CHAPTER II
ONCE MORE THE OBVIOUS
You don't suppose for a moment, I hope, that a girl like Louisa wouldallow her mind to dwell on such horrors. Mysterious crimes in strangecities--and in London, too, for a matter of that--are, alas! of fartoo frequent occurrence to be quite as startling as they should be.
A day or two later, Louisa Harris and her aunt, Lady Ryder, crossedover to England. They had spent five weeks in Italy and one inBrussels, not with a view to dreaming over the beauties of the ItalianLakes, or over the art treasures collected in the museums of Brussels,but because Lady Ryder had had a bronchial catarrh which she could notshake off and so her doctor had ordered her a thorough change.Bellaggio was selected, and Louisa accompanied her. They stayed at thebest hotels both in Bellaggio and in Brussels, where Lady Ryder hadseveral friends whom she wished to visit before she went home.
Nothing whatever happened that should not have happened; everythingwas orderly and well managed; the courier and the maid saw to ticketsand to luggage, to hotel rooms and sleeping compartments. It wasobviously their mission in life to see that nothing untoward orunexpected happened, but only the obvious.
It was clearly not their fault that Miss Harris had seen a cab inwhich an unknown man happened to have been murdered.
Louisa, with a view to preventing her aunt from going to sleep afterdinner and thereby spoiling her night's rest, had told her of theincident which she had witnessed in the Boulevard Waterloo, and LadyRyder was genuinely shocked. She vaguely felt that her niece had donesomething unladylike and odd, which was so unlike Louisa.
The latter had amused herself by scanning a number of English papersin order to find out what was said in London about that strange crime,which she had almost witnessed--the man stabbed through the neck, fromear to ear, and the wound so small it might have been done with askewer. But, with characteristic indifference, London paid but littleheed to the mysterious dramas of a sister city. A brief account of thegruesome discovery--a figurative shrug of the shoulders as to theincompetence of the Belgian police, who held neither a clue to theperpetrator of the crime nor to the identity of the victim. Just astranger--an idler. Brussels was full of strangers just now. Hisnationality? who knows? His individuality? there seemed no one tocare. The police were active no doubt, but so far they had discoverednothing.
Two men, the murderer and the murdered, engulfed in that greatwhirlpool known as humanity, small units of no importance, since noone seemed to care. Interesting to the detective whose duty it was totrack the crime to its perpetrator. Interesting to the reporter whocould fill a column with accounts of depositions, of questionings, ofexaminations. Interesting to the after-dinner talker who couldexpatiate over the moral lessons to be drawn from the conception ofsuch a crime.
But the murdered man goes to his grave unknown: and the murdererwanders Cain-like on the face of the earth--as mysterious, as unknown,as silent as his victim.
The Heart of a Woman Page 2