The Mystery of the Yellow Room
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?”