The Secret of the Night
thing, the poor dear soul. If Matrena had been a monster the occasion
was too good. Natacha’s absence, her solitary presence for a quarter of
an hour in the empty villa, all would have urged Matrena, whom I sent
alone to search under the carpet in the dining-room, to draw the last
nails from the board if she was really guilty of having drawn the
others. Natacha would have been lost then! Matrena returned sincerely,
tragically happy at not having found anything new, and now I have the
material proof that I needed. Morally and physically Matrena is removed
from it. So I am going to speak to her about the hat-pin. I believe that
the matter is urgent on that side rather than on the side of the nails
in the floor.
VI. THE MYSTERIOUS HAND
After the departure of Matrena, Rouletabille turned his attention to the
garden. Neither the marshal of the court nor the officers were there any
longer. The three men had disappeared. Rouletabille wished to know
at once where they had gone. He went rapidly to the gate, named the
officers and the marshal to Ermolai, and Ermolai made a sign that they
had passed out. Even as he spoke he saw the marshal’s carriage disappear
around a corner of the road. As to the two officers, they were nowhere
on the roadway. He was surprised that the marshal should have gone
without seeing Matrena or the general or himself, and, above all, he was
disquieted by the disappearance of the orderlies. He gathered from the
gestures of Ermolai that they had passed before the lodge only a
few minutes after the marshal’s departure. They had gone together.
Rouletabille set himself to follow them, traced their steps in the soft
earth of the roadway and soon they crossed onto the grass. At this point
the tracks through the massed ferns became very difficult to follow. He
hurried along, bending close to the ground over such traces as he could
see, which continually led him astray, but which conducted him finally
to the thing that he sought. A noise of voices made him raise his head
and then throw himself behind a tree. Not twenty steps from him Natacha
and Boris were having an animated conversation. The young officer held
himself erect directly in front of her, frowning and impatient. Under
the uniform cloak that he had wrapped about him without having bothered
to use the sleeves, which were tossed up over his chest, Boris had
his arms crossed. His entire attitude indicated hauteur, coldness and
disdain for what he was hearing. Natacha never appeared calmer or more
mistress of herself. She talked to him rapidly and mostly in a low
voice. Sometimes a word in Russian sounded, and then she resumed her
care to speak low. Finally she ceased, and Boris, after a short silence,
in which he had seemed to reflect deeply, pronounced distinctly these
words in French, pronouncing them syllable by syllable, as though to
give them additional force:
“You ask a frightful thing of me.”
“It is necessary to grant it to me,” said the young girl with singular
energy. “You understand, Boris Alexandrovitch! It is necessary.”
Her gaze, after she had glanced penetratingly all around her and
discovered nothing suspicious, rested tenderly on the young officer,
while she murmured, “My Boris!” The young man could not resist either
the sweetness of that voice, nor the captivating charm of that glance.
He took the hand she extended toward him and kissed it passionately. His
eyes, fixed on Natacha, proclaimed that he granted everything that she
wished and admitted himself vanquished. Then she said, always with that
adorable gaze upon him, “This evening!” He replied, “Yes, yes. This
evening! This evening!” upon which Natacha withdrew her hand and made a
sign to the officer to leave, which he promptly obeyed. Natacha remained
there still a long time, plunged in thought. Rouletabille had already
taken the road back to the villa. Matrena Petrovna was watching for his
return, seated on the first step of the landing on the great staircase
which ran up from the veranda. When she saw him she ran to him. He had
already reached the dining-room.
“Anyone in the house?” he asked.
“No one. Natacha has not returned, and...”
“Your step-daughter is coming in now. Ask her where she has been, if she
has seen the orderlies, and if they said they would return this evening,
in case she answers that she has seen them.”
“Very well, little domovoi doukh. The orderlies left without my seeing
when they went.”
“Ah,” interrupted Rouletabille, “before she arrives, give me all her
hat-pins.”
“What!”
“I say, all her hat-pins. Quickly!”
Matrena ran to Natacha’s chamber and returned with three enormous
hat-pins with beautifully-cut stones in them.
“These are all?”
“They are all I have found. I know she has two others. She has one on
her head, or two, perhaps; I can’t find them.”
“Take these back where you found them,” said the reporter, after
glancing at them.
Matrena returned immediately, not understanding what he was doing.
“And now, your hat-pins. Yes, your hat-pins.”
“Oh, I have only two, and here they are,” said she, drawing them from
the toque she had been wearing and had thrown on the sofa when she
re-entered the house.
Rouletabille gave hers the same inspection.
“Thanks. Here is your step-daughter.”
Natacha entered, flushed and smiling.
“Ah, well,” said she, quite breathless, “you may boast that I had to
search for you. I made the entire round, clear past the Barque. Has the
promenade done papa good?”
“Yes, he is asleep,” replied Matrena. “Have you met Boris and Michael?”
She appeared to hesitate a second, then replied:
“Yes, for an instant.”
“Did they say whether they would return this evening?”
“No,” she replied, slightly troubled. “Why all these questions?”
She flushed still more.
“Because I thought it strange,” parried Matrena, “that they went away
as they did, without saying goodby, without a word, without inquiring
if the general needed them. There is something stranger yet. Did you see
Kaltsof with them, the grand-marshal of the court?”
“No.”
“Kaltsof came for a moment, entered the garden and went away again
without seeing us, without saying even a word to the general.”
“Ah,” said Natacha.
With apparent indifference, she raised her arms and drew out her
hat-pins. Rouletabille watched the pin without a word. The young girl
hardly seemed aware of their presence. Entirely absorbed in strange
thoughts, she replaced the pin in her hat and went to hang it in the
veranda, which served also as vestibule. Rouletabille never quitted her
eyes. Matrena watched the reporter with a stupid glance. Natacha crossed
the drawing-room and entered her chamber by passing through her little
sitting-room, through which all entrance to her chamber had to be made.
That little room, though, had three doors. One opened into Natacha’s
chamber, one into the drawing-room, and the third into the little
passage in a corner of the house where was the stairway by which the
servants passed from the kitchens to the ground-floor and the
upper floor. This passage had also a door giving directly upon the
drawing-room. It was certainly a poor arrangement for serving the
dining-room, which was on the other side of the drawing-room and behind
the veranda, such a chance laying-out of a house as one often sees in
the off-hand planning of many places in the country.
Alone again with Rouletabille, Matrena noticed that he had not lost
sight of the corner of the veranda where Natacha had hung her hat.
Beside this hat there was a toque that Ermolai had brought in. The old
servant had found it in some corner of the garden or the conservatory
where he had been. A hat-pin stuck out of that toque also.
“Whose toque is that?” asked Rouletabille. “I haven’t seen it on the
head of anyone here.”
“It is Natacha’s,” replied Matrena.
She moved toward it, but the young man held her back, went into the
veranda himself, and, without touching it, standing on tiptoe, he
examined the pin. He sank back on his heels and turned toward Matrena.
She caught a glimpse of fleeting emotion on the face of her little
friend.
“Explain to me,” she said.
But he gave her a glance that frightened her, and said low:
“Go and give orders right away that dinner be served in the veranda.
All through dinner it is absolutely necessary that the door of Natacha’s
sitting-room, and that of the stairway passage, and that of the veranda
giving on the drawing-room remain open all the time. Do you understand
me? As soon as you have given your orders go to the general’s chamber
and do not quit the general’s bedside, keep it in view. Come down to
dinner when it is announced, and do not bother yourself about anything
further.”
So saying, he filled his pipe, lighted it with a sort of sigh of relief,
and, after a final order to Matrena, “Go,” he went into the garden,
puffing great clouds. Anyone would have said he hadn’t smoked in a week.
He appeared not to be thinking but just idly enjoying himself. In fact,
he played like a child with Milinki, Matrena’s pet cat, which he pursued
behind the shrubs, up into the little kiosque which, raised on piles,
lifted its steep thatched roof above the panorama of the isles that
Rouletabille settled down to contemplate like an artist with ample
leisure.
The dinner, where Matrena, Natacha and Rouletabille were together again,
was lively. The young man having declared that he was more and more
convinced that the mystery of the bomb in the bouquet was simply a play
of the police, Natacha reinforced his opinion, and following that they
found themselves in agreement on about everything else. For himself, the
reporter during that conversation hid a real horror which had seized him
at the cynical and inappropriate tranquillity with which the young lady
received all suggestions that accused the police or that assumed the
general no longer ran any immediate danger. In short, he worked, or at
least believed he worked, to clear Natacha as he had cleared Matrena,
so that there would develop the absolute necessity of assuming a third
person’s intervention in the facts disclosed so clearly by Koupriane
where Matrena or Natacha seemed alone to be possible agents. As he
listened to Natacha Rouletabille commenced to doubt and quake just as he
had seen Matrena do. The more he looked into the nature of Natacha the
dizzier he grew. What abysmal obscurities were there in her nature!
Nothing interesting happened during dinner. Several times, in spite of
Rouletabille’s obvious impatience with her for doing it, Matrena went up
to the general. She returned saying, “He is quiet. He doesn’t sleep. He
doesn’t wish anything. He has asked me to prepare his narcotic. It is
too bad. He has tried in vain, he cannot get along without it.”
“You, too, mamma, ought to take something to make you sleep. They say
morphine is very good.”
“As for me,” said Rouletabille, whose head for some few minutes had been
dropping now toward one shoulder and now toward another, “I have no need
of any narcotic to make me sleep. If you will permit me, I will get to
bed at once.”
“Eh, my little domovoi doukh, I am going to carry you there in my arms.”
Matrena extended her large round arms ready to take Rouletabille as
though he had been a baby.
“No, no. I will get up there all right alone,” said Rouletabille, rising
stupidly and appearing ashamed of his excessive sleepiness.
“Oh, well, let us both accompany him to his chamber,” said Natacha, “and
I will wish papa good-night. I’m eager for bed myself. We will all make
a good night of it. Ermolai and Gniagnia will watch with the schwitzar
in the lodge. Things are reasonably arranged now.”
They all ascended the stairs. Rouletabille did not even go to see the