An Historical Mystery (The Gondreville Mystery)

He had led the abbe to a part of the garden which lay in the moonlight, and as he said the last words he looked at him suddenly. The priest was greatly distressed, but his manner was that of a man surprised and wholly ignorant.

“Understand this, monsieur l’abbe,” resumed Corentin; “the right of these young men to the estate of Gondreville will render them doubly criminal in the eyes of the middle class. I’d like to see them put faith in God and not in his saints – ”

“Is there really a plot?” asked the abbe, simply.

“Base, odious, cowardly, and so contrary to the generous spirit of the nation,” replied Corentin, “that it will meet with universal opprobrium.”

“Well! Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne is incapable of baseness,” cried the abbe.

“Monsieur l’abbe,” replied Corentin, “let me tell you this; there is for us (meaning you and me) proof positive of her guilt; but there is not enough for the law. You see she took flight when we came; I sent the mayor to warn her.”

“Yes, but for one who is so anxious to save them, you followed rather closely on his heels,” said the abbe.

At those words the two men looked at each other, and all was said. Each belonged to those profound anatomists of thought to whom a mere inflexion of the voice, a look, a word suffices to reveal a soul, just as the Indians track their enemies by signs invisible to European eyes.

“I expected to draw something out of him, and I have only betrayed myself,” thought Corentin.

“Ha! the sly rogue!” thought the priest.

Midnight rang from the old church clock just as Corentin and the abbe re-entered the salon. The opening and shutting of doors and closets could be heard from the bedrooms above. The gendarmes pulled open the beds; Peyrade, with the quick perception of a spy, handled and sounded everything. Such desecration excited both fear and indignation among the faithful servants of the house, who still stood motionless about the salon. Monsieur d’Hauteserre exchanged looks of commiseration with his wife and Mademoiselle Goujet. A species of horrible curiosity kept every one on the qui vive. Peyrade at length came down, holding in his hand a sandal-wood box which had probably been brought from China by Admiral de Simeuse. This pretty casket was flat and about the size of a quarto volume.

Peyrade made a sign to Corentin and took him into the embrasure of a window.

“I’ve an idea!” he said, “that Michu, who was ready to pay Marion eight hundred thousand francs in gold for Gondreville, and who evidently meant to shoot Malin yesterday, is the man who is helping the Simeuse brothers. His motive in threatening Marion and aiming at Malin must be the same. I thought when I saw him that he was capable of ideas; evidently he has but one; he discovered what was going on and he must have come here to warn them.”

“Probably Malin talked about the conspiracy to his friend the notary, and Michu from his ambush overheard what was said,” remarked Corentin, continuing the inductions of his colleague. “No doubt he has only postponed his shot to prevent an evil he thinks worse than the loss of Gondreville.”

“He knew what we were the moment he laid eyes on us,” said Peyrade. “I thought then that he was amazingly intelligent for a peasant.”

“That proves that he is always on his guard,” replied Corentin. “But, mind you, my old man, don’t let us make a mistake. Treachery stinks in the nostrils, and primitive folks do scent it from afar.”

“But that’s our strength,” said the Provencal.

“Call the corporal of Arcis,” cried Corentin to one of the gendarmes. “I shall send him at once to Michu’s house,” he added to Peyrade.

“Our ear, Violette, is there,” said Peyrade.

“We started without getting news from him. Two of us are not enough; we ought to have had Sabatier with us – Corporal,” he said, when the gendarme appeared, taking him aside with Peyrade, “don’t let them fool you as they did the Troyes corporal just now. We think Michu is in this business. Go to his house, put your eye on everything, and bring word of the result.”

“One of my men heard horses in the forest just as they arrested the little groom; I’ve four fine fellows now on the track of whoever is hiding there,” replied the gendarme.

He left the room, and the gallop of his horse which echoed on the paved courtyard died rapidly away.

“One thing is certain,” said Corentin to himself, “either they have gone to Paris or they are retreating to Germany.”

He sat down, pulled a note-book from the pocket of his spencer, wrote two orders in pencil, sealed them, and made a sign to one of the gendarmes to come to him.

“Be off at full gallop to Troyes, wake up the prefect, and tell him to start the telegraph as soon as there’s light enough.”

The gendarme departed. The meaning of this movement and Corentin’s intentions were so evident that the hearts of the household sank within them; but this new anxiety was additional to another that was now martyrizing them; their eyes were fixed on the sandal-wood box! All the while the two agents were talking together they were each taking note of those eager looks. A sort of cold anger stirred the unfeeling hearts of these men who relished the power of inspiring terror. The police man has the instincts and emotions of a hunter: but where the one employs his powers of mind and body in killing a hare, a partridge, or a deer, the other is thinking of saving the State, or a king, and of winning a large reward. So the hunt for men is superior to the other class of hunting by all the distance that there is between animals and human beings. Moreover, a spy is forced to lift the part he plays to the level and the importance of the interests to which he is bound. Without looking further into this calling, it is easy to see that the man who follows it puts as much passionate ardor into his chase as another man does into the pursuit of game. Therefore the further these men advanced in their investigations the more eager they became; but the expression of their faces and their eyes continued calm and cold, just as their ideas, their suspicions, and their plans remained impenetrable. To any one who watched the effects of the moral scent, if we may so call it, of these bloodhounds on the track of hidden facts, and who noted and understood the movements of canine agility which led them to strike the truth in their rapid examination of probabilities, there was in it all something actually horrifying. How and why should men of genius fall so low when it was in their power to be so high? What imperfection, what vice, what passion debases them? Does a man become a police-agent as he becomes a thinker, writer, statesmen, painter, general, on the condition of knowing nothing but how to spy, as the others speak, write, govern, paint, and fight? The inhabitants of the chateau had but one wish, – that the thunderbolts of heaven might fall upon these miscreants; they were athirst for vengeance; and had it not been for the presence, up to this time, of the gendarmes there would undoubtedly have been an outbreak.

“No one, I suppose, has the key of this box?” said the cynical Peyrade, questioning the family as much by the movement of his huge red nose as by his words.

The Provencal noticed, not without fear, that the guards were no longer present; he and Corentin were alone with the family. The younger man drew a small dagger from his pocket, and began to force the lock of the box. Just then the desperate galloping of a horse was heard upon the road and then upon the pavement by the lawn; but most horrible of all was the fall and sighing of the animal, which seemed to drop all at once at the door of the middle tower. A convulsion like that which a thunderbolt might produce shook the spectators when Laurence, the trailing of whose riding-habit announced her coming, entered the room. The servants hastily formed into two lines to let her pass.

In spite of her rapid ride, the girl had felt the full anguish the discovery of the conspiracy must needs cause her. All her hopes were overthrown! she had galloped through ruins as her thoughts turned to the necessity of submission to the Consular government. Were it not for the danger which threatened the four gentlemen, and which served as a tonic to conquer her weariness and her despair, she would have dropped asleep on the way. The mare was almost killed in her haste to reach the chateau, and stand between her cousins and death. As all present looked at the heroic girl, pale, her features drawn, her veil aside, her whip in her hand, standing on the threshold of the door, whence her burning glance grasped the whole scene and comprehended it, each knew from the almost imperceptible motion which crossed the soured and bittered face of Corentin, that the real adversaries had met. A terrible duel was about to begin.

Noticing the box, now in the hands of Corentin, the countess raised her whip and sprang rapidly towards him. Striking his hands with so violent a blow that the casket fell to the ground, she seized it, flung it into the middle of the fire, and stood with her back to the chimney in a threatening attitude before either of the agents recovered from their surprise. The scorn which flamed from her eyes, her pale brow, her disdainful lips, were even more insulting than the haughty action which treated Corentin as though he were a venomous reptile. Old d’Hauteserre felt himself once more a cavalier; all his blood rushed to his face, and he grieved that he had no sword. The servants trembled for an instant with joy. The vengeance they had called down upon these men had come. But their joy was driven back within their souls by a terrible fear; the gendarmes were still heard coming and going in the garrets.

The spy– noun of strength, under which all shades of the police are confounded, for the public has never chosen to specify in language the varieties of those who compose this dispensary of social remedies so essential to all governments – the spy has this curious and magnificent quality: he never becomes angry; he possesses the Christian humility of a priest; his eyes are stolid with an indifference which he holds as a barrier against the world of fools who do not understand him; his forehead is adamant under insult; he pursues his ends like a reptile whose carapace is fractured only by a cannonball; but (like that reptile) he is all the more furious when the blow does reach him, because he believed his armor invulnerable. The lash of the whip upon his fingers was to Corentin, pain apart, the cannonball that cracked the shell. Coming from that magnificent and noble girl, this action, emblematic of her disgust, humiliated him, not only in the eyes of the people about him, but in his own.

Peyrade sprang to the hearth, caught Laurence’s foot, raised it, and compelled her, out of modesty, to throw herself on the sofa, where she had lately lain asleep. The scene, like other contrasts in human things, was burlesque in the midst of terror. Peyrade scorched his hand as he dashed it into the fire to seize the box; but he got it, threw it on the floor and sat down upon it. These little actions were done with great rapidity and without a word being uttered. Corentin, recovering from the pain of the blow, caught Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne by both hands, and held her.

“Do not compel me to use force against you,” he said, with withering politeness.

Peyrade’s action had extinguished the fire by the natural process of suppressing the air.

“Gendarmes! here!” he cried, still occupying his ridiculous position.

“Will you promise to behave yourself?” said Corentin, insolently, addressing Laurence, and picking up his dagger, but not committing the great fault of threatening her with it.

“The secrets of that box do not concern the government,” she answered, with a tinge of melancholy in her tone and manner. “When you have read the letters it contains you will, in spite of your infamy, feel ashamed of having read them – that is, if you can still feel shame at anything,” she added, after a pause.

The abbe looked at her as if to say, “For God’s sake, be calm!”

Peyrade rose. The bottom of the box, which had been nearly burned through, left a mark upon the floor; the lid was scorched and the sides gave way. The grotesque Scaevola, who had offered to the god of the Police and Terror the seat of his apricot breeches, opened the two sides of the box as if it had been a book, and slid three letters and two locks of hair upon the card-table. He was about to smile at Corentin when he perceived that the locks were of two shades of gray. Corentin released Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne’s hands and went up to the table to read the letter from which the hair had fallen.

Laurence rose, moved to the table beside the spies, and said: – “Read it aloud; that shall be your punishment.”

As the two men continued to read to themselves, she herself read out the following words: —

Dear Laurence, – My husband and I have heard of your noble conduct on the day of our arrest. We know that you love our dear twins as much, almost, as we love them ourselves. Therefore it is with you that we leave a token which will be both precious and sad to them. The executioner has come to cut our hair, for we are to die in a few moments; he has promised to put into your hands the only remembrance we are able to leave to our beloved orphans. Keep these last remains of us and give them to our sons in happier days. We have kissed these locks of hair and have laid our blessing upon them. Our last thought will be of our sons, of you, and of God. Love them, Laurence.

Berthe de Cinq-Cygne. Jean de Simeuse.

Tears came to the eyes of all the household as they listened to the letter.

Laurence looked at the agents with a petrifying glance and said, in a firm voice: —

“You have less pity than the executioner.”

Corentin quietly folded the hair in the letter, laid the letter aside on the table, and put a box of counters on the top of it as if to prevent its blowing away. His coolness in the midst of the general emotion was horrible.

Peyrade unfolded the other letters.

“Oh, as for those,” said Laurence, “they are very much alike. You hear the will; you can now hear of its fulfilment. In future I shall have no secrets from any one.”

1794, Andernach. Before the battle.