Outside, in a wan morning, a black and murmurous crowd was massed behind the soldiers. The clinking of weapons, the stamping of the horses’ hooves and him, Baruyer, his hands tied behind his back, with the black hood of parricides over his head.
Stiffening with all his might in order not to seem afraid, he was placed beneath the blade of the guillotine, against the sinister plank, and in a rapid vision in which things were confused in the morning haze, he perceived in front of him a crucifix brandished by a priest.
Suddenly, there was a hard and icy impact on the back of his neck.
He uttered a loud scream and woke up, his eyes haggard.
And he heard strident, satanic laughter mocking him. His hair standing on end, he stammered: “But I’m not guilty.”
“No, Albert Baruyer,” said a voice, “You’re not guilty of this crime. It was me, the Invisible, who took the dagger from your hand to cut your infamous mother’s throat. No, you’re not guilty, but you’ll be guillotined all the same, because I, the Invisible, want to punish you thus for your other sins. You have merited the supreme punishment, Albert Baruyer, and it’s of no importance that the law is imposing it for an erroneous motive. You’ll pay on the scaffold for the evil that you’ve done in other circumstances.”
There was a further burst of strident laughter. Livid and terrified, Albert Baruyer started howling like a madman, and warders equipped with lanterns came running.
“The Invisible!” he cried. “He’s here! Lock the door! Don’t let him get away…escape again...”
The warders looked at one another; they made signs and went out rapidly. One of them murmured, in a Provençal accent: “He’s mad, po’ fella! He’ll never go to the Assizes.”
VII. The Poorly-Sealed Coffin
The winter had passed very gently, and since the first days of March, a precocious spring had put buds on the branches of the trees. Albert Baruyer, interned for life, was a dead man. His brother, virtually ruined by the gamble on the Bourse in anticipation of Barsac’s fall, was trying painfully, in association with Walesport, to shore up the bank and prepare a new operation. Vauclin, also afflicted by the disaster, blamed Georges Baruyer for it. Between all those modern conquistadors, a kind of mistrust had arisen, an obscure, imprecise hatred, for too many affairs had gone awry in a matter of months, and each of them was convinced that the fault lay with a traitor in their midst.
Meanwhile, Barsac, the man whose abrupt triumph remained an enigma for them, had finally been overturned; his politics of procrastination, prevarication and continual half-measures has ended up wearying public opinion.
Germany was smiling.
During a kind of lull favorable to the resumption of business, Walesport and Vauclin were thinking about reconstituting their lost resources. Already, the two men were elaborating a scheme, when an unexpected event occurred, a coup de théâtre: the cadaver of Julien de Vandeuvre had been discovered in the Vauclins’ house.
One morning, the domestics, lodged in the attics, had noticed a frightful smell, and the frightened concierge had run to summon the police. When they went into the redoubt under the roof, after serious ventilation, they soon established that the nauseating odor was coming from a long rectangle of plaster elevated against the wall. No doubt was possible: a brownish liquid was running over the floor through a gap between the block and the red tiles: an unspeakable ooze that was spreading out in a semi-coagulated pool amid the dust in a corner of the room.
“What carrion is buried in there?” the Commissaire interrogated.
The concierges remained stupefied. Neither the man nor his wife remembered ever having seen that bizarre construction before. They knew when the masons had stored materials there; it must, therefore, have been constructed during the summer or the winter. By whom?
The masons, for whom the Commissaire sent, observed that the base of the construction had been undermined by accumulated liquids. One of the men explained: “You see, Monsieur le Commissaire, that skylight that has been left open? The rain has come in through there, and the water has spread out through the cupboard, accumulated in this corner, passing under the plaster block, inundating the tiling. We can easily remove that botched work.”
Indeed, when two workmen put pressure on the construction, it slid into the middle of the room, leaving a fetid trail.
“You see, Monsieur le Commissiaire, it’s a cadaver that’s been hidden in there, but the swine who built the tomb weren’t in the trade.”
“Why?”
“Because masons, before anything else, would have molded it to the floor, even sunk a few points in order to raise up an underlay on which to build subsequently. Whereas, operating as they’ve done, the murderers—for I assume that it was them—didn’t know that the block wouldn’t adhere to the floor. Then the rain, coming in through the skylight, penetrated inside the block from underneath, and that filth has leaked out.”
At that moment, the Commissaire perceived the inscription in chalk traced on the door: Resurgam.
“If it’s a human cadaver in there, the bandits didn’t lack audacity. In spite of that macabre joke, we’re going to find some big dog in there, or a litter of kittens. Demolish it.”
With blows of a pick-ax, the block was broken up. A crack extended through the middle and the mass opened in two halves. The spectators recoiled, fearfully.
“Ah, so much the better!” the Commissaire could not help crying.
The formless, black, stinking mass that lay in the plaster, in the midst of stained fabric, was indeed a putrefying human cadaver. The witnesses of that vision had haggard, fearful expressions; the concierge’s wife uttered piercing screams, and they all held their noses.
“Don’t touch anything!” cried the Commissaire.
An agent having telephoned the Prefecture of Police on his order, less than half an hour later all the representatives of the law were there. Monsieur Sauliet, the examining magistrate, took the affair in hand. Hundreds of curiosity-seekers were already gathered outside the putrid house.
On perceiving all the people gathered in the Avenue, Vauclin and his wife manifested the instinctive recoil of people who do not have a clear conscience. Already, via the service stairway, the news of the macabre discovery had spread, and it was a chambermaid who informed the brunette Messalina.
Before the domestic, Madame Vauclin did not manifest any emotion, but once alone with her husband she assumed a distressed expression reflecting atrocious anxieties. The two accomplices, disorientated and fearful, wondered what they ought to do: brazen it out or flee?
Vauclin quickly made his decision. Before judging the situation, it was necessary to know more about it, and, in order to do that, to see. Boldly, he climbed the stairs and arrived at the corridor to the maids’ rooms, which as blocked by an agent.
The representative of the authority did not want to hear any plea to let him pass; he was obeying orders. However, as the argument became heated, the public prosecutor came out of the attic to investigate the cause of the racket. Recognizing Vauclin, he advanced toward him, smiling.
“That’s true,” he said, “you live in the house.”
The prosecutor shook Vauclin’s hand, took him by the arm amicably, and drew him into the lumber-room before the astonished gaze of the policeman. The criminal, very cool and admirably self-controlled, nevertheless started abruptly in the presence of the horrible vision.
“Ah!” said the prosecutor. “It isn’t pretty.” And he put a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils.
Vauclin looked at the cadaver, a putrescent mass of green-tinted flesh, with which plaster dust and shards of brick were mingled. The young man’s white evening shirt was a frightful rag.
The murderer thought: He’s unrecognizable. It’ll be a clever man who can identify the handsome Julien de Vandeuvre in those putrid remains. Come on, they won’t get me this time, not me, Arsène Vauclin. But he was suddenly transfixed by the word Resurgam, the chalk inscription on the door. Well, the prop
hecy is realized; here’s Vandeuvre, returned to the light.
“Let’s see,” said the head of the Sûreté. “Workers carried out repairs in the house last spring. When the work was complete, they deposited the remains of the plaster they’d used here, along with the materials belonging to the owner. At that time, they didn’t see anything abnormal, and the concierge affirms that when they left, the plaster cube didn’t exist. So, in a window that we ought to place in June, according to the medical examiner, the crime was committed. Where? In the house, indisputably, for it’s inadmissible that the cadaver came from outside. It is, therefore, among the tenants of the building that it’s necessary to search for the key to the enigma.”
The concierge, very worthily, thought he ought to protest. “The house is only inhabited by people above any such suspicion.”
“Of course, my man; in any case, we’re not accusing anyone.”
But the examining magistrate, not wanting to give evidence of any less perspicacity that the head of the Sûreté, said: “I don’t believe that that it’s in the direction of the tenants that it’s necessary to search. It’s a drama of the sixth floor.”
There was a sudden stir; employees dressed in long hospital smocks set about transporting the remains of the cadaver.
Before going out of the attic, Monsieur Sauliet made the further observation: “And then again, Messieurs, who, if not a domestic, accustomed to inferior work, would have had the idea of using that plaster to build the victim a sepulcher. I can’t see a man of the world...”
Vauclin smiled. He was triumphant, but he regretted, even so, having been so maladroit. If he had known what he was doing, the cadaver would only have been discovered much later. In those conditions, however, it would have been mummified, and in consequence recognizable, whereas the water, coming through the skylight that he had forgotten to close, and subsequently penetrating the block of plaster had hastened the decomposition of the body, and it was scarcely probably now that they would succeed in identifying the victim. Thus, it had all worked out well.
Obligingly, he furnished the representatives of the law with numerous details about the house and the tenants, puerile items of information gravely recorded by the examining magistrate, the inanity of which Vauclin was well aware.
When he went back to his wife, who had retired to her bedroom, terribly anxious, he had a face so radiant that she stood up suddenly, also transfigured.
“You can be reassured. The law is going astray in silly paths, and Vandeuvre is unrecognizable.”
“In spite of all that, I’m uneasy. There are obscure points in this inexplicable story whose rationale escapes me. That dead man, already dead once before and then resurrected, is outside the natural laws of logic, and I sense the hand of a mysterious being who is our enemy.”
Vauclin remembered the word Resurgam written in chalk on the door of the attic. Suddenly, he stood up and started pacing back and forth in the room. In a dull voice, he said: “But what is this invisible being that is following us through life, hiding in the shadows? Who is it? Oh, it’s all coming back to me now: that Vandeuvre who came back to life, that dead man who reappeared at a party in my house, that inscription of the door, the sarcastic laughter I heard coming down the stairs, other laughter—the same one—when we decided, with the Baruyers and Walesport, the famous coup on the Bourse, and then the debacle that followed, our fortune lost. Albert Baruyer mad, his mother tragically killed—all of it looms up as a bundle of evidence, in testimony of the hatred of this powerful unknown. But, powerful as he is, when I know who he is, I’ll take responsibility for killing him! Who is he? Who? Who? Who?”
He was now in a state of extreme fury and his eyes were flashing. Then, his wife, calm and cold, said: “Why did the Fortins, whom we never see, and who never see anyone, bring Vandeuvre to us on the evening of that tragic night?”
At that reflection, Vauclin started. “You think,” he said, his throat taut, “you think it’s from that direction? What motive for hatred could the scientist have against us? I’ve searched hard...”
“But you haven’t found anything? Me neither. Jeanne was a friend at school. She still was, I thought.”
“So?”
“So, there’s a mystery here that it’s necessary to clarify. This afternoon, I’ll go to Saint-Cloud in the auto, to the Fortins’—and I hope that this evening, I’ll have indications that will permit me to fix my opinion.”
Vauclin had a boundless admiration for the genius of his wife. Between those two individuals, in whom no real tenderness existed, but merely complicity, a link was suddenly sealed, for they sensed danger threatening—and in a moment of confidence, and perhaps gratitude, Vauclin took his wife in his arms and kissed her forehead.
VIII. Madame Vauclin’s Astonishments
The lovely Madame Vauclin arrived at the Red Nest at about three o’clock. The March afternoon was delightful, for the extraordinarily precious spring was sensible, even though the trees were still bare of leaves. The old Norman gate to the vast park with the appearance of wilderness was wide open. The auto moved into the pathways scarcely traced through the undergrowth of the abandoned wood. When Madame Vauclin perceived the house covered in moss with its decrepit walls and its slender belvedere, she had the sensation of arriving at the dwelling of a sorceress.
She did, in fact, find Fortin in the company of the Sorcerer, Homo-Deus, who already knew the story of the discovery of the cadaver.
Well, she doesn’t lack nerve. So much the better; I like adversaries who aren’t afraid.
Jeanne and her father, brought up to date by the Invisible, who had come to have lunch with them, exchanged knowing glances.
The young woman came forward. “To what do I owe the pleasure of seeing you?”
Madame Vauclin could not give the true reason for her visit. On the other hand, at two o’clock in the afternoon, she could not maintain silence about the discovery made in her house. That omission would have been too conspicuous.
“No other motive than the joy of spending a little time with you, and the desire to savor the charm of a delightful afternoon. I was in the Bois and, perceiving the hills of Saint-Cloud, did not hesitate to come.”
“How nice. But why are you so pale?”
“I’m still under the influence of a violent emotion experienced this morning.”
Jeanne looked at her curiously, and Vanel smiled imperceptibly.
At that moment, Madame Vauclin sensed an uncomfortable atmosphere around her. An obscure intuition warned her of danger. The three individuals were attentive—perhaps more so than was appropriate—to what she was about to say. And on sensing them thus, simultaneously courteous and avid, their necks taut and their ears pricked, she experienced a vague instinctive terror.
They know! she said to herself. But she braced herself against the emotion that overtook her; a grim energy stiffened her, and she was able to assume a naturally fearful expression, without excess. To say: “Yes, can you imagine that a putrefying body was discovered this morning in the building where we live, on the flunkeys’ floor.”
“Oh!” said all her listeners, in unison.
There was nothing sincere about their astonishment, and Madame Vauclin pursed her lips. Now I’m sure that they know.
What should she do? She gave details, volubly, bravely pushing boldness to the point of saying that her husband had assisted the agents of law with their investigation, and that he had read the bizarre prophecy on the door of the attic.
Marc Vanel found her astonishing. Individuals of this sort were a change from the vague dolls encountered in society, and his misanthropy was amused by playing with an adversary of greater dimension.
He questioned her. “Do you know who the cadaver was, Madame?”
“I would doubtless know if, like you, I possessed the talent to divine everything. Personally, I’m not a witch, and it appears that the victim was in such a state of decomposition that it will be very difficult for the law to identi
fy him.”
“Oh! But perhaps the cadaver was dressed. In that case, his pockets might contain papers?”
“No. There’s every reason to believe that the identity of the dead man can never be proven. That doesn’t alter the fact that the drama, under my own roof, has distressed me somewhat.”
“It’s a sensational affair,” Homo-Deus remarked. “The newspapers will take possession of it.”
“My dear Madame,” Dr. Fortin added, “Be sure that the law, with the aid of science, will be able to identify the dead man. A scientist finds clues where others see nothing. A preceding wound, the traces of an accident—a fracture for example—is more than enough to clarify the mystery. A fracture is never effaced; the trace remains as clear as a signature. It even reveals the date when it was repaired. Don’t worry—the dead man found in your house will surely be recognized, and if the murderer lives there, the law will rid you of him.”
Sophie Vauclin was as white as a corpse now, but she retained a clarity of thought and a lucid mind. The doctor’s insistence reminded her that Julien de Vandeuvre’s fracture was characteristic, known. Perhaps foolishly, she still wanted to fortify her certainty.
“Who knows,” she said, “whether the poor fellow might not have been drawn into a trap by a soubrette?”
Coldly sarcastic, Homo-Deus seized the opportunity to amuse himself on the wing. “What would be even more frightful is that one of your guests might have been seduced by your chambermaid.” He laughed, blithely, mockingly and stridently. “Pardon me,” he said, when he had finished. “I’m amused by your terror, caused by the possibility that you might have a criminal in your service.”
As he seemed veritably to be enjoying himself, casually, Madame Vauclin wondered whether he was sincere or whether he was mocking her—but she knew that laughter.
“Oh, how unkind you are!” she said, pulling a face that she wanted to be pert, but which was a trifle forced.
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