this figure was. But, as he slept, his head had sunk upon his breast,
and the shadow cast upon his face by the low-drawn travelling-cap he
wore hid it from me. Yet if I had seemed to know the girl's face, I was
certain I knew the man's. But as I could see, so I could remember,
neither. And there was an absolute torture in this which I can't explain
to you,--in this inability, and in my inability to wake them from their
sleep.
"From the first I had been conscious of a desire to do that. This desire
grew stronger every second. I tried to call to them, and my tongue
wouldn't move. I tried to spring toward them, to thrust out my arms and
touch them, and my limbs were paralyzed. And then I tried to shut my
eyes to what I _knew_ must happen, and my eyes were held open and
dragged to look on in spite of me. And I saw this:
"I saw the door of the carriage where these two sleepers, whose sleep
was so horribly sound, were sitting--I saw this door open, and out of
the thick darkness another face look in.
"The light, as I have said, was very dim, but I could see his face as
plainly as I can see yours. A large yellow face it was, like a wax mask.
The lips were full, and lustful and cruel. The eyes were little eyes of
an evil gray. Thin yellow streaks marked the absence of the eyebrows;
thin yellow hair showed itself under a huge fur travelling-cap. The
whole face seemed to grow slowly into absolute distinctness as I looked,
by the sort of devilish light that it, as it were, radiated. I had
chanced upon a good many damnable visages before then; but there was a
cold fiendishness about this one such as I had seen on no man's face,
alive or dead, till then.
"The next moment the man this face belonged to was standing in the
carriage, that seemed to plunge and sway more furiously, as though to
waken them that still slept on. He wore a long fur travelling-robe, girt
about the waist with a fur girdle. Abnormally tall and broad as he was,
he looked in this dress gigantic. Yet there was a marvellous cat-like
lightness and agility about all his movements.
"He bent over the girl lying there helpless in her sleep. I don't make
rash bargains as a rule, but I felt I would have given years of my life
for five minutes of my lost freedom of limb just then. I tell you the
torture was infernal.
"The assassin--I knew he was an assassin--bent awhile, gloatingly, over
the girl. His great yellow hands were both bare, and on the forefinger
of the right hand I could see some great stone blazing like an evil eye.
In that right hand there gleamed something else. I saw him draw it
slowly from his sleeve, and, as he drew it, turn round and look at the
other sleeper with an infernal triumphant malignity and hate the Devil
himself might have envied. But the man he looked at slept heavily on.
And then--God! I feel the agony I felt in my dream then now!--then I saw
the great yellow hand, with the great evil eye upon it, lifted
murderously, and the bright steel it held shimmer as the assassin turned
again and bent his yellow face down closer to that other face hidden
from me in the shadow--the girl's face, that I knew was so fair.
"How can I tell this?... The blade flashed and fell.... There was the
sound of a heavy sigh stifled under a heavy hand....
"Then the huge form of the assassin was reared erect, and the bloated
yellow face seemed to laugh silently, while the hand that held the
steel pointed at the sleeping man in diabolical menace.
"And so the huge form and the bloated yellow face seemed to fade away
while I watched.
"The express rushed and roared through the blinding darkness without;
the sleeping man slept on still; till suddenly a strong light fell full
upon him, and he woke.
"And then I saw why I had been so certain that I knew him. For as he
lifted his head, I saw his face in the strong light.
"_And the face was my own face; and the sleeper was myself!_"
Paul Devereux made a pause in his queer story here. Except when he had
spoken of the girl, he had spoken in his usual cool, hard way. The pipe
he had been smoking all the time was smoked out. He took time to fill
another before he went on. I said never a word, for I guessed who the
sleeping girl was.
"Well," Paul remarked presently, "that was a devilish queer dream,
wasn't it? You'll account for it by telling me I'd been so pestered with
the story of the banker's murder that I naturally had nightmare;
perhaps, too, that my digestion was out of order. Call it a nightmare,
call it dyspepsia, if you like. I _don't_, because---- But you'll see
why I don't directly.
"At the same moment that my dream-self awoke in my dream, my actual self
woke in reality, and with the same ghastly horror.
"I say the _same_ horror, for neither then nor afterward could I
separate my one self from my other self. They seemed identical; so that
this queer dream made a more lasting impression upon me than you'd
think. However, in the life I led that sort of thing couldn't last very
long. Before I came back from Africa I had utterly forgotten all about
it. Before I left Paris, though, and while it was quite fresh in my
memory, I sketched the big murderer just as I had seen him in my dream.
The great yellow face, the great broad frame in the fur travelling-robe,
the great hand with the great evil eye upon it--everything, carefully
and minutely, as though I had been going to paint a portrait that I
wanted to make lifelike. I think at the time I had some such intention.
If I had, I never fulfilled it. But I made the sketch, as I say,
carefully; and then I forgot all about it.
"Time passed--three years nearly. I was wintering in the south of France
that year. There it was that I met her--Lucille. Old D'Avray, her
father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the
child on his death-bed to me. The end was I married her.
"Poor little thing! I think I might have made her happy--who knows? She
used to tell me often she was happy with me. Poor little thing!
"Well, we were to come straight to London. That was Lucille's notion.
She wanted to go to my London first--nowhere else. Now I would rather
have gone anywhere else; but, naturally, I let the child have her way.
She seemed nervously eager about it, I remembered afterward; seemed to
have a nervous objection to every other place I proposed. But I saw or
suspected nothing to make me question her very closely, or the reasons
for her preference for our grimy old Pandemonium. What could I suspect?
Not the truth. If I only had! If I had only guessed what it was that
made her, as she said, long to be safe there already. Safe? What had she
to fear with me? Ah, what indeed!
"So we started on our journey to England. It was a cold, dark night,
early in March. We reached Lyons somewhere about seven. I should have
stayed there that night but for Lucille. She entreated me so earnestly
and with such strange vehemence to go on by the night-mail to Paris,
that at last, to satisfy her, I consented; though it struck me
unpleasantly at the time that I had let her travel too long already, and
that this feverishness was the consequence of over-fatigue. But she
became pacified at once when I told her it should be as she wanted; and
declared she should sleep perfectly well in the carriage with me beside
her. She should feel quite safe then, she said.
"Safe! Where safer? you might ask. Nowhere, I believe. Alone with
me--surely nowhere safer. The Paris express was a short train that
night; but I managed to secure a compartment for ourselves. I left
Lucille in her corner there while I went across to the _buffet_ to fill
a flask. I was gone barely five minutes; but when I came back the change
in the child's face fairly startled me. I had seen it last with the
smile it always wore for me on it, looking so childishly happy in the
lamp-light. Now it was all gray-pale and distorted; and the great blue
eyes told me directly with what.
"Fear--sudden, terrible fear--I thought. But _fear_? Fear of what? I
asked her. She clung close to me half-sobbing awhile before she could
answer; and then she told me--nothing. There was nothing the matter;
only she had felt a pain--a cruel pain--at her heart; and it had
frightened her. Yes, that was it; it had frightened her, but it had
passed; and she was well, quite well again now.
"All this time her eyes seemed to be telling me another story; but I
said nothing; she was obviously too excited already. I did my best to
soothe her, and I succeeded. She told me she felt quite well once more
before we started. No, she had rather, much rather go on to Paris, as I
had promised her she should. She should sleep all the way, if no one
came into the carriage to disturb her. No one could come in? Then
nothing could be better.
"And so it was that she and I started that night by the Paris mail.
"I made her up a bed of rugs and wraps upon the cushions; but she had
rather rest her head upon my shoulder, she said, and feel my arm about
her; nothing could hurt her then. Ah, strange how she harped on that.
"She lay there, then, as she loved best--with her head resting on my
shoulder, not sleeping much or soundly; uneasily, with sudden waking
starts, and with glances round her; till I would speak to her. And then
she would look up into my face and smile; and so drop into that uneasy
sleep again. And I would think she was over-tired, that was all; and
reproach myself with having let her come on. And three or four hours
passed like this; and then we had got as far as Dijon.
"But the child was fairly worn out now; and she offered no opposition
when I asked her to let me pillow her head on something softer than my
shoulder. So I folded, a great thick shawl she was too well cloaked to
need, and she made that her pillow.
"We were rushing full swing through the wild, dark night, when she
lifted up her face and bade me kiss her and bid her sleep well. And I
put my arm round her, and kissed the child's loving lips--for the last
time while she lived. Then I flung myself on the seat opposite her; and,
watching her till she slept soundly and peacefully, slept at last myself
also. I had drawn the blind across the lamp in the roof, and the light
in the carriage was very dim.
"How long I slept I don't know; it couldn't have been more than an hour
and a half, because the express was slackening speed for its first halt
beyond Dijon. I had slept heavily I knew; but I woke with a sudden,
sharp sense of danger that made me broad awake, and strung every nerve
in a moment. The sort of feeling you have when you wake on a prairie,
where you have come across 'Indian sign;' on outpost-duty, when your
_feldwebel_ plucks gently at your cloak. You know what I mean.
"I was on my feet at once. As I said, the light in the carriage was very
dim, and the shadow was deepest where Lucille lay. I looked there
instinctively. She must have moved in her sleep, for her face was turned
away from me; and the cloak I had put so carefully about her had partly
fallen off. But she slept on still. Only soundly, very soundly; she
scarcely seemed to breathe. And--_did_ she breathe?
"A ghastly fear ran through my blood, and froze it. I understood why I
had wakened. In my nostrils was an awful odor that I knew well enough. I
bent over her; I touched her. Her face was very cold; her eyes glared
glassily at me; my hands were wet with something. My hands were wet with
blood--her blood!
"I tore away the blind from the lamp, and then I could see that my wife
of a week lay there stabbed straight to the heart--dead--dead beyond
doubting; murdered in her sleep."
Devereux's stern, low voice shook ever so little as he spoke those last
words; and we both sat very silent after them for a good while. Only
when he could trust his utterance again he went on.
"A curious piece of devilry, wasn't it? That child--whom had she ever
harmed? Who could hate her like this? I remember I thought that, in a
dull, confused sort of way, when I found myself alone in that carriage
with her lying dead on the cushions before me. _Alone_ with her--you
understand? It was confusing.
"I pass over what immediately followed. The express came duly to a halt;
and then I called people to me, and--and the Paris express went on
without that particular carriage.
"The inquiry began before some local authority next day. Very little
came of it. What could come of it, unless they had convicted _me_ of the
murder of this child I would have given my own life to save?
"They might have done that at home; but they knew better here, and
didn't. They couldn't find me the actual assassin, however; though I
believe they did their best. All they found was his weapon, which he
most purposely have left behind. I asked for this, and got it. It gave
their police no clue; and it gave me none. But I had a fancy for it.
"It was a plain, double-edged, admirably-tempered dagger--a very
workmanlike article indeed. On the cross hilt of it I swore one day that
I would live thenceforth for one thing alone--the discovery of the
murderer of old D'Avray's child, whom I had promised him to care for
before all. When I had found this man, whoever he was, I also swore that
I would kill him. Kill him myself, you understand; without any of the
law's delay or uncertainty, without troubling _bourreau_ or hangman.
Kill him as he had killed her--to do this was what I meant to live for.
There was war to the knife between him and me.
"I started, of course, under one heavy disadvantage. He knew me,
probably, whereas I didn't know him at all. When he found that his
amiable intention of fixing the crime on me had been frustrated, it
must, I imagined, have occurred to him that the said crime might
eventually be fixed by me on him. And he had proved himself to be a
person who didn't stick at trifles. It behooved me, therefore, to go to
work cautiously. But I hadn't fought Indians for nothing; and I _was_
very cautious. I waited quiet till I got a clue. It was a curious one;
and I got it in this way. It struck me one day, suddenly, that I had
heard of a murder precisely similar to this already. I could not at
first call the thing to mind; but presently I remembered--my dream. And
then I asked myself this: _Had not this murder been done before my eyes
three years ago?_
"I came to the conclusion that the circumstances of the murder in my
dream were absolutely identical with the circumstances of the actual
crime. Yes; the girl whose face in that dream I had never been able to
see was Lucille. Yes; the assassin whose face I had seen so plainly in
that dream was the real assassin. In short, I believe that the murder
had been _rehearsed_ before me three years previous to its actual
committal.
"Now this sounds rather wild. Yet I came to this conviction quite coolly
and deliberately. It _was_ a conviction. Assuming it to be true, the
odds against me grew shorter directly; _for I had the portrait of the
man I wanted drawn by myself the day after I had seen him in my dream_.
And the original of that portrait was a man not to be easily mistaken,
supposing him to exist at all. The day I came across that sketch of him
in that old forgotten sketch-book of mine, I was as sure he did exist as
that I was alive myself. What I had to do was to find this man, and then
I never doubted I should find the man I wanted. You see how the odds had
shortened. If he knew me I knew him now, and he had no notion that I did
know him. It was a good deal fairer fight between us.
"I fought it out alone. My story was hardly one the Rue de Jerusalem
would have acted upon; and, besides, I wanted no interference. So, with
the portrait before me, I sat down and began to consider who this man
was, and why he had murdered that child. The big, burly frame, the heavy
yellow face, the sandy-yellow hair, the physiognomy generally, was
Teutonic. My man I put down as a North German. Now there were, and are
probably, plenty of men who would have no objection whatever to put a
knife into me, if they got the chance; but this man, whom I had never
met, could have had no such quarrel as theirs with me. His quarrel with
me must have been, then, Lucille. Yes, that was it--Lucille. I began to
see clearly: a thwarted, devilish passion--a cool, infernal revenge. The
child had feared something of this sort; had perhaps seen him that
night. This explained her nervous terror, her nervous anxiety to stop
nowhere, to travel on. In that carriage of that express-train, alone
with me--where could she be safer? This accounted, too, for her anxiety
to reach England. He would not dare follow her there, she had thought,
or, at least, could not without my noticing him. And then she would have
told me. She had not told me before evidently because she had feared for
_me_ too, in a quarrel with this man. She must, innocent child as she
was, have had some instinctive knowledge of what he was capable.... Ay,
a cool, infernal revenge, indeed. To kill her; to fix the murder on me.
That dagger he had left behind.... The apparent impossibility of any
one's entering the carriage as he must have entered it at all, to say
nothing of the almost absolute impossibility of his doing so without
disturbing either of us,--you see it might have gone hard with me if a
British jury had had to decide on the case.
"Well, to cut this as short as may be, I made up my mind that the man I
wanted was a North German; that he had conceived a hideous passion for
Lucille before I knew her; that she had shrunk from it and him so
unmistakably, that he knew he had no chance; that my taking her away as
my wife, to which he might have been a witness, drove him to as hideous
a revenge; that, hearing we were going to England, and seeing that we
were likely to stop nowhere on the way, and so give him a chance of
doing what he had made up his mind to do, he had decided to do what he
had done as he had done it,--counting on finding us asleep as he had
found us, or on his strength if it came to a fight between him and me;
but coolly reckless enough to brave everything in any case. And the
devil aiding, he had in great part and only too well succeeded. He was
now either so far satisfied that, if I made no move against him--and
how, he might think, could I?--he, feeling himself all safe, would let
me be; or, on the other hand, he did not feel safe, and was not
satisfied, and was arranging for my being disposed of by and by. I
considered the latter frame of mind as his most probable one; I went to
work cautiously, as I say. I ascertained that Lucille had made no
mention of any obnoxious _pretendant_ at any time; I didn't expect to
find she had, her terror of the man was too intense. But this man must
have met her somewhere--where?
"When old D'Avray came home to die, his daughter was just leaving her
Paris _pensionnat_. All through his last illness he had seen no visitor
but me, and Lucille had never quitted him. Besides, I had been there all
the time. I presumed, then, that this man and she had met in Paris; and
I believe they were only likely to have met at one of the half-dozen
houses where the child would now and again be asked. I got a list of
all these. One name only struck me; it happened to be a German
name--Steinmetz. I wondered if Monsieur Steinmetz was my man. In the
mean time, who was he? I had no trouble in finding that out: Monsieur
Steinmetz was a German banker of good standing and repute, reasonably
well off, and recently left a widower. Personally? _Dame_, personally
Monsieur Steinmetz was a great man and a fat, with a big face and blond
hair, and the appearance of what he really was--a _bon vivant_ and a
_bon enfant_ yet _n'avait jamais fait de mal a personne--allez!_--All,
yes; in effect, Madame had died about a year ago, and Monsieur had been
inconsolable for a long time. He had changed his residence now, and
inhabited a house in one of the new streets off the Champs Elysees.
"From another source I discovered that in the lifetime of Madame
Steinmetz Lucille was frequently at the house. She had ceased to come
there about the date of the commencement of Madame's sudden illness. I
got this information by degrees, while I lay _perdu_ in an old haunt of
mine in the Pays Latin yonder; for I had always had an idea that I
should find the man I wanted in Paris. When I had got it, I thought I
should like to see Monsieur Steinmetz, the agreeable banker. One night I
strolled up as far as his new residence in the street off the Champs
Elysees. Monsieur Steinmetz lived on the first-floor. There was a
brilliant light there: Monsieur Steinmetz was entertaining friends, it
seemed.
"It was a fine night; I established myself out of sight under the
doorway of an unfinished house opposite, and waited. I don't know why;
perhaps I fancied that when his friends were gone, the fineness of the
night might induce Monsieur Steinmetz to take a stroll, and that then I
should be able to gratify my curiosity. You see, I knew that if he were
my man, I should know him directly. I waited a good while: shadows
crossed the lighted blinds; once a big, broad shadow appeared there,
that made me fancy I mightn't have been waiting for nothing after all,
somehow. Presently Monsieur Steinmetz's guests departed, and in a little
while after there appeared on the little balcony of Monsieur Steinmetz's
apartment _the man I wanted_. There was a moon that night, and the cold
white light fell on the great yellow face, with the full lustful lips,
and the full cruel chin, just as I had seen the light fall on it in my
dream. It was the same face, Bertie; the same face, the same man. I
couldn't be mistaken. I had no doubt; I _knew_ that the assassin of my
wife, of that tender, innocent, helpless child, stood there, twenty
yards from me, on that balcony.
"I had got myself pretty well in hand; and it was as well. I never
moved. The face I knew turned presently toward the spot where I stood
hidden,--the face I had seen in my dream, beyond all doubting. The evil
gray eyes glanced carelessly into the shadow, and up and down the quiet
street; and then Monsieur Steinmetz, humming an air, got inside the
window again, and closed it after him. Once more the great burly shadow
that had at first told me I should not wait in that dark doorway in vain
crossed the blinds; and then it disappeared. I saw my man no more that
night; but I had seen enough. I knew who he was now, and where to find
him.
"As I walked along home I thought what I would do. I quite meant to kill
Monsieur Steinmetz; but I also meant to have no _demeles_ with an
Imperial Procureur and the Cour d'Assizes for doing so. I didn't want to
murder him, either. I thought I would wait a little for the chance of a
suitable opportunity for settling my business satisfactorily. And I did
wait. I turned this delay to account, and got together a case of
circumstantial evidence against my man that, though perhaps it might
have broken down in a law-court, would have been alone amply sufficient
for me.
"The reason why Lucille's visits to the banker's house ceased was, it
appeared, because Madame Steinmetz had conceived all at once a jealous
dislike to her. How far this was owing to Lucille herself I could well
understand; but I could understand Madame's jealousy equally well.
Madame's illness, strangely sudden, dated from the cessation of
Lucille's visits. Was it hard to find a _cause_ for that illness--a
cause for the wife's subsequent suspected death? I thought not. Then had
followed Lucille's departure from Paris. The child's anxiety for her
father hid her _other fear_ from his eyes and mine; but that fear must
have been on her then. With us she forgot it in time; yet it or another
reason had always prevented all mention of what had occasioned it. She
became my wife. At that very time I easily ascertained that Steinmetz
was absent from Paris; less easily, but indubitably, that he had, at all
events, been as far south as Lyons. At Lyons it must have been that
Lucille first discovered he was dogging us. Hence her alarm, which I had
remembered, and her anxiety to proceed on our journey without stopping
for the night, as I had previously arranged. The morning after the
murder Steinmetz reappeared in Paris. From the hour at which he was seen
at the _gare_, it was certain that he had travelled by the night express
train in which Lucille and I had started from Lyons; and he wore that
morning a travelling-coat of fur in all respects similar to the one I
remembered so well.
"If I had ever had any doubt of my man after actually seeing him, I
should probably have convinced myself that he was my man by the general
tendency of these facts, which I got at slowly and one by one. But I had
no need of such evidence; and of course no case, even with such
evidence, for a court of law. However, courts of law I had never
intended to trouble in the matter.