CATASTROPHE
"Those seem to be good horses, and we change on the way," said Planard.
"You give the men a Napoleon or two; we must do it within three hours
and a quarter. Now, come; I'll lift him upright, so as to place his feet
in their proper berth, and you must keep them together and draw the
white shirt well down over them."
In another moment I was placed, as he described, sustained in Planard's
arms, standing at the foot of the coffin, and so lowered backward,
gradually, till I lay my length in it. Then the man, whom he called
Planard, stretched my arms by my sides, and carefully arranged the
frills at my breast and the folds of the shroud, and after that, taking
his stand at the foot of the coffin made a survey which seemed to
satisfy him.
The Count, who was very methodical, took my clothes, which had just been
removed, folded them rapidly together and locked them up, as I
afterwards heard, in one of the three presses which opened by doors in
the panel.
I now understood their frightful plan. This coffin had been prepared for
me; the funeral of St. Amand was a sham to mislead inquiry; I had myself
given the order at Père la Chaise, signed it, and paid the fees for the
interment of the fictitious Pierre de St. Amand, whose place I was to
take, to lie in his coffin with his name on the plate above my breast,
and with a ton of clay packed down upon me; to waken from this
catalepsy, after I had been for hours in the grave, there to perish by a
death the most horrible that imagination can conceive.
If, hereafter, by any caprice of curiosity or suspicion, the coffin
should be exhumed, and the body it enclosed examined, no chemistry could
detect a trace of poison, nor the most cautious examination the
slightest mark of violence.
I had myself been at the utmost pains to mystify inquiry, should my
disappearance excite surmises, and had even written to my few
correspondents in England to tell them that they were not to look for a
letter from me for three weeks at least.
In the moment of my guilty elation death had caught me, and there was no
escape. I tried to pray to God in my unearthly panic, but only thoughts
of terror, judgment, and eternal anguish crossed the distraction of my
immediate doom.
I must not try to recall what is indeed indescribable--the multiform
horrors of my own thoughts. I will relate, simply, what befell, every
detail of which remains sharp in my memory as if cut in steel.
"The undertaker's men are in the hall," said the Count.
"They must not come till this is fixed," answered Planard. "Be good
enough to take hold of the lower part while I take this end." I was not
left long to conjecture what was coming, for in a few seconds more
something slid across, a few inches above my face, and entirely excluded
the light, and muffled sound, so that nothing that was not very distinct
reached my ears henceforward; but very distinctly came the working of a
turnscrew, and the crunching home of screws in succession. Than these
vulgar sounds, no doom spoken in thunder could have been more
tremendous.
The rest I must relate, not as it then reached my ears, which was too
imperfectly and interruptedly to supply a connected narrative, but as it
was afterwards told me by other people.
The coffin-lid being screwed down, the two gentlemen arranged the room
and adjusted the coffin so that it lay perfectly straight along the
boards, the Count being specially anxious that there should be no
appearance of hurry or disorder in the room, which might have suggested
remark and conjecture.
When this was done, Doctor Planard said he would go to the hall to
summon the men who were to carry the coffin out and place it in the
hearse. The Count pulled on his black gloves, and held his white
handkerchief in his hand, a very impressive chief-mourner. He stood a
little behind the head of the coffin, awaiting the arrival of the
persons who accompanied Planard, and whose fast steps he soon heard
approaching.
Planard came first. He entered the room through the apartment in which
the coffin had been originally placed. His manner was changed; there was
something of a swagger in it.
"Monsieur le Comte," he said, as he strode through the door, followed by
half-a-dozen persons, "I am sorry to have to announce to you a most
unseasonable interruption. Here is Monsieur Carmaignac, a gentleman
holding an office in the police department, who says that information to
the effect that large quantities of smuggled English and other goods
have been distributed in this neighborhood, and that a portion of them
is concealed in your house. I have ventured to assure him, of my own
knowledge, that nothing can be more false than that information, and
that you would be only too happy to throw open for his inspection, at a
moment's notice, every room, closet, and cupboard in your house."
"Most assuredly," exclaimed the Count, with a stout voice, but a very
white face. "Thank you, my good friend, for having anticipated me. I
will place my house and keys at his disposal, for the purpose of his
scrutiny, so soon as he is good enough to inform me of what specific
contraband goods he comes in search."
"The Count de St. Alyre will pardon me," answered Carmaignac, a little
dryly. "I am forbidden by my instructions to make that disclosure; and
that I _am_ instructed to make a general search, this warrant will
sufficiently apprise Monsieur le Comte."
"Monsieur Carmaignac, may I hope," interposed Planard, "that you will
permit the Count de St. Alyre to attend the funeral of his kinsman, who
lies here, as you see--" (he pointed to the plate upon the coffin)--"and
to convey whom to Pere la Chaise, a hearse waits at this moment at the
door."
"That, I regret to say, I cannot permit. My instructions are precise;
but the delay, I trust, will be but trifling. Monsieur le Comte will not
suppose for a moment that I suspect him; but we have a duty to perform,
and I must act as if I did. When I am ordered to search, I search;
things are sometimes hid in such bizarre places. I can't say, for
instance, what that coffin may contain."
"The body of my kinsman, Monsieur Pierre de St. Amand," answered the
Count, loftily.
"Oh! then you've seen him?"
"Seen him? Often, too often." The Count was evidently a good deal moved.
"I mean the body?"
The Count stole a quick glance at Planard.
"N--no, Monsieur--that is, I mean only for a moment."
Another quick glance at Planard.
"But quite long enough, I fancy, to recognize him?" insinuated that
gentleman.
"Of course--of course; instantly--perfectly. What! Pierre de St. Amand?
Not know him at a glance? No, no, poor fellow, I know him too well for
that."
"The things I am in search of," said Monsieur Carmaignac, "would fit in
a narrow compass--servants are so ingenious sometimes. Let us raise the
lid."
"Pardon me, Monsieur," said the Count, peremptorily, advancing to the
side of the coffin and extending his arm across it, "I cannot permit
that indignity--that desecration."
"There shall be none, sir--simply the raising of the lid; you shall
remain in the room. If it should prove as we all hope, you shall have
the pleasure of one other look, really the last, upon your beloved
kinsman."
"But, sir, I can't."
"But, Monsieur, I must."
"But, besides, the thing, the turnscrew, broke when the last screw was
turned; and I give you my sacred honor there is nothing but the body in
this coffin."
"Of course, Monsieur le Comte believes all that; but he does not know so
well as I the legerdemain in use among servants, who are accustomed to
smuggling. Here, Philippe, you must take off the lid of that coffin."
The Count protested; but Philippe--a man with a bald head and a smirched
face, looking like a working blacksmith--placed on the floor a leather
bag of tools, from which, having looked at the coffin, and picked with
his nail at the screw-heads, he selected a turnscrew and, with a few
deft twirls at each of the screws, they stood up like little rows of
mushrooms, and the lid was raised. I saw the light, of which I thought I
had seen my last, once more; but the axis of vision remained fixed. As I
was reduced to the cataleptic state in a position nearly perpendicular,
I continued looking straight before me, and thus my gaze was now fixed
upon the ceiling. I saw the face of Carmaignac leaning over me with a
curious frown. It seemed to me that there was no recognition in his
eyes. Oh, Heaven! that I could have uttered were it but one cry! I saw
the dark, mean mask of the little Count staring down at me from the
other side; the face of the pseudo-Marquis also peering at me, but not
so full in the line of vision; there were other faces also.
"I see, I see," said Carmaignac, withdrawing. "Nothing of the kind
there."
"You will be good enough to direct your man to re-adjust the lid of the
coffin, and to fix the screws," said the Count, taking courage;
"and--and--really the funeral must proceed. It is not fair to the
people, who have but moderate fees for night-work, to keep them hour
after hour beyond the time."
"Count de St. Alyre, you shall go in a very few minutes. I will direct,
just now, all about the coffin."
The Count looked toward the door, and there saw a _gendarme_; and
two or three more grave and stalwart specimens of the same force were
also in the room. The Count was very uncomfortably excited; it was
growing insupportable.
"As this gentleman makes a difficulty about my attending the obsequies
of my kinsman, I will ask you, Planard, to accompany the funeral in my
stead."
"In a few minutes;" answered the incorrigible Carmaignac. "I must first
trouble you for the key that opens that press."
He pointed direct at the press in which the clothes had just been locked
up.
"I--I have no objection," said the Count--"none, of course; only they
have not been used for an age. I'll direct someone to look for the key."
"If you have not got it about you, it is quite unnecessary. Philippe,
try your skeleton-keys with that press. I want it opened. Whose clothes
are these?" inquired Carmaignac, when, the press having been opened, he
took out the suit that had been placed there scarcely two minutes since.
"I can't say," answered the Count. "I know nothing of the contents of
that press. A roguish servant, named Lablais, whom I dismissed about a
year ago, had the key. I have not seen it open for ten years or more.
The clothes are probably his."
"Here are visiting cards, see, and here a marked
pocket-handkerchief--'R.B.' upon it. He must have stolen them from a
person named Beckett--R. Beckett. 'Mr. Beckett, Berkeley Square,' the
card says; and, my faith! here's a watch and a bunch of seals; one of
them with the initials 'R.B.' upon it. That servant, Lablais, must have
been a consummate rogue!"
"So he was; you are right, Sir."
"It strikes me that he possibly stole these clothes," continued
Carmaignac, "from the man in the coffin, who, in that case, would be
Monsieur Beckett, and not Monsieur de St. Amand. For wonderful to
relate, Monsieur, the watch is still going! The man in the coffin, I
believe, is not dead, but simply drugged. And for having robbed and
intended to murder him, I arrest you, Nicolas de la Marque, Count de St.
Alyre."
In another moment the old villain was a prisoner. I heard his discordant
voice break quaveringly into sudden vehemence and volubility; now
croaking--now shrieking as he oscillated between protests, threats, and
impious appeals to the God who will "judge the secrets of men!" And thus
lying and raving, he was removed from the room, and placed in the same
coach with his beautiful and abandoned accomplice, already arrested;
and, with two _gendarmes_ sitting beside them, they were immediate
driving at a rapid pace towards the Conciergerie.
There were now added to the general chorus two voices, very different in
quality; one was that of the gasconading Colonel Gaillarde, who had with
difficulty been kept in the background up to this; the other was that of
my jolly friend Whistlewick, who had come to identify me.
I shall tell you, just now, how this project against my property and
life, so ingenious and monstrous, was exploded. I must first say a word
about myself. I was placed in a hot bath, under the direction of
Planard, as consummate a villain as any of the gang, but now thoroughly
in the interests of the prosecution. Thence I was laid in a warm bed,
the window of the room being open. These simple measures restored me in
about three hours; I should otherwise, probably, have continued under
the spell for nearly seven.
The practices of these nefarious conspirators had been carried on with
consummate skill and secrecy. Their dupes were led, as I was, to be
themselves auxiliary to the mystery which made their own destruction
both safe and certain.
A search was, of course, instituted. Graves were opened in Pere la
Chaise. The bodies exhumed had lain there too long, and were too much
decomposed to be recognized. One only was identified. The notice for the
burial, in this particular case, had been signed, the order given, and
the fees paid, by Gabriel Gaillarde, who was known to the official
clerk, who had to transact with him this little funereal business. The
very trick that had been arranged for me, had been successfully
practiced in his case. The person for whom the grave had been ordered,
was purely fictitious; and Gabriel Gaillarde himself filled the coffin,
on the cover of which that false name was inscribed as well as upon a
tomb-stone over the grave. Possibly the same honor, under my pseudonym,
may have been intended for me.
The identification was curious. This Gabriel Gaillarde had had a bad
fall from a runaway horse about five years before his mysterious
disappearance. He had lost an eye and some teeth in this accident,
beside sustaining a fracture of the right leg, immediately above the
ankle. He had kept the injuries to his face as profound a secret as he
could. The result was, that the glass eye which had done duty for the
one he had lost remained in the socket, slightly displaced, of course,
but recognizable by the "artist" who had supplied it.
More pointedly recognizable were the teeth, peculiar in workmanship,
which one of the ablest dentists in Paris had himself adapted to the
chasms, the cast of which, owing to peculiarities in the accident, he
happened to have preserved. This cast precisely fitted the gold plate
found in the mouth of the skull. The mark, also, above the ankle, in the
bone, where it had reunited, corresponded exactly with the place where
the fracture had knit in the limb of Gabriel Gaillarde.
The Colonel, his younger brother, had been furious about the
disappearance of Gabriel, and still more so about that of his money,
which he had long regarded as his proper keepsake, whenever death should
remove his brother from the vexations of living. He had suspected for a
long time, for certain adroitly discovered reasons, that the Count de
St. Alyre and the beautiful lady, his companion, countess, or whatever
else she was, had pigeoned him. To this suspicion were added some others
of a still darker kind; but in their first shape, rather the exaggerated
reflections of his fury, ready to believe anything, than well-defined
conjectures.
At length an accident had placed the Colonel very nearly upon the right
scent; a chance, possibly lucky, for himself, had apprised the scoundrel
Planard that the conspirators--himself among the number--were in danger.
The result was that he made terms for himself, became an informer, and
concerted with the police this visit made to the Château de la Carque at
the critical moment when every measure had been completed that was
necessary to construct a perfect case against his guilty accomplices.
I need not describe the minute industry or forethought with which the
police agents collected all the details necessary to support the case.
They had brought an able physician, who, even had Planard failed, would
have supplied the necessary medical evidence.
My trip to Paris, you will believe, had not turned out quite so
agreeably as I had anticipated. I was the principal witness for the
prosecution in this _cause célèbre_, with all the _agrémens_
that attend that enviable position. Having had an escape, as my friend
Whistlewick said, "with a squeak" for my life, I innocently fancied that
I should have been an object of considerable interest to Parisian
society; but, a good deal to my mortification, I discovered that I was
the object of a good-natured but contemptuous merriment. I was a
_balourd, a benêt, un âne_, and figured even in caricatures. I
became a sort of public character, a dignity,
"Unto which I was not born,"
and from which I fled as soon as I conveniently could, without even
paying my friend, the Marquis d'Harmonville, a visit at his hospitable
chateau.
The Marquis escaped scot-free. His accomplice, the Count, was executed.
The fair Eugenie, under extenuating circumstances--consisting, so far as
I could discover of her good looks--got off for six years' imprisonment.
Colonel Gaillarde recovered some of his brother's money, out of the not
very affluent estate of the Count and soi-disant Countess. This, and the
execution of the Count, put him in high good humor. So far from
insisting on a hostile meeting, he shook me very graciously by the hand,
told me that he looked upon the wound on his head, inflicted by the knob
of my stick, as having been received in an honorable though irregular
duel, in which he had no disadvantage or unfairness to complain of.
I think I have only two additional details to mention. The bricks
discovered in the room with the coffin, had been packed in it, in straw,
to supply the weight of a dead body, and to prevent the suspicions and
contradictions that might have been excited by the arrival of an empty
coffin at the chateau.
Secondly, the Countess's magnificent brilliants were examined by a
lapidary, and pronounced to be worth about five pounds to a tragedy
queen who happened to be in want of a suite of paste.
The Countess had figured some years before as one of the cleverest
actresses on the minor stage of Paris, where she had been picked up by
the Count and used as his principal accomplice.
She it was who, admirably disguised, had rifled my papers in the
carriage on my memorable night-journey to Paris. She also had figured as
the interpreting magician of the palanquin at the ball at Versailles. So
far as I was affected by that elaborate mystification it was intended to
re-animate my interest, which, they feared, might flag in the beautiful
Countess. It had its design and action upon other intended victims also;
but of them there is, at present, no need to speak. The introduction of
a real corpse--procured from a person who supplied the Parisian
anatomists--involved no real danger, while it heightened the mystery and
kept the prophet alive in the gossip of the town and in the thoughts of
the noodles with whom he had conferred.
I divided the remainder of the summer and autumn between Switzerland and
Italy.
As the well-worn phrase goes, I was a sadder if not a wiser man. A great
deal of the horrible impression left upon my mind was due, of course, to
the mere action of nerves and brain. But serious feelings of another and
deeper kind remained. My afterlife was ultimately formed by the shock I
had then received. Those impressions led me--but not till after many
years--to happier though not less serious thoughts; and I have deep
reason to be thankful to the all-merciful Ruler of events for an early
and terrible lesson in the ways of sin.