But I had forgotten it all—all my anger, all my hatred and bitterness, when I met you. I dare not trust myself to think of you too much, now that everything is arranged for the one last step. It takes all my control to keep my decision unwavering while I sit here and tell you how much your love, your great tenderness, your sweet trust in me, meant to me.
Let me talk rather of Albert Graumann. I will forgive him for believing in my guilt, but I cannot forgive him that he, the man of cultivation and mental grasp, could not believe it possible for a convicted thief to have repented and to have lived an honest life after the atonement of his crime. I still cannot believe that this was Graumann’s opinion. I am forced to think that it was an excuse only on his part, an excuse to keep us apart, an excuse to keep you for himself.
You are lost to me now. There is nothing more in life for me. If the injustice of mankind has stained my honour beyond repair, has robbed me of every chance of happiness at any time and in any place, then I die easily, beloved, for there is little charm in such a life as would be mine after this.
But I do not wish to die quite in vain. There are two men who have touched my life, who need the lesson my death can teach them. These men are Albert Graumann and the prosecuting attorney Gustav Schmidt, the man who once condemned me so cruelly. His present position would make him the representative of the state in a murder trial, and I know his opinions too well not to foresee that he would declare Graumann guilty because of the circumstantial evidence which will be against him. My letter, given to the Presiding Judge after the Attorney has made his speech, will cause him humiliation, will ruin his brilliant arguments and cast ridicule upon him.
Do not think me hard or revengeful. I do not hate anyone now that death is so near. But is it inhuman that I should want to teach these two men a lesson? a lesson which they need, believe me, and it is such a slight compensation for the torture these last eight years have been to me!
And now I will explain in detail all the circumstances. I have arranged that Albert Graumann shall come to me on the evening of September 23rd between 7 and 8 o’clock. I asked him to do so by letter, asking him also to keep the fact of his visit to me a secret. Tonight, the 22nd of September, I received his answer promising that he would come. Therefore I can look upon everything that is to happen, as having already happened, for now there need be no further change in my plans. I will send this letter this evening to my friend Pernburg in Frankfurt am Main. In case anything should happen that would render impossible for me to carry out my plans, I will send Pernburg another letter asking him not to carry out the instructions of the first.
I can now proceed to tell you what will happen here tomorrow evening, the 23rd of September.
Albert Graumann will come to me, unknown to his family or friends, as I have asked him to come. I will so arrange it that the old servant will see him come in but will not see him go out. My landlady will not be in my way, for she has already told me that she will spend the night of the 23rd with her mother, in another part of the city. It is to be a birthday celebration I believe, so that I can be certain her plans will not be changed.
Graumann and I will be alone, therefore, with no reliable witnesses near. I will keep him there for a little while with commonplace conversation, for I have nothing to say to him. If he moves near the desk I will upset the inkbottle. The spots on his clothes will be another evidence against him. I will endeavour to get him to keep my jewelry which is, as you know, of considerable value. I will tell him that I am going away for a while and ask him to take charge of it for me. I, myself, will take him down to the door and let him out, when I have satisfied myself that the old servant is in bed or at least at the back of the house. The revolver which shall end my misery is Graumann’s property. I took it from its place without his knowledge.
The 10,000 gulden which I told my landlady were still in the house, and which would therefore be thought missing after my death, I have deposited in a bank in Frankfort in your name. Here is the certificate of deposit.
I will endeavour not to hold the revolver sufficiently close to have the powder burn my clothes. And I will exert every effort of mind and body to throw it far from me after I have fired the fatal shot. I think that I will be able to do this, for I am a very good shot and I have no fear of death. One thing more I will do, to turn aside all suspicion of suicide. I will write a letter to some person who does not exist, a letter which will make it appear as if I were in excellent humour and planning for the future.
And now, good-bye to life. People have called me eccentric, they may be right. This last deed of mine at least, is out of the ordinary. No one will say now that ended my life in a moment of darkened mind, in a rush of despair. My brain is perfectly clear, my heart beats calmly, now that I have arranged everything for my departure from this world of falsehood and unreality. My last deed shall go to prove to the world how little actual, apparent facts can be trusted.
The one thing real, the one thing true in all this world of falsehood was your love and your trust. I thank you for it.
THEODOR BELLMNN, KNOWN AS JOHN SIDERS.
Joseph Muller refuses to take any particular credit for this case. The letter would have come in time to prevent Graumann’s conviction without his assistance, he says. The only person whose gratitude he has a right to is Prosecuting Attorney Gustav Schmidt. He managed to have the Police Commissioner in G— read the letter in detail to the attorney. But Muller himself knows that it failed of its effect, so far as that dignitary was concerned. For nothing but open ridicule could ever convince a man of such decided opinions that he is not the one infallible person in the world.
But Albert Graumann had learned his lesson. And he told Muller himself that the few days of life which might remain to him were a gift to him from the detective. He felt that his weak heart would not have stood the strain and the disgrace of an open trial, even if that trial ended in acquittal. Two months later he was found dead in his bed, a calm smile on his lips.
Before he died he had learned that it was the undaunted courage of his timid little old aunt that had brought Muller to take charge of the case and to free her beloved nephew from the dreaded prison. And the last days that these two passed together were very happy.
But as aforesaid, Muller refuses to have this case included in the list of his successes. He did not change the ultimate result, he merely anticipated it, he says.
* A collection of six of the Muller stories, translated by Grace Isabel Colbron, was published in English in 1910 by Duffield & Co.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), after a brief career as an actress, became a very popular writer of the Victorian and early Edwardian period. She is best remembered for her enormously popular sensational novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). While this work certainly deals with crimes, with themes partially based on the Road Hill House murder of 1860 which also inspired Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, it is not crime fiction in any modern sense. However, her earlier work, Trail of the Serpent (1860), has been called the first English detective novel. Elements include boy assistants for the detectives (not unlike Holmes’s Irregulars), evidence planted on a corpse, and the detective’s use of disguise. The principal detective, Joseph Peters, is also quite unusual: Not only is he mute, he is lower-class. Although Braddon wrote eighty novels, she also wrote numerous short stories. The following, which first appeared in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper for December 27, 1896, combines a ghost story with a sad tale of a crime gone badly wrong.
THE WINNING SEQUENCE
M. E. BRADDON
THE PROLOGUE
The house is silent. A roomy, old-fashioned house—in the Royal village, that old-world Richmond to which King and Queen, and dukes and duchesses, and loose-lived ladies used to come a century and a half ago, and where Royalty still inhabits and loyal joy-bells ring loud.
The house is silent in the quiet, grey hour betwixt night and morning. Through the tall window on the staircase, a horizontal rift in the sky, a strea
k of pale light beneath a ridge of black cloud, tells that day is near.
Not a sound but the faint patter of mice, like the trickling of water, behind the worm-eaten panelling. Not a sound? Yes; there is a sound—a sound which has been heard often in that house—on that landing, at just that grey hour which is neither night nor morning. The sound of a footfall that is lighter than tread of a human foot; the sound of a sigh that reaches from the far distance of an unknown grave.
A door opens gently, slowly, and a scared face looks out into the dimness. It is the mistress of the house, who has heard that footfall before tonight, and who knows the story of it, and wants to see and hear more than mortal lips can tell her. She steps softly in slippered feet, as if her footsteps would disturb a ghost. She sees, or fancies she sees, in that grey twilight—first a pair of slippers, standing on the threshold of the door opposite her own door—embroidered velvet slippers, with red heels; next, turning her eyes towards the staircase, she sees, or fancies she sees, a figure slowly descending—the figure of a woman, handsome, past her first youth, but still young; tall, commanding; dressed in a loose gown of Indian silk, curiously patterned, a dull red, with a yellow scroll figured over it. The woman of the house sees, or believes she sees, all this—every particular of the tall figure, the loose flowing hair, the bare white arms, even to the delicate modelling of the hand which lightly touches the stout oak banister-rail.
Slowly, softly, she follows that silent figure, treading so stealthily with its bare feet, slowly, stair by stair, with cautious pauses and lingering movements to the hall below, which is darker than that upper corridor; and, after gentlest opening of a door, into the dark drawing-room, where the woman of the house sees—or thinks she sees—that shadow woman strike a light with flint and steel and clumsy process of burning tinder, and so light a candle.
Then the shadow-woman sets down the tall silver candlestick on a phantasmal card-table. And the house-mistress sees that other woman who has been dead a century and a half kneel on the carpeted floor, which is scattered with cards thick as fallen leaves in November woods—kings and queens and aces, cards that turn the fortune of the game. She gathers them up in heaps, and kneeling by the table in the dim candlelight, she sorts pack after pack with infinite pains, assures herself with earnest eyes and puckered brows of numbers and of suits, each pack complete, and with nothing to spare; and then after this patient labour, which lasts a long time, lays one small pack of cards on the table, and flings all the rest about the floor around the card-table. The little pack of selected cards she thrusts into the bosom of her red and yellow bedgown; and then she blows out the candle and creeps out of the room and across the hall, and upstairs again, her figure lighted by an unearthly light—a bluish glimmer, faint and dim and fitful, which the woman of the house fancies must be the light that hangs above an unhallowed grave—a light whereof the shadow-woman is unconscious, and so must needs grope for a candle to light her stealthy search.
Slowly and softly she steps, with pale, naked foot, from stair to stair, and at the top of the staircase melts and is absorbed into the growing dawn; and, lo! when the living woman looks at the ground by the door of the empty bed-chamber the velvet shoes are gone. There is nothing left but a fancy or a dream. The old eight-day clock ticks in the dark hall below; the mice scamper, a bird sings on the little suburban garden outside, a cool breath of the morning blows in at an open window. The new-born day has begun in all its freshness of awaking bird and opening flower.
This is the story of the ghost.
Now for the story of the woman who lived and sinned and suffered in that house a century and a half ago.
THE STORY
“Dearest, if you would make me happy, you would give up high play,” said the Colonel.
“I would go further than that,” answered Mrs. Fermor; “if it would make you happy, I would give up cards altogether. What are they worth? An hour’s excitement, the triumph of a winning hand, the misery of losing more than one can afford to lose, and make light of one’s losses and sit smiling, while one thinks of servants’ wages overdue, and black looks from one’s milliner.”
“Indeed, my love, this passion for play, so common in your charming sex nowadays, is a folly that touches near the edge of sin. And if you could make such a sacrifice for my sake, abandon a practice which fashion has made almost a necessity.”
“What trumpery, worldly pleasure would I not sacrifice for you? Why I would give up more than cards. I would give up eating and drinking, and starve to death smiling in your face all the time, were we shipwrecked on a desert island. I would give up friends and home—change my religion.”
“Thou shalt give up nothing but a passion which verges on vice. I know your losses at cards have vexed you.”
“Yes! But I have been luckier lately. I won enough last week to pay all my little domestic debts. You will see only smiling faces among my household.”
“My dear Sybilla, to my mind it is more degrading to win than to lose, and I doubt that good luck, as you call it, exercises a worse influence on a woman-gamester than ill-fortune.”
“Yet, severely as you condemn the passion, you sometimes play yourself.”
“I never venture more than I can afford to lose. I am a man, and I cannot always refuse to share the amusements of my friends.”
They were in the first raptures of affianced love. She was young and beautiful—a widow who had married a man considerably her senior, and whose marriage had proved a disappointment, since the husband’s fortune was less than people thought when the matrimonial bargain was struck. She had been left with an income just large enough to make a show with, and insufficient for comfort and show. She might have lived comfortably and avoided debt had she consented to exist without a couple of footmen and to ride in a hired coach. But the coach and footmen seemed to her as essential as the air she breathed, and when she played high it was with the hope of supplementing her income by a run of luck at quadrille or faro.
She had been a gamester for years, and with varying fortunes, now lifted to the Empyrean, now sunk low as Hades, hourly expecting to be hauled off to the Sponging House, and to see dress, coach, and gilded chair, abigail* and footman, vanish like Cinderella’s cavalcade at the stroke of midnight.
For this season, since her engagement to Ralph Challoner, her star had been in the ascendant, and she had enjoyed a run of luck, at which her friends began to wonder, not without an occasional curled lip and shrugged shoulder, not without an occasional inuendo.
It was one of these inuendos, carelessly uttered in a crowded card-room, and overheard by Colonel Challoner, which had made him urge her to play no more. Not for worlds would he have repeated the sneer, the scornful hint, which, had it not fallen from a woman’s lips, would have been accounted for with blood. He told her only that he had observed the pernicious influence of the gaming-table. He had seen her feverish and excited at cards, ennuied, and absent-minded when she was away from the card-table. He had seen her haggard countenance and worried aspect, even during a run of luck which her friends had called miraculous.
He was a poor man—a soldier in a line regiment; but he had fought with Wolfe at Quebec, and his name had appeared advantageously in the Gazette. He knew that to marry the beautiful widow would be to hazard the peace and happiness of his future life; but he was still young enough to be desperately in love, and he turned a deaf ear to the whispers of prudence, when asked, “What have you, with scarce two hundred a year beyond a lieutenant-colonel’s pay, to do with an expensive wife?”
He knew that the lady was living beyond her means, and had ventured to expostulate with her upon her extravagance, but she put him off with a kiss.
“When I am your wife I will live as you bid me,” she said. “In a cottage by Kensington gravel-pits, with one red-elbowed servant-wench. Do you remember the cottage we passed that day we rode out westwards after we had visited the Princess—a wooden hovel, smothered with roses and honeysuckle? Well, Ralph, I would be c
ontent to live there—with you.”
“Why your hoop would not pass through the doorway, love.”
“I would live without a hoop; without fine clothes, or jewels”—with a sigh at the thought of jewels which might be seized by her creditors tomorrow, were they ill-natured enough to take the law of her.
“Then live without cards, Sybilla. Make that sacrifice, and I will hold myself the happiest of men.”
“Let me get out of debt first,” she urged.
“What? Are you so sure of winning?” His head was bent low to kiss the small hand that he was wont to clasp and fondle throughout their confidential talk, seated side by side on the Louis Quatorze sofa. Had he been looking at her he must have seen the sudden terror in her eyes, and the sickly whiteness under her rouge as he asked that question.
“Sure? No, of course not,” she answered, fretfully; “who can be sure of winning? Only I believe in luck; and it seems foolish to leave off play until my luck changes.”
His prayers prevailed, and she gave him her promise. But she did not give up her card-parties. She had her “day” and her “night”; and once a week the tables in her spacious drawing-room were going all day and all night; and she insisted upon Colonel Challoner’s playing for at least an hour or so at her parties. “My future husband has puritanical ideas about women gamesters,” she said, lightly; “and I am his obedient slave; so he must take my place and help to amuse my friends.”
She would hang over his shoulder sometimes as he played, and her flashing eyes and flushed cheeks showed that she had lost none of her interest in the game. The perfume of her hair, the soft touch of her cheek as it brushed against his, even the light pressure of the restless hand which fluttered and trembled on his shoulder, distracted his attention from the cards in his hand, and his play would have been careless and automatic had she not advised and even commanded him.
In the Shadow of Agatha Christie Page 26