THE DIARY, AND ROSALIND
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.
"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.
... 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
_some_thing: 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 père_ 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 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.
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.
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 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!
"By Jove!" growled Clarke, chewing his pipe, "that rings in my ears!"
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!
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.
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....
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.
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 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!"
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 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."
"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 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 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.
"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 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."
"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, 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 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.
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:
I will write again. Meantime, do not lose hope! I have
discovered that your purloined dagger has been in the possession
of the late lady's-maid, Pauline. "A small thing, but mine own!"
I am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's.
R. M.
"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.