They were still contemplating this extraordinary spectacle when some breath of wind blew aside the spray which hid the eyes; and it was at once visible that though there were long black eyelashes, as silken as the lashes of a lovely girl, there were no eyes. The face was a mask, but of an artistry which was exquisite and astounding.
“We must have that down,” said Hanaud.
It was not so high above their heads but that his crook-handled stick could fetch it down. It fell on to the grass and he picked it up. It was just a papier-maché mask — nothing more. But he handed it to Victor Corbie and said: “Put it on!”
Victor Corbie dropped his kepi on the ground, and with a grin of delight overspreading his bucolic face, slipped the mask over his face and head; and at once from a good-humoured, grinning yokel, he became a thing of horror, a thing to fly from in a panic. Mr. Ricardo could not believe that so complete a transformation was possible. The mask, fixed though the features were, lived — yes, lived. The bright red hair gave to it a final touch of uncanny force. Whichever way Corbie turned, the mask never leered. On the contrary, it was beautiful and very sad — the long black fine lashes gave to even Corbie’s staring eyes the sadness of all the ages. It would have been a fit mask for the Wandering Jew, but for one attribute it had. It was wicked — beautiful and sad and abominably wicked — a mask, in a word, for Satan. Such was its effect that, even when Corbie had removed it from his head, one at all events of the men watching him wondered for a time whether he was not some demon masquerading as a peasant who had vouchsafed him a glimpse of his real aspect.
“We shall take great care of this mask, Monsieur Le Commissaire,” Hanaud said, wrapping it up in a great coloured handkerchief which he pulled from his pocket. “There are only two men in the world, I think, who can make such masks as this. One of them is in America. The other is to be found in a studio in the back of the Haymarket in London. We shall soon know which of them made this, and for whom. Meanwhile, I beg that no one will speak of it.” He looked from face to face to impress his command upon them all, and continued with a quiet solemnity which Mr. Ricardo had only once or twice heard him use before: “For this crime of the Chateau Suvlac has, I think, a good deal in common with this mask. I mean, that when all at last is discovered, we shall find it to have been an inhuman and malignant business. It was pitiless, I believe. So we, in our turn, shall be pitiless too.” Mr. Ricardo shivered.
CHAPTER 13
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW
HANAUD GAVE AN order to the gendarme. “You will take those shoes and wrap them up and hand them over to the secretary of Monsieur Le Commissaire. Then you will tell my assistant when he has finished with the flower-bed to take a cast of these footprints too and cover them up.”
Corbie picked up the slippers and hurried off upon his duty up the avenue. The rest of the search-party followed at a slower pace.
They had come to within twenty yards of the house when a smallish, round man in a cassock with a purple sash about his waist stepped out from the window of the drawing-room and looked carefully about him. There was something curiously secret in his manner. Hanaud, though he seemed sunk fathoms deep in his own thoughts, saw him on the instant. He stopped, and with a gesture stopped the others.
“Who is that?” he asked in a low voice.
“The Abbe Fauriel,” the Commissaire Herbesthal replied.
“Oh, yes!” said Hanaud.
But he did not resume his walk.
“Let no one move,” he whispered; and, screened by the trees, they watched the Abbe’s movements.
He walked on the tips of his toes to the edge of the terrace, and turning about scanned the upper windows of the two turrets. Assured that no one was watching him from those points of vantage, he moved along the stone flags in the direction of the avenue, but slowly, with his eyes bent on the ground like a man pondering an abstraction. When, however, his pacing had brought him opposite to the glass door of the dining-room, he became all at once alert again. He peered into the room, raising himself up on the balls of his feet so that he might see the better, and then, crossing the terrace with a little noiseless, tripping run, he pressed his face against the glass.
“This is all very peculiar,” Mr. Ricardo whispered with displeasure. Furtiveness in an Abb was by no means an agreeable sight to him.
“Hush!” said Hanaud; and then to himself: “I wonder how long he has been waiting in the drawing-room to offer his condolences?”
The Commissaire answered him.
“Monsieur l’Abbe has not been waiting at all. No, indeed! He would have something to say, I think, if he was kept waiting. Oh! He is an authoritative one, the Abbe. He has already seen the ladies of Suvlac.”
“Oho!” said Hanaud, his voice lifting a little on a note of interest. “Has he now? Let me hear of this, Monsieur Le Commissaire.”
“He arrived before you and your friend returned from Villeblanche. He asked my permission very correctly to offer his ministrations to the ladies. It is true that the ladies are Protestants, but in such calamities, the creeds are one.”
“You gave him the permission?” Hanaud observed softly.
“Without hesitation,” replied Herbesthal very firmly.
Hanaud inclined his head. Even famous inspectors from the Surete Generate of Paris do not tread on the toes of commissaires of police if they want their affairs to run smoothly.
“So all this while Monsieur l’Abbe has had us under his observation,” he remarked, as though nothing could have been more fortunate.
“Far from it,” Herbesthal replied. “The Abbe saw Mademoiselle Tasborough first of all, and was not very long with her. He went immediately afterwards to the room of Madame Tasborough, which is in the wing behind and does not look out in this direction at all.”
There is a flaw here, Mr. Ricardo reflected. It was obviously important to know when the Abbe left the room in the wing and made his furtive way to the drawing-room. But he did not intervene. “It is clear,” he argued to himself, “that the Commissaire has a Fauriel complex.” He left the matter to Hanaud, but Hanaud was once more watching the terrace with eyes for nothing else.
The Abbe, satisfied that there was no one in the drawing-room to overlook him, turned towards Diana Tasborough’s room and resumed his meditative walk in that direction. Hanaud whistled under his breath.
“Did he see Diana Tasborough in her own room in the turret there?” he asked of the Commissaire, but without taking his eyes for one moment from the terrace.
“Certainly.”
“And now he returns to it when it is empty. Yes, as my friend Mr. Ricardo says, it is all very peculiar.”
Nearer and nearer the Abbe paced towards the turret, and suddenly he whipped through the doorway. It seemed that Hanaud had been expecting just that movement. He was away from his shelter in a flash. In spite of his bulk, he sprinted. He reached the terrace almost before his companions had started. He ran across it noiseless as a man in rubber shoes, keeping close to the windows of the house. In the angle made by the round projection of the turret, he stopped. He certainly had not been heard, and where he stood he could not be seen. On the other hand, he could not see anything that the Abbe was doing in Diana Tasborough’s room. This, however, he did not appear to mind. He waited very patiently in his angle. His friends, indeed, were already within earshot before the Abbe reappeared, still with the absent air of a philosopher so lost in meditation that he did not know whither his feet had been guiding him. But he was to be startled out of it. Hanaud slipped up behind him and bending said in his ear: “Monsieur l’Abbe!”
The Abbe swung round quite disconcerted. Hanaud, holding the mask hidden in the handkerchief in his left hand, removed his hat with his right, and bowed respectfully.
“You noticed, no doubt, that the little rearrangement had already been made?”
The sentence, Greek to Mr. Ricardo and the Commissaire, had the clearest meaning for the Abbe Fauriel. Consternation shone in his eyes, t
he blood withdrew from his cheeks, leaving them mottled, and his nose and the skin beneath his eyes like tallow. His face in a second seemed to have sunk and grown thin. He was an old and shrivelled man. But he had the spirit of a young one. He raised his head high, and now in place of the consternation there was the glint of battle in his eyes. He stood square; and then, turning slightly towards the Commissary Herbesthal, he said in a biting voice; “This, no doubt, is the illustrious Monsieur Hanaud, who very wisely speaks in riddles. For riddles are the short cut to prestige and reputation, and, besides, very intimidating to slow-witted provincials like ourselves.”
It was a declaration of war — no less than that. Mr. Ricardo, observing the little priest and the big detective, thought, in his obvious way, of David and Goliath. Hanaud had undoubtedly staged a little trap, but the Abbe was indisposed to tumble into it. Now that he had recovered himself, and stood quivering a little from head to foot, not with terror but with a concentration of his faculties, he looked a little man to be wary of. Mr. Ricardo wondered whether he concealed a sling about his person, fitted with a nice, big, fat stone.
“If I wrapped up my meaning, Monsieur l’Abbe, so that you only should understand it, as you evidently did,” said Hanaud, “you should be thankful for my consideration, rather than blame it. But since you won’t have my riddles, I ask you now in the plainest terms why you went into mademoiselle’s room just now with so many precautions against being seen?”
“I shall reply to you that I have my duties, as you have yours, Monsieur Hanaud. Mine, it is true, may be said to begin after yours have ended. But they are both sad and exacting and — secret. Should you, however, wish for a poor priest’s blessing upon yours, whatever they may be,” he added with a hint of humour, “I shall not be disposed to deny it you.” He moved away with a little bow, but Hanaud pivoted upon his heels like a soldier, and fell in at his side with the neatness of a cog fitting into the ratchet of a wheel.
“No doubt,” he said imperturbably. “I catch the criminal first, and you save his soul afterwards. It is a roughly correct division of our duties. But we each have the same third duty, Monsieur 1’Abbe.”
“Thousands of duties, Monsieur Hanaud. I have preached for thirty years, but I have not got to the end of them yet.”
“One, however, which is paramount.”
The little priest saw the stroke coming.
“I am aware of it, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“The duty of a good citizen.”
“You have said it.”
“And under the pressure of that third duty, one or two separate duties at times may overlap.”
The two men were pacing side by side away from the Commissaire and Mr. Ricardo. They were still, to Mr. Ricardo’s satisfaction, within earshot. But the Abbe, though he showed no sign of haste, was steadily edging in towards the door of the drawing-room.
“When and if that time comes, I trust that I shall not fail in mine,” the priest replied.
“That time has come, Monsieur l’Abbe.”
“I think not, Monsieur Hanaud, and I am the judge.”
“I shall invite your closer consideration upon that point, Monsieur l’Abbe.”
The dialogue was all very stiff and formal and polite, although now an angry quiver of the voice, now a bitter word caught quickly back, betrayed the fierce hostility between them. Now, however, disdain caused the Abbe Fauriel to trip.
“Any argument of yours, Monsieur Hanaud, must of course command every atom of consideration which I have to give,” he said with a curling lip; and Hanaud was under his guard in a flash.
“My argument is an instance, monsieur. For example, there is the little matter of your vestments which were stolen last night.”
The Abbe was shaken. He showed it only by stopping in his walk and by a second’s silence. Then he resumed in an accent of self-reproach:
“Monsieur Hanaud, I spoke too lightly in this house last night. I am ashamed, and I have appointed to myself certain penances in consequence. My vestments were hanging in my sacristy this morning and were worn by me as early as six o’clock, when to a deplorable congregation of two old women, I sought the blessing of St. Matthew upon our vineyards.”
Clearly Hanaud was astonished. “They were brought back by six o’clock this morning?” he cried.
The Abbe smiled.
“We who are not of your profession, Monsieur Hanaud, may be permitted to cultivate a spirit kind enough to believe that they had never been taken away.”
“That won’t do,” said Hanaud bluntly. The two men were standing face to face, the priest sheltering what knowledge he had behind a stolid face, Hanaud towering over him, like an inquisitor. The fine courtesies of “Monsieur l’Abbe” and “Monsieur Hanaud” were discarded like the last year’s frills on a lady’s gown. “You did not find all your vestments in your sacristy this morning. For one of them is in the mortuary at Villeblanche stained with the blood of a young woman who dined at the same table with you in this house last night, and was savagely murdered afterwards.”
Mr. Ricardo could hardly repress a cry, as he comprehended the careful scrutiny which Hanaud had made of the torn piece of fine linen in which the body of Evelyn Devenish had been wrapped. But the Abbe actually uttered one. His jaw dropped; he stood and stared at the detective, his face an effigy of horror.
“You are sure of that abomination?” he stammered, and he did not wait for an answer to his question. His defences were down. He had no big fat stone and no sling to launch it with. He tottered to the bench and, dropping down upon it heavily, fumbled for his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. But Hanaud would not leave him in peace. He stepped up in front of him. He suddenly uncovered the mask with its curious obscene beauty, and held it under the Abbe’s eyes.
“Can you imagine a use for it?” he asked.
“At a time of carnival,” said the Abbe with the wraith of a smile. He had not looked at the mask very closely. But Hanaud held it so that his eyes could not avoid it, and he looked at it and looked again, and shrank from it as from a touch that was contagious. He rose up on to his feet.
“There was a young woman alive in this house last night, who is now foully murdered,” said Hanaud, standing in front of him.
“I shall pray for her soul,” returned the Abbe.
“But there is also a young girl with all her life in front of her, a joy to herself and an inspiration to others, who has disappeared. What of her, Monsieur l’Abbe?”
“I shall pray that no harm may come to her.”
“But you will give me no other help!” Hanaud’s voice rang out over the terrace and the garden. His words were a reproach and more than a reproach — an accusation. But they fell upon ears which were quite deaf. The Abbe’s eyes were now set upon a very distant horizon. A life or two? Some few hours of suffering? The Abbd Fauriel was not looking at the garden, nor at the Gironde, nor at the rising shore beyond the Gironde. He watched a procession of the ages, in which a life or two, or a few hours of suffering, mattered not at all.
“Monsieur,” he said with a remarkable quiet dignity, “a terrible crime has been committed. Of that crime there may be some quite hideous explanation. You know more about it than I do. I beg you to excuse me.”
To Hanaud’s thinking he was a broken man. He had suffered a shock that afternoon from which he was not likely to recover. Even Hanaud stepped back as he moved away, and let him pass out of sight through the open window of the drawing-room without another effort to detain him. But as soon as the Abbe Fauriel had gone, Hanaud’s manner quite changed. He grimaced in the most childish fashion at the window.
“Ah, the old fox,” he cried in a low voice. “He knows a great deal more than he will tell. But he has told me, none the less, much more than he meant to tell me, by his reluctance to tell me anything at all.”
He turned upon Mr. Ricardo. “You dined here last night, and the Abbe Fauriel dined too?”
“Yes.”
Hanaud took Ricardo b
y the arm and drew him down beside him on the bench. “You shall tell me at once anything which he said last night — anything which he did.”
Anything which he did! Yes, there was something which he had done. Mr. Ricardo recalled the scene — There had been something said — yes — and the Abbe had ceased from talking — had made a little movement with his hand — yes!
“There was a moment when under the cover of the table-cloth he made the sign of the Cross,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Ohol Tell me about that moment!” Hanaud urged, pressing his friend’s arm.
“Let me seel” said Mr. Ricardo. “It can hardly have been important or I should have remembered it. Oh, yes! I was puzzled at the time. I certainly was puzzled.”
“It is very interesting that you were puzzled,” Hanaud remarked patiently.
“Yes, that’s it. I was puzzled.” Mr. Ricardo was triumphant. His memory had not failed him. No; he remembered very accurately that he had been puzzled.
“Then, my friend, something puzzled you,” said Hanaud.
“That’s true,” Mr. Ricardo replied, with a little disappointment. “To be sure, I wasn’t likely to have been puzzled unless something had puzzled me. Now, what was it?”
“Yes! What was it? Make a scene of that dinner-table in your mind. Mrs. Tasborough here, the Abbe there—”
And suddenly Mr. Ricardo chirruped: “I’ve got it. One of them — sitting not so far from me — wait! — on the same side of the table — yes!” He held his hand in the air with a look of intense concentration upon his face. “Evelyn Devenish!” he cried. “She shivered suddenly and rather violently.”
“Yes.”
“And someone — oh, of course, it was that which puzzled me,” and Mr. Ricardo leaned back against the rail of the bench and relapsed into contentment.
“But you haven’t told me what puzzled you,” said Hanaud in the gentlest voice.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 100