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de Bercy Affair

<h2>CHAPTER X THE DIARY, AND ROSALIND</h2> Strange as a process of nature is the way in which events, themselves unimportant, work into one another to produce some foredestined result that shall astonish the world. The sudden appearance of Inspector Clarke before Pauline Dessaulx at the front door of Mrs. Marsh's lodgings produced by its shock a thorough upset in the girl's moral and physical being. And in Clarke himself that diary of Rose de Bercy which Pauline handed him produced a hilarity, an almost drunken levity of mind, the results of which levity and of Pauline's upset dovetailed one with the other to bring about an effect which lost none of its singularity because it was preordained. To Clarke the diary was a revelation! Moreover, it was one of those sweet revelations which placed the fact of his own wit and wisdom in a clearer light than he had seen those admitted qualities before, for it showed that, though working in the dark, he had been guided aright by that special candle of understanding that must have been lit within him before his birth. [pg 170] "Well, fancy that," cried he again and again in a kind of surprise. "I was right all the time!" He sat late at night, coatless and collarless, at a table over the diary, Mrs. Clarke in the next room long since asleep, London asleep, the very night asleep from earth right up to heaven. Four days before a black cat had been adopted into the household. Surely it was that which had brought him the luck to get hold of the diary!—so easily, so unexpectedly. Pussie was now perched on the table, her purr the sole sound in the quietude, and Clarke, who would have scoffed at a hint of superstition, was stroking her, as he read for the third time those last pages written on the day of her death by the unhappy Frenchwoman. <blockquote> ... I so seldom dream, that it has become the subject of remark, and Dr. Naurocki of the Institute said once that it is because I am such a "perfect animal." It is well to be a perfect something: but that much I owe only to my father and mother. I am afraid I am not a perfect anything else. A perfect liar, perhaps; a perfect adventuress; using as stepping-stones those whose fond hearts love me; shallow, thin within; made of hollow-ringing tin from my skin to the tissue of my liver. Oh, perhaps I might have done better for myself! Suppose I had stayed with Marguerite and le pre Armaud on the farm, and helped to milk the two cows, and met some rustic lover at the stile at dusk, and married him in muslin? It might have been as well! There is something in me that is famished and starved, and decayed, something that pines and sighs because of its utter thinness—I suppose it is what they call "the soul." I have lied until I am become a lie, an unreality, a Nothing. I seem to see myself [pg 171] clearly to-day; and if I could repent now, I'd say "I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him 'Father.'" Too late now, I suppose. Marguerite would draw her skirts away from touching me, though the cut of the skirt would set me smiling; and, if the fatted calf was set before me on a soiled table-cloth, I should be ill. Too late! You can't turn back the clock's hands: the clock stops. God help me, I feel horribly remorseful. Why should I have dreamt it? I so seldom dream! and I have never, I think, dreamt with such living vividness. I thought I saw my father and Marguerite standing over my dead body, staring at me. I saw them, and I saw myself, and my face was all bruised and wounded; and Marguerite said: "Well, she sought for it," and my father's face twitched, and suddenly he sobbed out: "I wish to Heaven I had died for her!" and my dead ears on the bed heard, and my dead heart throbbed just once again at him, and then was dead for ever. </blockquote> Clarke did not know that he was reading literature, but he did know that this was more exciting than any story he had ever set eyes on. He stopped, lit a pipe, and resumed. <blockquote> I saw it, I heard it, though it was in a black world that it happened, a world all draped in crape; black, black. But what is the matter with me to-day? Is there any other woman so sad in this great city, I wonder? I have opened one of the bottles of Old Veuve, so there are only seven left now; and I have drunk two full glasses of it. But it has made no difference; and I have to dine with Lady Knox-Florestan, and go with her to the opera; and Osborne may be coming. They will think me a death's-head, and catch melancholy from me like a fever. I do not know why I dreamt it, and why I cannot forget. It seems rather strange. Is anything going to happen to me, really? Oh, inside this breast of mine there is a bell tolling, and a funeral moving to the tomb this afternoon. It is as if I had drunk of some lugubrious drug that [pg 172] turns the human bosom to wormwood. Is it my destiny to die suddenly, and lie in an early grave? No, not that! Let me be in rags, and shrunken, with old, old eyes and toothless gums, but give me life! Let me say I am still alive! </blockquote> "By Jove!" growled Clarke, chewing his pipe, "that rings in my ears!" <blockquote> Yet I have had curious tokens, hints, fancies, of late. Four nights ago, as I was driving down Pall Mall from Lady Sinclair's diner dansant—it was about eleven-thirty—I saw a man in the shadow at a corner who I could have sworn for a moment was F. I didn't see his face, for as the carriage approached him, he turned his back, and it was that turning of the back, I think, that made me observe him. Suppose all the time F. knows of me?—knows who Rose de Bercy is! I never wanted to have that Academy portrait painted, and I must have been mad to consent in the end. If F. saw it? If he knows? What would he do? His nature is capable of ravaging flames of passion! Suppose he killed me? But could a poor woman be so unlucky? No, he doesn't know, he can't, fate is not so hard. Then there is that wretched Pauline—she shan't be in this house another week. My quarrel with her this morning was the third, and the most bitter of all. Really, that girl knows too much of me to permit of our living any longer under one roof; and, what is more, she has twice dropped hints lately which certainly seem to bear the interpretation that she knows of my work in Berlin for the Russian Government. Oh, but that must only be the madness of my fancy! Two persons, and two only, in the whole world know of it—how could she, possibly? Yet she said in her Friday passion: "You will not be a long liver, Madame, you have been too untrue to your dupes." Untrue to my dupes! Which dupes? My God, if she meant the Anarchists! </blockquote> Clarke's face was a study when he came to that word. It wore the beatific expression of the man who is justified in his own judgment. [pg 173] <blockquote> Just suppose that she knows! For that she is mixed up with some of them to some uncertain extent I have guessed for two years. And if they knew that I have actually been a Government agent; they would do for me, oh, they would, I know, it would be all up with me. Three months ago Sauriac Paulus in the promenoire at Covent Garden, said to me: "By the way, do you know that you have been condemned to death?" I forget à propos of what he said it, and have never given it a thought from that day. He was bantering me, laughing in the lightest vein, but—God! it never struck me like this before!—Suppose there was earnest under the jest, deep-hidden under? He is a deep, deep, evil beast, that man. Those were his words—I remember distinctly. "By the way, do you know that you have been condemned to death?" "By the way:" his heavy face shook with chuckling. And it never once till now entered my head!—Oh, but, after all, I must be horribly ill to be having such thoughts this day! The beast, of course, didn't mean anything. Think, though, of saying, "by the way?"—the terrible, evil beast. Oh, yes, I am ill. I have begun to die. This night, may be, my soul shall be required of me. I hear Marguerite saying again, "Well, she sought for it," and my father's bitter sobbing, "I wish to Heaven I had died for her!" But, if I am killed this day, it will be by ... or by C. E. F.... </blockquote> That last dash after the "F." was not, Clarke saw, meant as a dash, for it was a long curved line, as if her elbow had been struck, or she herself violently startled. She had probably intended, this time, to write the name in full, but the interruption stopped her. At the spot of the first dash lay thick ink-marks—really made by Pauline Dessaulx—and Clarke, cute enough to see this, now commenced to scratch out the ink blot with a penknife, and after the black dust was scraped away, he used a damp sponge. [pg 174] It was a delicate, slow operation, his idea being that, since under those layers of ink lay a written name, if he removed the layers with dainty care, then he would see the name beneath. And this was no doubt true in theory, but in practice no care was dainty enough to do the trick with much success. He did, however, manage to see the shape of some letters, and, partly with the aid of his magnifying glass, partly with the aid of his imagination, he seemed to make out the word "Janoc." The murder, then, was committed either by Janoc, or by C. E. F.—this, as the mantle of the night wore threadbare, and some gray was showing through it in the east, Clarke became certain of. Who was C. E. F.? There was Furneaux, of course. Those were his initials, and as the name of Furneaux arose in his mind, Clarke's head dropped back over his chair-back, and a long, delicious spasm of laughter shook him. For the idea that it might, in very truth, be Furneaux who was meant never for one instant occurred to him. He assumed that it must needs be some French or Russian C. E. F., but the joke of the coincidence of the initials with Furneaux's, who had charge of the case, into whose hands the case had been given by Winter over his (Clarke's) head, was so rich, that he resolved to show the diary to Winter, and to try and keep from bursting out laughing, while he said: "Look here, sir—this is your Furneaux!" Clarke, indeed, had heard at the inquest how Furneaux [pg 175] had been seen on the evening of the murder in Osborne's museum, from which the "celt" and the dagger had vanished. Hearing this, his mind had instantly remembered the "C. E. F." of the diary, and had been amazed at such a coincidence. But his brain never sprang to grapple with the possibility that Rose de Bercy might, in truth, be afraid of Furneaux. So, whoever "C. E. F." might be, Clarke had no interest in him, never suspected him: his thoughts had too long been preoccupied with one idea—Anarchists, Janoc, Anarchists—to receive a new bent with real perspicacity and interest. And the diary confirmed him in this opinion: for she had actually been condemned to death as an agent of the Russian Government months before. At last he stood up, stretching his arms in weariness before tumbling into bed. "Well! to think that I was right!" he said again, and again he laughed. When he was going out in the morning, he put some more ink-marks over the "Janoc" in the diary—for he did not mean that any other than himself should lay his hand on the murderer of Rose de Bercy—and when he arrived at Scotland Yard, he showed the diary to the Chief Inspector. Winter laid it on the desk before him, and as he read where Clarke's finger pointed, his face went as colorless as the paper he was looking at. A laugh broke out behind him. "Furneaux!" [pg 176] And Winter, glancing round, saw Clarke's face merry, like carved ivory in a state of gayety, showing a tooth or two lacking, and browned fangs. For a moment he stared at Clarke, without comprehension, till the absurd truth rushed in upon him that Clarke was really taking it in jest. Then he, too, laughed even more loudly. "Ha! ha!—yes, Furneaux! 'Pon my honor, the funniest thing! Furneaux it is for sure!" "Officer in charge of the case!" "Ripping! By gad, I shall have to apply for a warrant!" Finding his chief in this rare good humor, Clarke thought to obtain a little useful information. "Do you know any of the Anarchist crowd with those initials, sir?" he asked. "I think I do; yes, a Frenchman. Or it may be a German. There is no telling whom she means—no telling. But where on earth did you come across this diary?" "You remember the lady's-maid, Pauline, the girl who couldn't be found to give evidence at the inquest? I was following the Anarchist Antonio, who seemed to be prowling after some ladies in a cab a day or two ago, and the door that was opened to the ladies when their cab stopped was opened by—Pauline." Then he told how he had obtained the diary, and volunteered a theory as to the girl's possession of it. "She must have picked it up in the flat on coming [pg 177] home from the Exhibition on the night of the murder, and kept it." They discussed the circumstances fully, and Clarke went away, his conscience clear of having kept the matter dark from headquarters, yet confident that he had not put Winter on the track of his own special prey, Janoc. And as his footsteps became faint and fainter behind the closed door, Winter let his head fall low, almost upon the desk, and so he remained, hidden, as it were, from himself, a long while, until suddenly springing up with a face all fiery, he cried aloud in a rage: "Oh, no more sentiment! By the Lord, I'm done with it. From this hour Inspector Furneaux is under the eye of the police." Furneaux himself was then, for the second time that week, at Mrs. Marsh's lodgings in Porchester Gardens in secret and urgent talk with Rosalind. "You will think that I am always hunting you down, Miss Marsh," he said genially on entering the room. "You know best how to describe your profession," she murmured a little bitterly, for his parting shot at their last meeting had struck deep. "But this time I come more definitely on business," he said, seating himself uninvited, which was a strange thing for Furneaux to do, since he was a gentleman by birth and in manners, "and as I am in a whirl of occupation just now, I will come at once to the point." [pg 178] "To say 'I will come at once to the point' is to put off coming to it—for while you are saying it——" "True. The world uses too many words——" "It is a round world—hence its slowness in coming to a point." "I take the hint. Yet you leave me rather breathless." "Pray tell me why, Inspector Furneaux." "For admiration of so quick and witty a lady. But I shall make you dumb by what I am going to suggest to-day. I want to turn you into a detective——" "It is a point, then. You want me to be sharp?" "You are already that. The question is, what effect did what I last said have upon your mind?" "About your finding the blood-spotted clothes in Mr. Osborne's trunk?" she asked, looking down at his tired and worn face from her superior height, and suddenly moved to listen to him attentively. "Well, it was somewhat astounding at first. In fact, it sounded almost convincing. But then, I had already believed in Mr. Osborne's innocence in this matter. Nor am I over-easily shaken, I think, in my convictions. If he confessed his guilt to me, then I would believe—but not otherwise." "Good," said Furneaux, "you have said that well, though I am sure he does not deserve it. Anyhow, since you persist in believing in his innocence, you must also believe that every new truth must be in [pg 179] his favor, and so may be willing to turn yourself into the detective I suggested.... You have, I think, a servant here named Pauline Dessaulx?" This girl he had been seeking for some time, and had been gladly surprised to have her open the door to him on the day of his first visit to Rosalind. "She did not know me," he explained, "but I have twice seen her in the streets with her former mistress. Do you know who that mistress was? Rose de Bercy!" Rosalind started as though a whip had cracked across her shoulders. She even turned round, looked at the door, tested it by the handle to see if it was closed, and stood with her back to it. Furneaux seemingly ignored her agitation. "Now, you were at the inquest, Miss Marsh," he said. "You heard the description given by Miss Prout of the Saracen dagger missing from Mr Osborne's museum—the dagger with which the crime was probably committed. Well, I want to get that into my hands. It is lying in Pauline Dessaulx's trunk, and I ask you to secure it for me." "In Pauline's trunk," Rosalind repeated after him, quite too dazed in her astonishment to realize the marvels that this queer little man was telling her. "To be quite accurate," he continued, "I am not altogether sure of what I say. But that is where it should be, in her trunk, and with it you should find a second dagger, or knife, which I am also anxious to obtain, and if you happen to come across a little [pg 180] book, a diary, with a blue morocco cover, I shall be extremely pleased to lay my hand on it." "How can you possibly know all this?" Rosalind asked, her eyes wide open with wonder now, and forgetful, for the moment, of the pain he had caused her. "Going up and down in the earth, like Satan, and then sitting and thinking of it," he said, with a quick turn of mordant humor. "But is it a bargain, now? Of course, I could easily pounce upon the girl's trunk myself: but I want the objects to be stolen from her, since I don't wish to have her frightened—not quite yet." "Do you, then, suspect this girl of having—of being—the guilty hand, Inspector Furneaux?" asked Rosalind, her very soul aghast at the notion. "I have already intimated to you the person who is open to suspicion," answered Furneaux promptly, "a man, not a woman—though, if you find these objects in the girl's trunk, that may lighten the suspicion against the man." A gleam appeared one instant in his eyes, and died out as quickly, but this time Rosalind saw it. She pulled a chair close to him and sat down, her fingers clasped tightly over her right knee—eager to serve, to help. But, then, to steal, to pry into a servant's boxes, that was not a nice action. And this Pauline Dessaulx was a girl who had interested her, had shown a singular liking for her. She mentioned her qualms. [pg 181] "At the bidding of the police," urged Furneaux—"in the interests of justice—to serve a possibly innocent man, who is also a friend—surely that is something." "I might have been able to do it yesterday," murmured Rosalind, distraught, "but she is better to-day. I will tell you. For two days the girl has been ill—in a kind of hysteria or nervous collapse—a species of neurosis, I think—altogether abnormal and strange. I—you may as well know—wrote a letter to Mr. Osborne on the day you first came, a little before you came. I gave it her to post—she may have seen the address. Then you appeared. After you were gone, I sent him a telegram, also by Pauline's hand, telling him not to read my letter——" "Ah, you see you did believe that what I told you proved his guilt——" "Hear me.... No, I did not believe that. But—you had impressed me with the fact that Mr. Osborne has been, may have been, already sufficiently successful in attracting the sympathies of young ladies. I had been at the inquest—I had seen there in the box his exquisite secretary, of whose perfect ways of acting you gave me some knowledge that day, and I thought it might be rash of me to seem to be in rivalry with so charming a lady. Now you see my motive—I am often frank. So, when you were gone, I sent the telegram forbidding the reading of my letter; and the next morning I received a very [pg 182] brief note from Mr. Osborne saying that the letter was awaiting my wishes unopened." "How did he know your address, if he did not open the letter?" asked Furneaux. Rosalind started like a child caught in a fault. She was so agitated that she had not asked herself that question. As a matter of fact, it was Hylda Prout, having tracked Rosalind from Waterloo, who had given Osborne the address for her own reasons: Hylda had told Osborne, on hearing his fretful exclamation of annoyance, that she knew the address of a Miss Marsh from an old gentleman who had apparently come up from Tormouth with him and her, and had called to see Osborne when Osborne was out. "He got the address from some source, I don't know what," Rosalind said, with a rather wondering gaze at Furneaux's face; "but the point is, that the girl, Pauline, saw my letter to him, and the telegram; and last night, coming home from an outing in quite a broken-down and enfeebled state, she said to me with tears in her eyes: 'Oh, he is innocent! Oh, do not judge him harshly, Miss Marsh! Oh, it was not he who did it!' and much more of that sort. Then she collapsed and began to scream and kick, was got to bed, and a doctor sent for, who said that she had an attack of neurasthenia due to mental strain. And I was sitting by her bedside quite a long while, so that I might then—if I had known—But I think she is better to-day." [pg 183] "It is not too late, if she is still in bed," said Furneaux. "Sit with her again till she is asleep, and then see if the trunk is unlocked, or if you can find the key——" "Only it doesn't seem quite fair to——" "Oh, quite, in this case, I assure you," said Furneaux. "Whether this girl committed that murder with her own hand or not——" "But how could she? She was at an Exhibition——!" "Was she? Are you sure? I was saying that whether the girl committed the murder with her own hand or not——" "If she did, it could not have been done by the person you said that you suspect!" "No? Why speak so confidently? Have you not heard of such things as accomplices? She might have helped Osborne! He might have helped her! But I was saying—for the third time—that whether the girl committed the murder with her own hand or not, I am in a position to give you my assurance that she is not a lawful citizen, and that you needn't have the least compunction in doing anything whatever to her trunk or her—in the cause of truth." "Well, if you say so——" Rosalind said, and Furneaux stood up to go. It was then two o'clock in the afternoon. By five o'clock Rosalind had in her hand the Saracen dagger, and another dagger—though not, of course, [pg 184] the diary, which Clarke had carried off long ago. At about three she had gone to sit by Pauline's bedside, and here, with the leather trunk strapped down, not two feet from her right hand, had remained over an hour. Pauline lay quiet, with a stare in her wide-open eyes, gazing up at the ceiling. Every now and again her body would twist into a gawky and awkward kind of position, a stupid expression would overspread her face, a vacant smile play on her lips; then, after some minutes, she would lie naturally again, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, about half-past four, she had had a kind of seizure; her body stiffened and curved, she uttered shrieks which chilled Rosalind's blood, and then her whole frame settled into a steady, strong agitation, which set the chamber all in a tremble, and could not be stilled by the two servants who had her wrists in their grip. When this was over, she dropped off into a deep sleep. And now, as soon as Rosalind was again left alone with the invalid, she went to the trunk, unstrapped it, found it locked. But she was not long in discovering the key in the pocket of the gown which Pauline had had on when she fell ill. She opened the trunk, looking behind her at the closed eyes of the exhausted girl, and then, in feverish haste, she ransacked its contents. No daggers, however, and no diary were there. She then searched methodically through the room—an improvised wardrobe—a [pg 185] painted chest of drawers—kneaded and felt the bed, searched underneath—no daggers. She now stood in the middle of the room, her forehead knit, her eyes wandering round, all her woman's cunning at work in them. Then she walked straight, with decision, to a small shelf on the wall, full of cheap books; began to draw out each volume, and on drawing out the third, she saw that the daggers were lying there behind the row. Her hand hovered during some seconds of hesitancy over the horrible blades, one of which had so lately been stained so vilely. Then she took them, and replaced the books. One of the daggers was evidently the Saracen weapon that she had heard described. The label was still on it; the other was thick-bladed, of an Italian type. She ran out with them, put them in a glove box, and, rather flurriedly, almost by stealth, got out of the house to take her trophies to Furneaux. She drove to the address that he had given her, an eagerness in her, a gladness that the truth would now appear, and through her—most unexpectedly! Quite apart from her friendship for Osborne, she had an abstract interest in this matter of the murder, since from the first, before seeing Osborne, she had said that he was innocent, but her mother had seemed to lean to the opposite belief, and they were in hostile camps on the subject, like two good-natured people of different political convictions dwelling in the same house. [pg 186] She bade her driver make haste to Furneaux's; but midway, seeing herself passing close to Mayfair, gave the man Osborne's address, thinking that she would go and get her unopened letter, and, if she saw Osborne himself, offer him a word of cheer—an "all will be well." Her driver rapped for her at the house door, she sitting still in the cab, a hope in her that Osborne would come out. It seemed long since she had last seen his face, since she had heard that sob of his at the sun-dial at the Abbey. The message went inwards that Miss Marsh had called for a letter directed to Mr. Osborne by her; and her high spirits were damped when Jenkins reappeared at the door to say that the letter would be brought her, Mr. Osborne himself having just gone out. In sober fact, Osborne had not stirred out of the house for days, lest her promised call "in person" should occur when he was absent, but at last, unable to bear it any longer, he had made a dash to see her, and was at that moment venturing to knock at her door. However, though the news was damping, she had a store of high spirits that afternoon, which pushed her to leave a note scribbled with her gold pencil on the back of a letter—an act fraught with terrible sufferings for her in the sequel. This was her message: <blockquote> I will write again. Meantime, do not lose hope! I have discovered that your purloined dagger has been in the possession [pg 187] of the late lady's-maid, Pauline. "A small thing, but mine own!" I am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's. R. M. </blockquote> "What will he think of 'I have discovered'?" she asked herself, smiling, pleased; "he will say 'a witch'!" She folded it crossways with a double bend so that it would not open, and leaning out of the cab, handed it to Jenkins. As he disappeared with it, Hylda Prout stood in the doorway with Rosalind's letter to Osborne—Hylda's freckles showing strong against her rather pale face. She held the flap-side of the envelope forward from the first, to show the stains of gum on it. As she approached the cab, Rosalind's neck stiffened a little. Their eyes met malignly, and dwelt together several seconds, in a stillness like that of somber skies before lightnings fly out. Truly, Rupert Osborne's millions were unable to buy him either happiness or luck, for it was the worst of ill-luck that he should not have been at home just then. <hr class="hr2" /> [pg 188] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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