And had any one doubted three days before that they would be so directed, had any one then predicted that, arrived on the scene of my labours, I should suffer another aim, another object to share and divert my thoughts, I should certainly and reasonably have laughed at him. As reasonable would it have seemed to me to doubt my identity, or to assert that I should prefer the whim of the moment to every tradition in which I had been reared, and to every rule by which I had hitherto guided my life.
All true. And yet could I — nay, how could I ignore the events of the last forty-eight hours, or wipe from my memory the face that had haunted me for weeks and now rose before me in piteous appeal? How could I steel my heart against the silent prayer of the helpless girl whom I believed to be in direst peril, and snared like any dove in the net of this vile gang — the girl who had no one on earth to look to, no hope of escape if I deserted her?
Perceval — Perceval, poor fellow, cried indeed for vengeance from the dark grave in which he lay. But he was cold and dead — I could not doubt it; no man could now help him or save him. While she lived she still lived to fear and suffer. And her woebegone face, her quivering lips, her terror-filled eyes haunted me, obsessed me, floated between me and the dull plain, the passing trees, the shimmering water — glided ever, ghost-like, beside the carriage as we drove!
No, it was impossible. I could not be so inhuman, so hard of heart. I could not wrest my thoughts from her. A woman, yet a child, she appealed to all the manhood that was in me, and I could not — I could not close my ears to her.
I had taken Grussbaum into the carriage with me, and in his aid I discerned the only way out of my trouble. I must depute to him the one task or the other. And perforce and reluctantly I ceded to him that which I held now — I confess it — the nearest to my heart. He knew nothing of Ellis, of his story, or his disappearance.
In dealing with that matter he would be worse than useless. But he could look out for the Waechters, he could search the town for them, he could follow them, attach himself to them, dog them — if need be, threaten them. If they went forward to Hamburg, he could go forward also, and see the girl’s father — Altona is but a suburb of Hamburg, though Danish — and put him on the track.
True, I felt that Grussbaum was but a poor creature to entrust with anything; I had not much faith in either his perseverance or his courage. But he had shown some flashes of sense, and once or twice he had surprised me by rising to the occasion. In a word, I had no better helper at hand, and I must trust to him or to no one.
Accordingly, as we drove through the outskirts of the town, I laid my instructions upon him; and again, confound the man, I found him obstructive. This time I was not surprised; he must act alone, and he had no initiative and no enterprise. But I was determined. I silenced his remonstrances, crushed his weak resistance, and, reminding him brutally of his obligations to me, I bribed him into compliance.
“I entrust this to you,” I concluded, “because I cannot do it myself — I have my own work to do in Perleberg. Learn first if these rogues have gone forward. If they have, let me know, you understand, and then do you follow them. I will pay all expenses and make it worth your while besides. But, whatever happens, don’t let them escape you. Don’t let them give you the slip, man. Hang on to them, or not a thaler will come your way. Not a thaler. That is the bargain. But if you wish to reach your sick wife with a full purse, here, and now, is your chance.”
He fingered his chin in pitiable indecision — a weakling indeed, on whom to lean. “If you could tell me, mein Herr, why the young lady goes with them?” he prayed. “ Why she does not—”
“Leave them?” I exclaimed. “If I could tell you that I should not be sending you after them.”
“If they go forward — I am to follow?” he muttered. “But if they do not?”
“Well, if they don’t, so much the better!”
He still fingered his chin, but on a sudden he looked at me more sharply than was his wont. “Who are they, honoured sir?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t know. If I did—”
“Just so, just so,” he mumbled. “To be sure. To be sure, honoured sir, I see.”
A moment later we drove past the end of a street, and, following the main road some sixty yards farther, we halted before the posthouse. I descended from the carriage and looked about me — looked with growing interest. For, now that I stood on the spot, the Baron’s story of Perceval’s last hours recurred to me in all its vital detail.
The posthouse was a shabby wooden building with two gables and two doors opening on the road. A gateway, abutting on it, admitted to a yard enclosed by untidy stables. On the farther side of the gateway from the house a low building declared itself the postilions’ room — that room which Perceval, in a fever of anxiety ordering and counter-ordering his horses, had repeatedly entered on that fateful night.
There, where my carriage now stood — in the road as is the German way — his had stood, and to and fro beside it, impatiently awaiting the coming of the French postboy, he had paced up and down in the dusk, until out of the darkness had stepped to his side the shrouded thing that in a moment had erased him from the living! The thing that so far, covered by the veil of night, had defied detection.
Had he been lured a few yards this way or a few yards that? Had he been struck down under the more remote wall of the inn where of a night the gloom would be deep? Or in the shadow of the ramshackle tavern that leaned and tottered on the other side of the road, some twenty yards farther from the foot of the street?
It hung out the sign of the Black Cow, and I knew it for the disreputable inn of which the Baron had spoken; the inn beneath which in a cellar had been found the skeleton which was not Ellis’s, but betrayed some earlier crime. Or had he walked away from this place with the life still safe in him, and gone into the town? And perished, God only knew where and how?
The answer was to seek. It was for me to seek.
Meantime, the place lay much as I had pictured it, thanks to the good Baron’s accuracy. But, as my eyes travelled from the posthouse to the distant street-end, and round to the Black Cow, and so back to the sordid group of loiterers who hung about the posthouse doors and watched me suspiciously, my hopes sank and I felt all my helplessness.
I perceived more fully the difficulties of my task. I owned, with the mise en scene before me, that where others, better equipped, had failed, it was most unlikely that I should succeed. In Berlin fancy had had full play. I had supposed that, were I once on the spot, discoveries would leap to the eye. But the little group of houses, the road, the yard, the everyday life about them, told no tales.
They raised before the imagination the blank wall of the actual. Perceval had passed this way, had entered this house and left this house, had paced this road, had passed from it to his death. But the scene retained no trace of him; it told no more of him or his fate than any group of houses on the Berlin-Hamburg chaussee.
He had left no mark — or the life of many commonplace days had obliterated it; and it was with a baffled sense of disillusion that I at last turned away, and, entering the posthouse by the nearer door, sought the small room in which he had supped, and where the servant-wench had come on him pacing to and fro and talking to himself — and again had seen him examining his pistols.
I ordered dinner, and standing with my back to the stove, I watched the girl — the same buxom girl who had watched Ellis — as she laid it. From time to time she cast a stealthy glance at me — at my fur cloak I fancied, for the room being cold, I had kept it on. And at last: “Is August here?” I asked.
But my question, abrupt as it was, failed to surprise her. “So!” she said, and her face took on a sullen cast; “you are one of them?”
“One of whom?”
“The police. August? No, you know well. He is in gaol.”
“Ah, I remember,” I said. And I put two or three questions to her; about the two Jews who had supped wit
h Ellis, and as to the latest moment at which she had seen him and where. But all I could extract from her was: “I have told you all I know, and I have been tormented enough. I have been badgered, teased, threatened — till I don’t know what I remember and what I don’t. I don’t know what happened to the gentleman, but” — viciously—” I wish he had never been born; der gute Gott knows that!”
No, I was a day, two days, many days late for the fair. It was a case of la moutarde apres diner. Whatever traces of the crime there had been, whatever clues might have been gathered, had been over-trodden, confused, destroyed this many a week. And doubtless I should find all the witnesses in the same mood as this girl; weary of questioning, uncertain what they remembered, and what had been suggested to them; above all, sulkily set on not committing themselves to anything.
With a lad in the yard I had my greatest success, little as that was. He had seen and he vaguely remembered the missing postilion, and he confirmed the fact that the man had worn a cast-off French uniform, and had been dark-complexioned with very black eyebrows. In his judgment — but the stranger had kept his leather collar turned up and had shown his face little — a French deserter.
But there again, as the fellow had spoken German, the lad was not sure; he might have been a German in French pay. Be that as it might — and this was what chiefly interested me — the lad retained a hazy impression that he had seen the face before; at some time and somewhere, he could not say where. It was all, indeed, misty and uncertain, and, alas, when pressed to search his memory, he only grew more doubtful.
“On the road? Driving through perhaps?” I suggested. But no, he was not sure that it was on the road. He could not tell where it was. Or, in fine, and at last, whether it was; he might not have seen the man before. He might have only fancied it. He had certainly not seen him since.
It needed but an hour of this to plunge me into the deepest dejection. I saw the absurdity of my belief that I, a stranger and a foreigner, could learn anything where the authorities had failed; and before I left the posthouse I had as good as given up hope. It was only as a matter of duty that I proceeded into the town to interview von Kalisch.
The Baron’s description had been so clear and the town was so small that I needed no guide. Five minutes saw me standing in the Market Place, over-large for the town, with the hoary cathedral on one hand, some low arcaded houses on the other, and in the middle of the grass-grown cobbled space the grey, age-worn, crumbling statue of Roland.
Beyond this, and facing me, rose the quaint little Rathhaus, of which one end abutted on a street that left the Market Place at a comer, while the other end was divided by a house of some pretensions from the parallel street which left the market place at the other comer. The latter street led, I knew, to the German Coffee House.
A sleepy old-world place, smacking nothing of crime or mystery. Here and there a dog wandered, its nose to the ground. At one or two doors a tradesman in a nightcap loitered, smoking his long German pipe and gazing stolidly before him. About the crumbling statue sparrows chirped and fluttered and pigeons strutted. The heavy bell of the cathedral tolled the hour of two, and a boy with a satchel on his back issued noisily from a doorway and clattered through the Arcade.
I walked across to the residence which prolonged the Rathhaus, and I knocked at the door. A good-looking, frank-faced girl, with blue eyes and a mass of light hair wound about her head, opened it. She started on seeing me, and I was sure that even before I spoke she associated me with that other traveller in the fur cloak who had come so tragically into her life.
I asked if Captain von Kalisch was at home.
She admitted me, but reluctantly, I thought. And as I passed by her she looked at me covertly. No doubt she, like the others, had heard enough of the matter; had been questioned and bullied and questioned again, until she was weary of it. No doubt she had told all that she knew a hundred times. Oh, it was a hopeless — a hopeless task on which I had embarked.
Still, the girl impressed me favourably. I judged her to be honest and straightforward; one who would tell the truth as far as she knew it. And the Governor, when I was admitted to his modest quarters, had the same effect on me He wore glasses and a small beard, was smallish himself, and of a more intellectual type than the common run of Prussian officers. But he sighed when he saw me and I told him who I was. He, too, had had more than enough of the case.
“So!” he said. “You want to know? But first sir” — formally—” your authority, if you please.”
I gave him Davout’s letter and he read it, and sighed again, as he returned it to me. An Englishman vouched for by a Frenchman! Matters had come to a pretty pass in Prussia when these things were! However—’ Very good,” he said wearily. ‘What, mein Hen, do you wish to know?”
“What you think,” I said. “Your opinion.”
“Oh!” he answered. “That? Well, I’ve thought till I am tired. And I see only two alternatives: one which I believe to be the truth, and another remotely possible.”
“The first, then, if it please you?”
“A common guet-apens. I think your friend was murdered for what he had about him, and buried in some backyard, some house, in the fields, perhaps in the river — God knows where! That is what we all believe here.”
“But,” I objected, “that was not what he feared when he came to you?”
“No, he feared a plot, the French behind it. True, doubtless. But all the same, what I have said was what happened to him in my opinion.”
“A queer coincidence,” I said. “He feared — he had cause to fear one thing; and another happened to him!”
“Well, yes. A coincidence.”
“But,” I argued, “surely in a little place like this, Herr von Kalisch, there are not many vauriens capable of such a crime as this.”
“There are enough,” he said. “The upset of the war — there is hardly a village that has not its disbanded soldiers, broken men, deserters, ready, the worst of them, to cut a throat for a month’s pay. And, without a scrap of evidence except that against the man August, what could we do? Lay ‘em all by the heels? Impossible, mein Herr.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“And the other — the remote possibility?”
He glanced at the door. “Well, of course, it may have been the French,” he said. “But, if so, without our knowledge. And they must have been very clever if they did it — without our knowledge. Anyway, our hands are clean — I tell you that as man to man. And I don’t think the French did it. But I don’t deny the possibility. I am quite frank.”
I told him of the simultaneous attack that had been made on me, and of the warnings against Klatz that we had received. “They don’t fall in with a theory of a chance attack,” I argued. “On the other hand, one would have thought, Captain von Kalisch, that if the French were guilty, Davout would not have—”
“Sent you here?” He shrugged his shoulders. “They would not tell him. The order would come from elsewhere.”
I thought this over, and in the end: “Well, there’s an argument, and I am not sure that it is not a conclusive argument, against this theory. My friend’s papers. If they were in French hands we should be aware of it.”
“They would have been published?”
“Or used.”
“Then you may depend upon it,” briskly, “that my theory is the correct one. The papers were for nothing in it, or they would have been taken and used. Therefore the French were not in it, and he was murdered for what he had. His cloak would have been enough,” with his eye on mine.
“The postilion? If anyone is to be suspected it seems to me that he is the man. Have you learned nothing of him?”
“Nothing. He may be hundreds of miles away by now. In Silesia, on the Rhine, in Poland — God knows where. Perhaps in Spain.”
That seemed a hopeless view and I felt proportionately discouraged. I asked the Governor to describe in minute detail the events of that afternoon — Ellis’s arrival, his application fo
r a guard, his appearance, his words, his manner. He did so, and with an honest desire, I could see, to tell the truth. When he had done — and his story went not a jot beyond the Baron’s report—” At first, I confess,” he added, “ I thought it a case of suicide. Your friend’s manner was wild, his statements disjointed; he made a sort of mystery of what he feared, he looked like a man who had not slept for nights, and I was inclined to think his fears a delusion. But, of course when the body could not be found I changed my mind.”
“Poor Perceval! Poor Ellis!” I muttered, moved by the picture. And I felt once more the bite of remorse, of self-reproach, which was never entirely to leave me. “Nothing of his has been found? Nothing that was on his person?”
“Nothing except the cloak.”
“Which was not his,” I rejoined. And I explained that matter. “ And now as to the girl who let me in,” I said. “She believes, I understand, that my friend returned at nine o’clock and asked for you. I want to look into that — into that especially. Someone, I take it, did come and did ask for you? And according to her story, she sent him after you to the German Coffee House. What I want to know is — did any one come on to you there? Any stranger?”
“Well, yes” — reluctantly—” a man did ask for me there and see me. A stranger.”
I opened my eyes. “Oh,” I said. “And did he say that he had come on from your house?”
“No.”
“But have you since learned if he did call — at this house. Because if he did, he, and not Ellis, was the caller — at nine o’clock.”
But von Kalisch shook his head. “ I thought of that, of course. But too late. The man was a Danish merchant, going for Holstein, who sought leave to stay two nights in the town. Unfortunately, when the point arose he was gone, and we have failed to get into touch with him.”
“But he may have been the man?”
“He may. He was a tall man like your friend, and he wore a cloak. A blue roquelaure with a red lining and a high stiff collar.”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 701