ONCE MORE THE OBVIOUS
You don't suppose for a moment, I hope, that a girl like Louisa would
allow her mind to dwell on such horrors. Mysterious crimes in strange
cities--and in London, too, for a matter of that--are, alas! of far
too frequent occurrence to be quite as startling as they should be.
A day or two later, Louisa Harris and her aunt, Lady Ryder, crossed
over to England. They had spent five weeks in Italy and one in
Brussels, not with a view to dreaming over the beauties of the Italian
Lakes, or over the art treasures collected in the museums of Brussels,
but because Lady Ryder had had a bronchial catarrh which she could not
shake off and so her doctor had ordered her a thorough change.
Bellaggio was selected, and Louisa accompanied her. They stayed at the
best hotels both in Bellaggio and in Brussels, where Lady Ryder had
several friends whom she wished to visit before she went home.
Nothing whatever happened that should not have happened; everything
was orderly and well managed; the courier and the maid saw to tickets
and to luggage, to hotel rooms and sleeping compartments. It was
obviously their mission in life to see that nothing untoward or
unexpected happened, but only the obvious.
It was clearly not their fault that Miss Harris had seen a cab in
which an unknown man happened to have been murdered.
Louisa, with a view to preventing her aunt from going to sleep after
dinner and thereby spoiling her night's rest, had told her of the
incident which she had witnessed in the Boulevard Waterloo, and Lady
Ryder was genuinely shocked. She vaguely felt that her niece had done
something unladylike and odd, which was so unlike Louisa.
The latter had amused herself by scanning a number of English papers
in order to find out what was said in London about that strange crime,
which she had almost witnessed--the man stabbed through the neck, from
ear to ear, and the wound so small it might have been done with a
skewer. But, with characteristic indifference, London paid but little
heed to the mysterious dramas of a sister city. A brief account of the
gruesome discovery--a figurative shrug of the shoulders as to the
incompetence of the Belgian police, who held neither a clue to the
perpetrator of the crime nor to the identity of the victim. Just a
stranger--an idler. Brussels was full of strangers just now. His
nationality? who knows? His individuality? there seemed no one to
care. The police were active no doubt, but so far they had discovered
nothing.
Two men, the murderer and the murdered, engulfed in that great
whirlpool known as humanity, small units of no importance, since no
one seemed to care. Interesting to the detective whose duty it was to
track the crime to its perpetrator. Interesting to the reporter who
could fill a column with accounts of depositions, of questionings, of
examinations. Interesting to the after-dinner talker who could
expatiate over the moral lessons to be drawn from the conception of
such a crime.
But the murdered man goes to his grave unknown: and the murderer
wanders Cain-like on the face of the earth--as mysterious, as unknown,
as silent as his victim.