The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux [dar e dil novel online reading TXT] 📗

could see, which was not much, and everything that we could not see, which must have been infinite.

The toilette table was a simple table standing on four legs; there was nothing about it by which it could possibly be changed into a temporary hiding-place. There was not a closet or cupboard. Mademoiselle Stangerson kept her wardrobe at the chateau.

Rouletabille literally passed his nose and hands along the walls, constructed of solid brickwork. When he had finished with the walls, and passed his agile fingers over every portion of the yellow paper covering them, he reached to the ceiling, which he was able to touch by mounting on a chair placed on the toilette table, and by moving this ingeniously constructed stage from place to place he examined every foot of it. When he had finished his scrutiny of the ceiling, where he carefully examined the hole made by the second bullet, he approached the window, and, once more, examined the iron bars and blinds, all of which were solid and intact. At last, he gave a grunt of satisfaction and declared “Now I am at ease!”

“Well,—do you believe that the poor dear young lady was shut up when she was being murdered—when she cried out for help?” wailed Daddy Jacques.

“Yes,” said the young reporter, drying his forehead, ““The Yellow Room” was as tightly shut as an iron safe.”

“That,” I said, “is why this mystery is the most surprising I know. Edgar Allan Poe, in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ invented nothing like it. The place of that crime was sufficiently closed to prevent the escape of a man; but there was that window through which the monkey, the perpetrator of the murder, could slip away! But here, there can be no question of an opening of any sort. The door was fastened, and through the window blinds, secure as they were, not even a fly could enter or get out.”

“True, true,” assented Rouletabille as he kept on drying his forehead, which seemed to be perspiring less from his recent bodily exertion than from his mental agitation. “Indeed, it’s a great, a beautiful, and a very curious mystery.”

“The Bete du bon Dieu,” muttered Daddy Jacques, “the Bete du bon Dieu herself, if she had committed the crime, could not have escaped. Listen! Do you hear it? Hush!”

Daddy Jacques made us a sign to keep quiet and, stretching his arm towards the wall nearest the forest, listened to something which we could not hear.

“It’s answering,” he said at length. “I must kill it. It is too wicked, but it’s the Bete du bon Dieu, and, every night, it goes to pray on the tomb of Sainte-Genevieve and nobody dares to touch her, for fear that Mother Angenoux should cast an evil spell on them.”

“How big is the Bete du bon Dieu?”

“Nearly as big as a small retriever,—a monster, I tell you. Ah!—I have asked myself more than once whether it was not her that took our poor Mademoiselle by the throat with her claws. But the Bete du bon Dieu does not wear hobnailed boots, nor fire revolvers, nor has she a hand like that!” exclaimed Daddy Jacques, again pointing out to us the red mark on the wall. “Besides, we should have seen her as well as we would have seen a man—”

“Evidently,” I said. “Before we had seen this Yellow Room, I had also asked myself whether the cat of Mother Angenoux—”

“You also!” cried Rouletabille.

“Didn’t you?” I asked.

“Not for a moment. After reading the article in the ‘Matin,’ I knew that a cat had nothing to do with the matter. But I swear now that a frightful tragedy has been enacted here. You say nothing about the Basque cap, or the handkerchief, found here, Daddy Jacques?”

“Of course, the magistrate has taken them,” the old man answered, hesitatingly.

“I haven’t seen either the handkerchief or the cap, yet I can tell you how they are made,” the reporter said to him gravely.

“Oh, you are very clever,” said Daddy Jacques, coughing and embarrassed.

“The handkerchief is a large one, blue with red stripes and the cap is an old Basque cap, like the one you are wearing now.”

“You are a wizard!” said Daddy Jacques, trying to laugh and not quite succeeding. “How do you know that the handkerchief is blue with red stripes?”

“Because, if it had not been blue with red stripes, it would not have been found at all.”

Without giving any further attention to Daddy Jacques, my friend took a piece of paper from his pocket, and taking out a pair of scissors, bent over the footprints. Placing the paper over one of them he began to cut. In a short time he had made a perfect pattern which he handed to me, begging me not to lose it.

He then returned to the window and, pointing to the figure of Frederic Larsan, who had not quitted the side of the lake, asked Daddy Jacques whether the detective had, like himself, been working in “The Yellow Room”?

“No,” replied Robert Darzac, who, since Rouletabille had handed him the piece of scorched paper, had not uttered a word, “He pretends that he does not need to examine “The Yellow Room”. He says that the murderer made his escape from it in quite a natural way, and that he will, this evening, explain how he did it.”

As he listened to what Monsieur Darzac had to say, Rouletabille turned pale.

“Has Frederic Larsan found out the truth, which I can only guess at?” he murmured. “He is very clever—very clever—and I admire him. But what we have to do to-day is something more than the work of a policeman, something quite different from the teachings of experience. We have to take hold of our reason by the right end.”

The reporter rushed into the open air, agitated by the thought that the great and famous Fred might anticipate him in the solution of the problem of “The Yellow Room”.

I managed to reach him on the threshold of the pavilion. “Calm yourself, my dear fellow,” I said. “Aren’t you satisfied?”

“Yes,” he confessed to me, with a deep sigh. “I am quite satisfied. I have discovered many things.”

“Moral or material?”

“Several moral,—one material. This, for example.”

And rapidly he drew from his waistcoat pocket a piece of paper in which he had placed a light-coloured hair from a woman’s head.