The de Bercy Affair

With her clenched fists drawn back, she glared crazily at him, and her face reddened for a little while, as if she were furious at the outrage and suddenness of his news. Then her cheeks whitened, she went faint, sank back into the shelter of the hall, and leant against an inner doorway, her eyes closed, her lips parted.

"Oh, Pauline, be brave!" said Antonio, and tears choked his voice.

After a time, without opening her eyes, she asked:

"What proofs have they?"

"They have found the daggers in his trunk."

"But I have the daggers!"

"No, that woman who lived here, your supposed friend, Miss Marsh, stole the daggers from you, and Janoc secured them from her."

She moaned, but did not weep. She, who had been timid as a mouse at sight of Clarke, was now braver than the man. Presently she whispered:

"Where have they taken him to?"

"He will have been taken to the Marlborough Street police-station."

After another silence she said:

"Thank you, Antonio; leave me."

Passionately he kissed her hand in silence, and went.

She was no sooner alone than she walked up to her room, dressed herself in clothes suited for an out-of-door mission, and went out, heedless and dumb when a wondering fellow-servant protested. She called a cab – for Marlborough Street; and now she was as calm and strong as had been her brother when he gave himself up to Clarke.

Her cab crossed Oxford Circus about ten minutes ahead of the vehicle which carried Furneaux and Osborne; and as she turned south to enter Marlborough Street, she saw Winter, who had lately visited her, standing at a corner awaiting the arrival of Furneaux.

"Stop!" Pauline cried to her driver: and she alighted.

"Well, you are better, I see," said Winter, who did not wish to be bothered by her at that moment.

"Sir," said Pauline solemnly in her stilted English, "I regret having been so unjust as to tell you that it was either Mr. Furneaux or Mr. Osborne who committed that murder, since it was I myself who did it."

"What!" roared Winter, stepping backward, and startled most effectually out of his official phlegm.

"Sir," said Pauline again, gravely, calmly, "it was not a murder, it was an assassination, done for political reasons. As I have no mercy to expect, so I have no pardon to ask, and no act to blush at. It was political. I give myself into your custody."

Winter stood aghast. His brain seemed suddenly to have curdled; everything in the world was topsy-turvy.

"So that was why you left the Exhibition – to kill that poor woman, Pauline Dessaulx?" he contrived to say.

"That is the truth, sir. I could bear to keep it secret no longer, and was going now to the police-station to give myself up, when I saw you."

Still Winter made no move. He stood there, frowning in thought, staring at nothing.

"And all the proofs I have gathered against – against someone else – all these are false?" he muttered.

"I am afraid so, sir," said Pauline, "since it was I who did it with my own hands."

"And Mr. Osborne's dagger and flint – where do they come in?"

"It was I who stole them from Mr. Osborne's museum, sir, to throw suspicion upon him."

"Oh, come along," growled Winter. "I believe, I know, you are lying, but this must be inquired into."

Not unkindly, acting more like a man in a dream than an officer of the law, he took her arm, led her to the cab from which she had just descended, and the two drove away together to the police-station higher up the street.

Thus, and thus only, was Inspector Furneaux saved from arrest that day. Two minutes later he and Osborne passed the very spot where Pauline found Winter, and reached Poland Street without interference.

Furneaux produced a bunch of keys when he ran up the steps of the house. He unlocked the door at once, and the two men entered. Evidently Furneaux had been there before, for he hurried without hesitation down the kitchen stairs, put a key into the cellar door, flung it open, and Osborne, peering wildly over his shoulder, caught a glimpse of Rosalind sitting on the ground in a corner.

She did not look up when they entered – apparently she thought it was Janoc who had come, and with fixed, mournful eyes, like one gazing into profundities of vacancy, she continued to stare at the floor. Her face and air were so pitiable that the hearts of the men smote them into dumbness.

Then, half conscious of some new thing, she must have caught sight of two men instead of the usual one, for she looked up sharply; and in another moment was staggering to her feet, all hysterical laughter and sobbings, like a dying light that flickers wildly up and burns low alternately, trying at one instant to be herself and calm, when she laughed, and the next yielding to her distress, when she sobbed. She put out her hand to Osborne in a last effort to be graceful and usual; then she yielded the struggle, and fainted in his arms.

Furneaux produced a scent-bottle and a crushed cigar, such as it was his habit to smell, to present them to her nose…

But she did not revive, so Osborne took her in his arms, and carried her, as though she were a child, up the stone steps, and up the wooden, and out to the cab. Furneaux allowed him to drive alone with her, himself following behind in another cab, which was a most singular proceeding on the part of a detective who had arrested a man accused of an atrocious murder.

Half-way to Porchester Gardens Rosalind opened her eyes, and a wild, heartrending cry came from her parched lips.

"I will have no more wine nor water – let me die!"

"Try and keep still, just a few moments, my dear one!" he murmured, smiling a fond smile of pain, and clasping her more tightly in a protecting arm. "You are going home, to your mother. You will soon be there, safe, with her."

"Oh!" – Then she recognized him, though there was still an uncanny wildness in her eyes. "I am free – it is you."

She seemed to falter for words, but raised her hands instinctively to her hair, knowing it to be all rumpled and dusty. Instinctively, too, she caught her hat from her knee, and put it on hurriedly. She could not know what stabs of pain these little feminine anxieties caused her lover. No spoken words could have portrayed the sufferings she had endured like unto her pitiful efforts to conceal their ravages. At last she recovered sufficiently to ask if her mother expected her.

"I am not sure," said Osborne. "I am not your deliverer; Inspector Furneaux discovered where you were, and went to your rescue."

"But you are with him?" and an appealing note of love, of complete confidence, crept into her voice.

"I merely happen to be with him, because he is now taking me to a felon's cell. But he lets me come in the cab with you, because he trusts me not to run away."

His smile was very sad and humble, and he laid his disengaged hand on hers, yielding to a craving for sympathy in his forlornness. But memories were now thronging fast on her mind, and she drew herself away from both hand and arm. She recalled that her last sight of him was when in the embrace of Hylda Prout in his library; and, mixed with that vision of infamy, was a memory of her letter that had been opened, whose opening he had denied to her.

And that snatch of her hand as from a toad's touch, that shrinking from the pressure of his arm, froze him back into his loneliness of misery. They remained silent, each in a corner, a world between them, till the cab was nearly at the door in Porchester Gardens. Then he could not help saying from the depths of a heavy heart:

"Probably I shall never see you again! It is good-by now; and no more Rosalind."

The words were uttered in a tone of such heart-rending sadness that they touched some nerve of pity in her. But she could find nothing to say, other than a quite irrelevant comment.

"I will tell my mother of your consideration for me. At least, we shall thank you."

"If ever you hear anything – of me – that looks black – " he tried to tell her, thinking of his coming marriage with Hylda Prout, but the explanation choked in his throat; he only managed to gasp in a quick appeal of sorrow: "Oh, remember me a little!"