The Three Eyes Part 13

My summons only hastened his flight; and it was in vain that I darted forward in his pursuit, shouting insults at him and threatening him with a revolver which I did not possess. He covered the whole width of the fields, leapt over a hedge and reached the skirt of the woods.

I was certainly younger than he, for I soon perceived that the interval between us was decreasing; and I should have caught him up, if we had been running across open country. But I lost sight of him at the first clump of trees; and I was nearly abandoning the attempt to come up with him, when, suddenly, he retraced his steps and seemed to be looking for something.

I made a rush for him. He did not appear to be perturbed by my approach. He merely drew a revolver and pointed it at me, without saying a word or ceasing his investigations.

I now saw what his object was. Something lay gleaming in the gra.s.s. It was a piece of metal which, I soon perceived, was none other than the steel plate on which Noel Dorgeroux had engraved the chemical formula.

We both flung ourselves on the ground at the same time. I was the first to seize the strip of steel. But a hand gripped mine; and on this hand, which was half-covered by the sleeve of the rain-coat, there was blood.

I was startled and suffered from a moment's faintness. The vision of Noel Dorgeroux dying, nay, dead, had flashed upon me so suddenly that the man succeeded in overpowering me and stretching me underneath him.

As we thus lay one against the other, with our faces almost touching, I saw only part of his, the lower half being hidden by the m.u.f.fler.

But his two eyes glared at me, under the shadow of his hat; and we stared at each other in silence, while our hands continued to grapple.

Those eyes of his were cruel and implacable, the eyes of a murderer whose whole being is bent upon the supreme effort of killing. Where had I seen them before? For I certainly knew those fiercely glittering eyes. Their gaze penetrated my brain at a spot into which it had already been deeply impressed. It bore a familiar look, a look which had crossed my own before. But when? In what eyes had I seen that expression? In the eyes looming out of the wall perhaps? The eyes shown on the fabulous screen?

Yes, yes, those were the eyes! I recognized them now! They had shone in the infinite s.p.a.ce that lay in the depths of the plaster! They had lived before my sight, a few minutes ago, on the ruined wall of the mortuary chapel. They were the same cruel, pitiless eyes, the eyes which had perturbed me then even as they were perturbing me now, sapping my last remnant of strength.

I released my hold. The man sprang up, caught me a blow on the forehead with the b.u.t.t of his revolver and ran away, carrying the steel plate with him.

This time I did not think of pursuing him. Without doing me any great hurt, the blow which I received had stunned me. I was still tottering on my feet when I heard, in the woods, the same sound of an engine being started and a car getting under way which I had heard near the cemetery. The motor-car, driven by the man with the eye-gla.s.ses, had come to fetch my a.s.sailant. The two confederates, after having probably rid themselves of Berangere and certainly rid themselves of Noel Dorgeroux, were making off. . . .

My heart wrung with anguish, I hurried back to the foot of the old lamp-post, hoisted myself to the top of the fence and in this way jumped into the front part of the Yard, contained between the main wall and the new structure of the amphitheatre.

This wall, entirely rebuilt, taller and wider than it used to be, now had the size and the importance of the outer wall of a Greek or Roman amphitheatre. Two square columns and a canopy marked the place of the screen, whose plaster, from the distance at which I stood, did not seem yet to be coated with its layer of a dark-grey composition, which explained why my uncle had left it uncovered. Nor could I at first see the lower part, which was concealed by a heap of materials of all kinds. But how certain I felt of what I should see when I came nearer!

How well I knew what was there, behind those planks and building-stones!

My legs were trembling. I had to seek a support. It cost me an untold effort to take a few steps forward.

Right against the wall, in the very middle of his Yard, Noel Dorgeroux lay p.r.o.ne, his arms twisted beneath him.

A cursory inspection showed me that he had been murdered with a pick-axe.

CHAPTER VIII

"SOME ONE WILL EMERGE FROM THE DARKNESS"

Notwithstanding Noel Dorgeroux's advanced age, there had been a violent struggle. The murderer, whose footprints I traced along the path which led from the fence to the wall, had flung himself upon his victim and had first tried to strangle him. It was not until later, in the second phase of the contest, that he had seized a pick-axe with which to strike Noel Dorgeroux.

Nothing of intrinsic value had been stolen. I found my uncle's watch and note-case untouched. But the waistcoat had been opened; and the lining, which formed a pocket, was, of course, empty.

For the moment I wasted no time in the Yard. Pa.s.sing through the garden and the Lodge, where I told old Valentine in a few words what had happened, I called the nearest neighbours, sent a boy running to the mayor's and went on to the disused cemetery, accompanied by some men with ropes, a ladder and a lantern. It was growing dark when we arrived.

I had decided to go down the cistern myself; and I did so without experiencing any great emotion. Notwithstanding the reasons which led me to fear that Berangere might have been thrown into it, the crime appeared to me to be absolutely improbable. And I was right.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of the cistern, which was perforated by obvious cracks and held only a few puddles of stagnant water, I picked up in the mud, among the stones, brickbats and potsherds, an empty bottle, the neck of which had been knocked off. I was struck by its blue colour. This was doubtless the bottle which had been taken from the dresser at the Lodge. Besides, when I brought it back to the Lodge that evening, Valentine identified it for certain.

What had happened might therefore be reconstructed as follows: the man with the eye-gla.s.ses, having the bottle in his possession, had gone to the cemetery to meet the motor-car which was waiting for him and had stopped in front of the chapel, to which were nailed the fragments from the old wall in the Yard. These fragments he had smeared with the liquid contained in the bottle. Then, when he heard me coming, he threw the bottle down the well and, without having time to see the picture which I myself was to see ten minutes later, he ran away and went off in the car to pick up Noel Dorgeroux's murderer near the Yard.

Things as they turned out confirmed my explanation, or at least confirmed it to a great extent. But what of Berangere? What part had she played in all this? And where was she now?

The enquiry, first inst.i.tuted in the Yard by the local police, was pursued next day by a magistrate and two detectives, a.s.sisted by myself. We learnt that the car containing the two accomplices had come from Paris on the morning of the day before and that it had returned to Paris the same night. Both coming and going it had carried two men whose descriptions tallied exactly with that of the two criminals.

We were favoured by an extraordinary piece of luck. A road-mender working near the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne told us, when we asked him about the motor-car, that he recognized it as having been garaged in a coach-house close by the house in which he lived and that he recognized the man with the eye-gla.s.ses as one of the tenants of this same house!

He gave us the address. The house was behind the Jardin des Batignolles. It was an old barrack of a tenement-house swarming with tenants. As soon as we had described to the concierge the person for whom we were searching, she exclaimed:

"You mean M. Velmot, a tall, good-looking man, don't you? He has had a furnished flat here for over six months, but he only sleeps here now and again. He is out of town a great deal."

"Did he sleep at home last night?"

"Yes. He came back yesterday evening, in his motor, with a gentleman whom I had never seen before; and they did not leave until this morning."

"In the motor?"

"No. The car is in the garage."

"Have you the key of the flat?"

"Of course! I do the housework!"

"Show us over, please."

The flat consisted of three small rooms; a dining-room and two bedrooms. It contained no clothes or papers. M. Velmot had taken everything with him in a portmanteau, as he did each time he went away, said the concierge. But pinned to the wall, amid a number of sketches, was a drawing which represented the Three Eyes so faithfully that it could not have been made except by some one who had seen the miraculous visions.

"Let's go to the garage," said one of the detectives.

We had to call in a locksmith to gain admittance. In addition to the m.u.f.fler and a coat stained with blood we found two more m.u.f.flers and three silk handkerchiefs, all twisted and spoilt. The identification-plate of the car had been recently unscrewed. The number, newly repainted, must be false. Apart from these details there was nothing specially worth noting.

I am trying to sum up the phases of the preliminary and magisterial enquiries as briefly as possible. This narrative is not a detective-story any more than a love-story. The riddle of the Three Eyes, together with its solution, forms the only object of these pages and the only interest which the reader can hope to find in them. But, at the stage which we have reached, it is easy to understand that all these events were so closely interwoven that it is impossible to separate one from the other. One detail governs the next, which in its turn affects what came before.

So I must repeat my earlier question: what part was Berangere playing in it all? And what had become of her? She had disappeared, suddenly, somewhere near the chapel. Beyond that point there was not a trace of her, not a clue. And this inexplicable disappearance marked the conclusion of several successive weeks during which, we are bound to admit, the girl's behaviour might easily seem odd to the most indulgent eyes.

I felt this so clearly that I declared, emphatically, in the course of my evidence:

"She was caught in a trap and carried off."

"Prove it," they retorted. "Find some justification for the appointments which she made and kept all through the winter with the fellow whom you call the man with the gla.s.ses, in other words, with the man Velmot."

And the police based their suspicions on a really disturbing charge which they had discovered and which had escaped me. During his struggle with his a.s.sailant, very likely at the moment when the latter, after reducing him to a state of helplessness, had moved away to fetch the pick-axe, Noel Dorgeroux had managed to scrawl a few words with a broken flint at the foot of the screen. The writing was very faint and almost illegible, for the flint in places had merely scratched the plaster; nevertheless, it was possible to decipher the following:

"B-ray. . . . Berge. . ."

The term "B-ray" evidently referred to Noel Dorgeroux's invention. My uncle's first thought, when threatened with death, had been to convey in the briefest (but, unfortunately, also the most unintelligible) form the particulars which would save his marvellous discovery from oblivion. "B-ray" was an expression which he himself understood but which suggested nothing to those who did not know what he meant by it.