of Mademoiselle Stangerson—the old stains belonged to other crimes,
probably dating years back.
It may be easily imagined that the crime engaged the attention of the
press throughout the world. No crime known had more absorbed the minds
of people. It appeared to me, however, that the judicial inquiry was
making but very little progress; and I should have been very glad, if,
on the receipt of my friend’s invitation to rejoin him at the Glandier,
the despatch had not contained the words, “Bring revolvers.”
That puzzled me greatly. Rouletabille telegraphing for revolvers
meant that there might be occasion to use them. Now, I confess it
without shame, I am not a hero. But here was a friend, evidently in
danger, calling on me to go to his aid. I did not hesitate long; and
after assuring myself that the only revolver I possessed was properly
loaded, I hurried towards the Orleans station. On the way I remembered
that Rouletabille had asked for two revolvers; I therefore entered a
gunsmith’s shop and bought an excellent weapon for my friend.
I had hoped to find him at the station at Epinay; but he was not there.
However, a cab was waiting for me and I was soon at the Glandier.
Nobody was at the gate, and it was only on the threshold of the château
that I met the young man. He saluted me with a friendly gesture and
threw his arms about me, inquiring warmly as to the state of my health.
When we were in the little sitting-room of which I have spoken,
Rouletabille made me sit down.
“It’s going badly,” he said.
“What’s going badly?” I asked.
“Everything.”
He came nearer to me and whispered:
“Frédéric Larsan is working with might and main against Darzac.”
This did not astonish me. I had seen the poor show Mademoiselle
Stangerson’s fiancé had made at the time of the examination of the
footprints. However, I immediately asked:—
“What about that cane?”
“It is still in the hands of Frédéric Larsan. He never lets go of it.”
“But doesn’t it prove the alibi for Monsieur Darzac?”
“Not at all. Gently questioned by me, Darzac denied having, on that
evening, or on any other, purchased a cane at Cassette’s. However,”
said Rouletabille, “I’ll not swear to anything; Monsieur Darzac has
such strange fits of silence that one does not know exactly what to
think of what he says.”
“To Frédéric Larsan this cane must mean a piece of very damaging
evidence. But in what way? The time when it was bought shows it could
not have been in the murderer’s possession.”
“The time doesn’t worry Larsan. He is not obliged to adopt my theory
which assumes that the murderer got into The Yellow Room between five
and six o’clock. But there’s nothing to prevent him assuming that
the murderer got in between ten and eleven o’clock at night? At that
hour Monsieur and Mademoiselle Stangerson, assisted by Daddy Jacques,
were engaged in making an interesting chemical experiment in the part
of the laboratory taken up by the furnaces. Larsan says, unlikely as
that may seem, that the murderer may have slipped behind them. He has
already got the examining magistrate to listen to him. When one looks
closely into it, the reasoning is absurd, seeing that the ‘intimate’—if
there is one—must have known that the professor would shortly leave
the pavilion, and that the ‘friend’ had only to put off operating till
after the professor’s departure. Why should he have risked crossing the
laboratory while the professor was in it? And then, when he had got
into The Yellow Room?—
“There are many points to be cleared up before Larsan’s theory can be
admitted. I sha’n’t waste my time over it, for my theory won’t allow
me to occupy myself with mere imagination. Only, as I am obliged for
the moment to keep silent, and Larsan sometimes talks, he may finish
by coming out openly against Monsieur Darzac,—if I’m not there,”
added the young reporter proudly. “For there are surface evidences
against Darzac, much more convincing than the cane, which remains
incomprehensible to me, all the more so as Larsan does not in the least
hesitate to let Darzac see him with it!—I understand many things in
Larsan’s theory, but I can’t make anything of that cane.”
“Is he still at the château?”
“Yes; he hardly ever quits it!—He sleeps there, as I do, at the request
of Monsieur Stangerson, who has done for him what Monsieur Robert
Darzac has done for me. In spite of the accusation made by Larsan that
Monsieur Stangerson knows who the murderer is he yet affords him every
facility for arriving at the truth,—just as Darzac is doing for me.”
“But you are convinced of Darzac’s innocence?”
“At one time I did believe in the possibility of his guilt. That was
when we arrived here for the first time. The time has come for me to
tell you what has passed between Monsieur Darzac and myself.”
Here Rouletabille interrupted himself and asked me if I had brought the
revolvers. I showed him them. Having examined both, he pronounced them
excellent, and handed them back to me.
“Shall we have any use for them?” I asked.
“No doubt; this evening. We shall pass the night here—if that won’t
tire you?”
“On the contrary,” I said with an expression that made Rouletabille
laugh.
“No, no,” he said, “this is no time for laughing. You remember the
phrase which was the ‘Open sesame’ of this château full of mystery?”
“Yes,” I said, “perfectly,—‘The presbytery has lost nothing of its
charm, nor the garden its brightness.’ It was the phrase which you
found on the half-burned piece of paper amongst the ashes in the
laboratory.”
“Yes; at the bottom of the paper, where the flame had not reached,
was this date: 23rd of October. Remember this date, it is highly
important. I am now going to tell you about that curious phrase. On the
evening before the crime, that is to say, on the 23rd, Monsieur and
Mademoiselle Stangerson were at a reception at the Élysée. I know that,
because I was there on duty, having to interview one of the savants of
the Academy of Philadelphia, who was being fêted there. I had never
before seen either Monsieur or Mademoiselle Stangerson. I was seated in
the room which precedes the Salon des Ambassadeurs, and, tired of being
jostled by so many noble personages, I had fallen into a vague reverie,
when I scented near me the perfume of the lady in black.
“Do you ask me what is the ‘perfume of the lady in black’? It must
suffice you to know that it is a perfume of which I am very fond,
because it was that of a lady who had been very kind to me in my
childhood,—a lady whom I had always seen dressed in black. The lady
who, that evening, was scented with the perfume of the lady in black,
was dressed in white. She was wonderfully beautiful. I could not help
rising and following her. An old man gave her his arm, and, as they
passed, I heard voices say: ‘Professor Stangerson and his daughter.’ It
was in that way I learned who it was I was following.
“They met Monsieur Robert Darzac, whom I knew by sight. Professor
Stangerson, accosted by Mr. Arthur William Rance, one of the American
savants, seated himself in the great gallery, and Monsieur Robert
Darzac led Mademoiselle Stangerson into the conservatory. I followed.
The weather was very mild that evening; the garden doors were open.
Mademoiselle Stangerson threw a fichu shawl over her shoulders and I
plainly saw that it was she who was begging Monsieur Darzac to go with
her into the garden. I continued to follow, interested by the agitation
plainly exhibited by the bearing of Monsieur Darzac. They slowly passed
along the wall abutting on the Avenue Marigny. I took the central
alley, walking parallel with them, and then crossed over for the
purpose of getting nearer to them. The night was dark, and the grass
deadened the sound of my steps. They had stopped under the vacillating
light of a gas jet and appeared to be both bending over a paper held
by Mademoiselle Stangerson, reading something which deeply interested
them. I stopped in the darkness and silence.
“Neither of them saw me, and I distinctly heard Mademoiselle Stangerson
repeat, as she was refolding the paper: ‘The presbytery has lost
nothing of its cha
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/1685