Delphi complete works of.., p.335
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 335
“He is fooling you. — You ‘re no match for him,” growled the general.
“On the contrary, my dear duke — he seems to me to be doing his best to accuse himself, to heap up testimony against himself. It is inexplicable. I have absolute proof now that he did not arrive until Monday morning, two days after the murder. And as that scent grows weak, I discover another, much more reliable, where everything coincides, — the hour, the day, the motive, and the reports of my agents, as well as anonymous letters which I am receiving.”
Delcrous paused as a footman appeared on the stoop at the open door-window. “Who is there? I gave orders that we should not be disturbed,” roared the general, in his military voice. The servant vanished in dismay. In his place a gigantic shadow filled the whole width of the door:
“Excuse me, Monsieur le Duc.”
“Ah! it’s you, Sautecœur.”
Hastily and noiselessly Delcrous stepped up to the general: “I beg you to receive this man; we will talk further after you have seen him.”
The general shrugged his shoulders, and said, pointing to a door in the hangings: “Go in there; I will call you.” — Then, turning toward the window: “Come in, Eugène.”
The Indian, thin and shrunken, walking unsteadily, seemed to have newly risen from a sick bed. His voice, too, had lost its ring, although he strove to speak firmly and to stand erect, being in full uniform, under arms, and in his master’s presence.
“Monsieur le Duc,” he said, standing with his eyes on the carpet, “I beg you to accept my resignation.”
“Why?”
“My son is going to America with his wife. The children want me to go with them; but not until — until I have settled my account with the law.”
The duke moved uneasily in his chair: “The law? Why, what has happened to you?”
“A villainous piece of work.”
“Explain.”
“I don’t know whether I can,” said the keeper, in a low tone. He leaned against the mantel, trembling so that the barrel of the gun slung over his shoulder beat a tattoo on the marble. He had to resume his erect posture to tell his story. A simple but ghastly story it was. Having been ordered out on Friday night to beat up a gang of poachers, he was returning home about two in the morning, when a man leaped from a window of his house, into the yard of the Hermitage, a few steps from him. It was very dark. He supposed it was a robber, fired at random, hit his man; and when he went up to him to see who it was —
A brutal voice cut him short:
“You lie.”
The keeper reared under the insult:
“General!”
“I say that you lie. That was not the way you killed the prince. I am sure of it; I know what you did as well as if I were your conscience; but I want to hear you tell it yourself. Come, speak — but no, wait.” — He called, sharply: “Delcrous!”
When he saw the Corbeil magistrate, before whom he had often testified in poaching cases, enter the room in prompt response to the call, grave and stern, the Indian felt his knees tremble under him, as if the executioner had already placed his hand on his shoulder, saying: “Forward!” His great flat cheeks turned deathly pale, and hollows formed in them. Really, he had not thought that it would be so soon.
“Well, Monsieur le Juge d’instruction,” said the duke, triumphantly, “I was — it seems to me — very nearly right in saying that the villain of whom we were speaking might not have committed the crime himself. — Come, Sautecœur, if you wish to be dealt gently with, tell us how it all happened — above all things, no trickery!” He fancied that his guard hesitated, and to spare him the shame of a confession, he suggested the words to him. “Tell us, what did they promise you? What did they give you? — for of course you were not working on your own account?”
Sautecœur drew himself up, his cheekbones aflame, the veins in his forehead swelling with the effort he made to contain himself: “Possibly such things may be done for money; but after twenty-eight years of faithful service — thirteen at the Poste-aux-Lièvres and fifteen at the Hermitage — my master can’t believe me capable of — No, no!”
“Why, you ‘re not going to tell us that your story of a moment ago wasn’t true, are you?” sneered the general, slightly disturbed.
“A moment ago, Monsieur le Duc, I lied to you on account of a stupid pride which I no longer have any right to feel. The arm is caught, the whole body must follow it. — Very good, let it follow, tonnerre de Dieu! — it won’t cost me so much to tell the truth as to hear what I just heard.” — He drew himself up, with clenched fists, and began: “Ten days ago, in my boy’s absence, an unsigned letter came to me at the Hermitage, telling me that, on the next night, between three and five o’clock, I might see, from the Pacôme gate, a man come out of my daughter-in-law’s chamber, through the window. You see, in my day I have had family troubles of my own, — a wife I loved, who led me a deuce of a life! At last she went off with a gendarme from Montgeron, and left the child and me alone in our desert at the Poste-aux-Lièvres. A downright good-for-nothing! — That experience left me with a grudge against all women; and when my son got married I promised myself that I’d keep an eye on his store-room, and made up my mind, if anything went wrong, to take revenge for his misfortunes and my own at one stroke. That was well known in the neighborhood, and the people who wrote to me knew very well what they were doing.”
“Did you keep the anonymous letter?” Delcrous asked.
“Pray let him finish,” said the duke impatiently.
“That Friday, as it happened, we were all on foot to catch a parcel of heathens from Mainville who had been taking our best does. The letter said between three and five. About three o’clock I left my station in the Gros-Chêne avenue, and went into ambush near the Pacôme gate. As true as this rifle is in my hand, I didn’t know who my daughter-in-law was receiving in her bedroom. I had had some knowledge that the prince was hanging around; but, after a scene with the girl, I thought it was all over for that time, and the letter, as you will see, Messieurs, put a very different name from his into my head. I had been there half an hour, drenched to my bones in a pouring rain that never slackened, when I heard the rattle of a window-fastening. Some one jumped out, within ten feet of my hiding-place, and ran away. I couldn’t see well; I might have missed him if he had kept on running. Unluckily, he stopped to open a sort of umbrella he had, and I fired. The man walked a few steps very fast, then fell into the ditch and never stirred, like a beast that has had his deathblow. At that I ran to the house. The little one pretended to be asleep, with the bedclothes pulled up over her eyes. ‘Get up and take the lantern,’ I said to her; ‘I’ve killed your lover; come and help me bury him.’ — She was afraid, and she didn’t make me speak twice, I promise you. At that moment I had no suspicion of what I was going to find at the end of my rifle-shot. The proof of what I say is that, when we were both in the ditch, beside the motionless body, I asked my daughter-in-law: ‘Who is it?’—’ Look and see,’ she says in a whisper, lowering the lantern.
— Ah! Monsieur le Duc, when I saw what I had done—” With the sleeve of his keeper’s jacket he wiped his streaming forehead. The duke, watching the effect of the story on Delcrous, said to his keeper, in a perfectly calm tone:
“What was your gun loaded with?”
“Buckshot.”
“And you hit him where?”
“The whole charge didn’t take effect. There was only one hole, near the temple.”
There was an awful pause, during which the mother’s shriek rang out anew, as if she had seen the wound, the hole near the temple. Then the examination was resumed: “You say that he fell near the Hermitage. But he was not found there.”
“We put him first in the bottom of one of the old quarries of which there are so many in that part of the forest, all filled with brambles and leaves. After we had got home again, chilled to the bone, it occurred to us to take him out of the quarry and lay him on the grass against the Fénigan park. The little one held the lantern, and I carried the body in my arms as if it was a child; I am very strong. It all happened just as I tell you.”
The magistrate, in his corner, assumed a cunning air: “Why that open umbrella over his head?”
“I remembered a woman who was found’ dead under her umbrella in the forest of Fontainebleau, and who stayed on the same spot a whole week without being disturbed.”
“And why against the Fénigan park?”
Sautecœur put out his neck, and replied in a faltering tone: “A wicked thought that, Monsieur Delcrous, — a’ cowardly thought that I punish myself for by confessing it to you. After all the talk about the prince and Madame Richard, there was a chance that the husband might be accused. But I ought to say that that thought would never have occurred to my daughter-in-law or me, if it hadn’t been for a letter the prince had in his pocket.”
“We ‘re coming to it at last!” cried the duke, with savage vehemence. “Confess that you searched his pockets to get some papers that the husband wanted. Admit that, and we’ll let you go in peace.”
The keeper, without replying, took from his jacket a letter and a notebook. “The Prince d’Olmütz,” he said gravely, “had upon him, in addition to the articles which have been handed you, this card-case and this unsealed letter, partly written to one of his friends. He was waiting, before sending it, to find out whether he had a pleasant night. — Of course I shouldn’t have read it, — but my head was in such a whirl, and my daughter-in-law kept saying to me all the time: ‘Perhaps there is something in it that will help us.’ And it’s true that the letter proves all that I have said. You will see when you read it that I haven’t lied, and also that the unfortunate young man set, with his own hands, the trap in which he found death.”
He placed the last letter to Vallongue and a little tortoise-shell note-book on the shelf that was fastened to the easy-chair for the invalid’s convenience.
“And the anonymous warning you received — where is that?” Delcrous inquired while the duke was reading.
“I have it here, if Monsieur le Juge d’instruction desires to look at it.”
“Let me see it. — A woman’s writing, and not a woman of distinction. Ah! the devil!”
He started, and said to the keeper, in an undertone, as if he were afraid that the father would hear:— “So you thought you were firing at Alexandre?”
“Yes,” said the woodsman, with a nod.
The general, who was twisting his moustache fiercely, raised his eyes from the letter to Vallongue: “There are some things that I can’t understand yet — the step you are taking at this moment, what is the object of it? — And why didn’t you do it earlier?”
“Ah! the women, Monsieur le Duc! I yielded to the entreaties of my daughter-in-law, who is as afraid of her husband as she is of fire and wanted to hide the whole thing from him. The result is that the poor fellow has lived among us all these days without suspecting anything. He went to his shop, talked about the affair on the train with anybody and everybody — and you can imagine whether it turned my hair white! The idea that an innocent man should be in prison on my account, that he might, perhaps, be convicted! — At last, when we three were at dinner yesterday, my son saw me push my plate away without eating, as I have often done these last few days. ‘Tell us what’s the matter, father?’ — I couldn’t keep it back any longer; it was stifling me too much; and I told him everything. Ah! the poor boy, I thought he was going to fall dead from the blow I dealt him. His wife threw herself on her knees at his feet, but he wouldn’t so much as look at her; he forgot his own misfortune. ‘No, no; we must think about father first. Father has failed in his duty; he must make up for lost time.’ — Ah! there are moments in one’s life — We threw our arms around each other’s necks, sobbing. I swore that I would come to you this morning — and I have come.”
“All this rings true,” muttered Delcrous.
“And agrees with what I have just read,” said the general, regretfully. “The only thing is that the physicians found no trace of the buckshot in the decomposed face — and yet the body was in the wood only two days.”
“A poacher’s trick, Monsieur le Duc,” said Sautecœur, with a shudder; “but I would have torn out my tongue rather than—”
Rather than tell that father that, to make his son unrecognizable, they had left him one whole night hanging by his heels to a tree, with his head buried to the shoulders in an anthill.
The magistrate, with Charlexis’ letter in his hand, said in the general’s ear: “Did I not tell you that it was a bad scent? — Clearly, this man is the assassin; and if you wish to avenge yourself—”
“Avenge myself on this clown! No, my dear fellow, it was Fénigan that I wanted — but this man—”
“Especially when you consider that, with this letter on the files, it would be difficult to convict.”
The duke reflected a moment, then rejoined with decision: “I agree with you, Delcrous. The prince’s good name and that of our family would gain nothing by having the affair noised abroad, nor by the cynical confidences of these two young gentlemen. This is a most excellent opportunity for one of those convenient nonsuits—”
The magistrate with the wolf’s teeth and wooden whiskers of the Le Nôtre type of architecture interrupted him hastily, and addressing Sautecœur, who stood erect and rigid, cap in hand: “You hear,” he said; “Monsieur le Duc does not propose to follow up this unfortunate misadventure. Leave the country at the earliest possible moment, without a word to any one; whether you suffer any unpleasant consequences depends entirely on your prudence.”
The keeper bowed. “Thanks, Messieurs.” He turned at the door, before leaving the room, and said inquiringly: “And Monsieur Richard?”
“Have no fear on that score. Monsieur Richard will return to Uzelles before night.”
At that promise of Delcrous, the general interposed snappishly: “Before to-night? Why so? — You seem to be in a great hurry to have that brute regain possession of his wife!”
It was the cry of his hatred, of his invalid’s jealousy, extorted from him even amid more painful anxieties, amid all the tortures of his paternal grief.
At Uzelles that evening, the elder Madame Fénigan and old Mérivet were sitting under the great paulownia by the front door, exchanging a few last dejected words, interrupted by long pauses, and by exclamations like the sparks of a dying fire, while gardeners and dairymaids were taking the air in the moonlight, on the road in front of the gate. The inexorable curfew hour had struck long before, but nobody had paid any heed to it; perhaps because of the exceptional beauty of the night or because discipline was relaxed in that depressed and disordered household. But what a contrast between the silence in those brightly lighted and deserted apartments on the ground floor and the noisy merriment of the servants, between that loud, indifferent laughter and the heart-broken tone of the two voices talking in low tones in the shadow of the sleeping tree.
“How far the air carries to-night! — I can hear some one walking on the bridge of Ris,” said the proprietor of the Little Parish Church, who, since his return, was constantly with Richard’s mother and wife.
“Doubtless it is some one who has come from Corbeil by the last train, and some one who is in a hurry,” rejoined Mme. Fénigan, listening to the unfamiliar, rapid step.
“Madame Richard was very sad to-night,” old Mérivet replied; “even more so than usual. That beggar’s death seems to me to have made a very deep impression on her.”
“When one’s heart is full, anything is an excuse for tears,” sighed Mme. Fénigan. “Just consider, my friend, not for three days, not since his arrest, have we had any word from her husband except that mysterious note.”
“All of which proves that he is certain of his speedy release. A mistake, Madame; I tell you again, it is a mistake. I understood it at once when I confronted that Delcrous, with his embarrassed, dejected manner. Believe me, you will soon see your dear child again. — Why, look, look, look, I say, Madame Fénigan!” cried Napoléon Mérivet, in a loud voice, springing to his feet.
Along the white and blue road, and through the open gate, a well-known figure came hurrying toward them. Powerless to stir, the mother called, in the darkness: “Richard!”
“Are you there?” cried a voice which struggled to be firm, but ended in a sob. “Where is Lydie?” he added, as soon as he could speak; “have you heard from her?”
“Lydie? Why, she is at home, at your own house, — at the Pavilion.”
Richard, in blank amazement, not staying to listen to his mother’s explanations, darted away under the arching hedgerow, with its dark, rustling foliage, fragrant with flowering linden, at the end of which a light gleamed and beckoned to him.
Lydie, in her peignoir, her lovely hair braided for the night, was writing in the lower room, at her husband’s desk. She did not turn, thinking that it was Rosine who had come in, and did not raise her head until Richard stood beside her. Then there was an explosion of surprise, of frantic joy, of breathless words interrupted by kisses, by embraces: “Free! you are free!”
“Yes, the true culprit has been discovered.”
She stared at him, in utter stupefaction: “What! The true culprit?”
Her emotion, the expression in her eyes drew from Richard the exclamation: “So you thought that it was I?”
“Yes,” she whispered, for she had not the strength to lie. And her husband, no less confused than she, rejoined:
“To think that I believed the same thing about you!”
Lydie raised her head. “Is it possible?” Then, suddenly enlightened: “Oh! I understand now why you wrote to me to go away, why you allowed that judge to believe — You intended to be convicted in my place. — My husband! — my darling husband!”
She threw herself, sobbing, on his breast.
Richard, dazed with joy, felt the throbbing of her heart, the agitation of her young body under the lace peignoir. “Come and tell me that you love me, and I shall be repaid for everything,” he murmured, gently leading her away.
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