The Mystery of the Yellow Room
now, joined us at the same moment, and I cried out to him:
“He is dead!—is dead!”
“So much the better,” he said. “Take him into the vestibule of the
château.” Then as if on second thought, he said: “No!—no! Let us put
him in his own room.”
Rouletabille knocked at the door. Nobody answered. Naturally, this did
not surprise me.
“He is evidently not there, otherwise he would have come out,” said the
reporter. “Let us carry him to the vestibule then.”
Since reaching the dead _shadow_, a thick cloud had covered the
moon and darkened the night, so that we were unable to make out the
features. Daddy Jacques, who had now joined us, helped us to carry the
body into the vestibule, where we laid it down on the lower step of the
stairs. On the way, I had felt my hands wet from the warm blood flowing
from the wounds.
Daddy Jacques flew to the kitchen and returned with a lantern. He held
it close to the face of the dead shadow, and we recognised the keeper,
the man called by the landlord of the Donjon Inn the Green Man, whom,
an hour earlier, I had seen come out of Arthur Rance’s chamber carrying
a parcel. But what I had seen I could only tell Rouletabille later,
when we were alone.
* * * * *
Rouletabille and Frédéric Larsan experienced a cruel disappointment
at the result of the night’s adventure. They could only look in
consternation and stupefaction at the body of the Green Man.
Daddy Jacques showed a stupidly sorrowful face and with silly
lamentations kept repeating that we were mistaken—the keeper could not
be the assailant. We were obliged to compel him to be quiet. He could
not have shown greater grief had the body been that of his own son.
I noticed, while all the rest of us were more or less undressed and
barefooted, that he was fully clothed.
Rouletabille had not left the body. Kneeling on the flagstones by
the light of Daddy Jacques’s lantern he removed the clothes from the
body and laid bare its breast. Then snatching the lantern from Daddy
Jacques, he held it over the corpse and saw a gaping wound. Rising
suddenly he exclaimed in a voice filled with savage irony:—
“The man you believe to have been shot was killed by the stab of a
knife in his heart!”
I thought Rouletabille had gone mad; but, bending over the body, I
quickly satisfied myself that Rouletabille was right. Not a sign of
a bullet anywhere—the wound, evidently made by a sharp blade, had
penetrated the heart.
Chapter XXIII
The Double Scent
I had hardly recovered from the surprise into which this new discovery
had plunged me, when Rouletabille touched me on the shoulder and asked
me to follow him into his room.
“What are we going to do there?”
“To think the matter over.”
I confess I was in no condition for doing much thinking, nor could
I understand how Rouletabille could so control himself as to be
able calmly to sit down for reflection when he must have known that
Mademoiselle Stangerson was at that moment almost on the point of
death. But his self-control was more than I could explain. Closing the
door of his room, he motioned me to a chair and, seating himself before
me, took out his pipe. We sat there for some time in silence and then I
fell asleep.
When I awoke it was daylight. It was eight o’clock by my watch.
Rouletabille was no longer in the room. I rose to go out when the door
opened and my friend re-entered. He had evidently lost no time.
“How about Mademoiselle Stangerson?” I asked him.
“Her condition, though very alarming, is not desperate.”
“When did you leave this room?”
“Towards dawn.”
“I guess you have been hard at work?”
“Rather!”
“Have you found out anything?”
“Two sets of footprints!”
“Do they explain anything?”
“Yes.”
“Have they anything to do with the mystery of the keeper’s body?”
“Yes; the mystery is no longer a mystery. This morning, walking round
the château, I found two distinct sets of footprints, made at the same
time, last night. They were made by two persons walking side by side. I
followed them from the court towards the oak grove. Larsan joined me.
They were the same kind of footprints as were made at the time of the
assault in The Yellow Room—one set was from clumsy boots and the other
was made by neat ones, except that the big toe of one of the sets was
of a different size from the one measured in The Yellow Room incident.
I compared the marks with the paper patterns I had previously made.
“Still following the tracks of the prints, Larsan and I passed out of
the oak grove and reached the border of the lake. There they turned off
to a little path leading to the high road to Epinay where we lost the
traces in the newly macadamised highway.
“We went back to the château and parted at the courtyard. We met again,
however, in Daddy Jacques’s room to which our separate trains of
thinking had led us both. We found the old servant in bed. His clothes
on the chair were wet through and his boots very muddy. He certainly
did not get into that state in helping us to carry the body of the
keeper. It was not raining then. Then his face showed extreme fatigue
and he looked at us out of terror-stricken eyes.
“On our first questioning him he told us that he had gone to bed
immediately after the doctor had arrived. On pressing him, however, for
it was evident to us he was not speaking the truth, he confessed that
he had been away from the château. He explained his absence by saying
that he had a headache and went out into the fresh air, but had gone
no further than the oak grove. When we then described to him the whole
route he had followed, he sat up in bed trembling.
“‘And you were not alone!’ cried Larsan.
“‘Did you see it then?’ gasped Daddy Jacques.
“‘What?’ I asked.
“‘The phantom—the black phantom!’
“Then he told us that for several nights he had seen what he kept
calling the black phantom. It came into the park at the stroke of
midnight and glided stealthily through the trees; it appeared to him
to pass through the trunks of the trees. Twice he had seen it from
his window, by the light of the moon, and had risen and followed the
strange apparition. The night before last he had almost overtaken it;
but it had vanished at the corner of the donjon. Last night, however,
he had not left the château, his mind being disturbed by a presentiment
that some new crime would be attempted. Suddenly he saw the black
phantom rush out from somewhere in the middle of the court. He followed
it to the lake and to the high road to Epinay, where the phantom
suddenly disappeared.
“‘Did you see his face?’ demanded Larsan.
“‘No!—I saw nothing but black veils.’
“‘Did you go out after what passed on the gallery?’
“‘I could not!—I was terrified.’
“‘Daddy Jacques,’ I said, in a threatening voice, ‘you did not _follow_
it; you and the phantom walked to Epinay together—arm in arm!’
“‘No!’ he cried, turning his eyes away, ‘I did not. It came on to pour,
and—I turned back. I don’t know what became of the black phantom.’
“We left him, and when we were outside I turned to Larsan, looking him
full in the face, and put my question suddenly to take him off his
guard:
“‘An accomplice?’
“‘How can I tell?’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘You can’t be
sure of anything in a case like this. Twenty-four hours ago I would
have sworn that there was no accomplice!’ He left me saying he was off
to Epinay.”
“Well, what do you make of it?” I asked Rouletabille, after he had
ended his recital. “Personally I am utterly in the dark. I can’t make
anything out of it. What do you gather?”
“Everything! Everything!” he exclaimed. “But,” he said abruptly, “let’s
find out further about Mademoiselle Stangerson.”
Chapter XXIV
Rouletabille Knows the Two Halves of the Murderer
Mademoiselle Stangerson had been for the second time almost murdered.
Unfortunately, she was in too weak a state to bear the severer injuries
of this second attack as well as she had those of the first. She had
received three wounds in the breast from the murderer’s knife, and she
lay long between life and death. Her strong physique, however, saved
her; but though she recovered physically it was found that her mind had
been affected. The slightest allusion to the terrible incident sent her
into delirium, and the arrest of Robert Darzac which followed on the
day following the tragic death of the keeper seemed to sink her fine
intelligence into complete melancholia.
Robert Darzac arrived at the château towards half-past nine. I saw him
hurrying through the park, his hair and clothes in disorder and his
face a deadly white. Rouletabille and I were looking out of a window in
the gallery. He saw us, and gave a despairing cry: “I’m too late!”
Rouletabille answered: “She lives!”
A minute later Darzac had gone into Mademoiselle Stangerson’s room and,
through the door, we could hear his heart-rending sobs.
* * * * *
“There’s a fate about this place!” groaned Rouletabille. “Some infernal
gods must be watching over the misfortunes of this family!—If I had not
been drugged, I should have saved Mademoiselle Stangerson. I should
have silenced him forever. And the keeper would not have been killed!”
* * * * *
Monsieur Darzac came in to speak with us. His distress was terrible.
Rouletabille told him everything: his preparations for Mademoiselle
Stangerson’s safety; his plans for either capturing or for disposing of
the assailant for ever; and how he would have succeeded had it not been
for the drugging.
“If only you had trusted me!” said the young man, in a low tone, “if
you had but begged Mademoiselle Stangerson to confide in me!—But, then,
everybody here distrusts everybody else, the daughter distrusts her
father, and even her lover. While you ask me to protect her she is
doing all she can to frustrate me. That was why I came on the scene too
late!”
At Monsieur Robert Darzac’s request Rouletabille described the whole
scene. Leaning on the wall, to prevent himself from falling, he had
made his way to Mademoiselle Stangerson’s room, while we were running
after the supposed murderer. The ante-room door was open and when he
entered he found Mademoiselle Stangerson lying partly thrown over the
desk. Her dressing-gown was dyed with the blood flowing from her bosom.
Still under the influence of the drug, he felt he was walking in a
horrible nightmare.
He went back to the gallery automatically, opened a window, shouted
his order to fire, and then returned to the room. He crossed the
deserted boudoir, entered the drawing-room, and tried to rouse Monsieur
Stangerson who was lying on a sofa. Monsieur Stangerson rose stupidly
and let himself be drawn by Rouletabille into the room where, on seeing
his daughter’s body, he uttered a heart-rending cry. Both united their
feeble strength and carried her to her bed.
On his way to rejoin us Rouletabille passed by the desk. On the floor,
near it, he saw a large packet. He knelt down and, finding the wrapper
loose, he examined it, and made out an enormous quantity of papers
and photographs. On one of the papers he read: “New differential
electroscopic condenser. Fundamental properties of substance
intermediary between ponderable matter and imponderable ether.” Strange
irony of fate that the professor’s precious papers should be restored
to him at the very time when an attempt was being made to deprive him
of his daughter’s life! What are papers worth to him now?
* * * * *
The morning following that awful night saw Monsieur de Marquet once
more at the château, with his Registrar and gendarmes. Of course we