Fantômas, Pierre Souvestre [suggested reading .TXT] 📗

"By Jove, yes!" his father rapped out: "I can believe that! But if you were not asleep, how do you account for your not hearing anything?"

"Thérèse did not hear anything either," said Charles after a moment's reflection.

"Thérèse's room was a long way off," M. Rambert replied, "while there was only a thin wall between yours and that of the Marquise. You must have heard: you did hear! More than that——, oh, my boy, my unhappy boy!"

Charles was twisting and untwisting his hands, and great drops of cold perspiration beaded his brow.

"You are the only single person who thinks I committed such an awful crime!" he said, half questioningly.

"The only one?" Etienne Rambert muttered. "Perhaps! As yet! But you ought to know that you made a very bad impression indeed upon the friends of the Marquise during the evening before the crime, when President Bonnet was reading the particulars of a murder that had been committed in Paris by—somebody: I forget whom."

"Good heavens!" Charles exclaimed in indignation, "I did not say anything wrong. Do you mean to say that just because I am interested in stories of great criminals like Rocambole and Fantômas——"

"You created a deplorable impression," his father repeated.

"So they suspect me too, do they?" Charles enquired. "But you can't make accusations like that," he said, warming up: "you've got to have facts, and proofs." He looked at his father for the sympathy and encouragement of affection. "Listen, papa, I know you will believe me when I swear that I am innocent; but do you think other people——"

M. Etienne Rambert sat with his head between his hands, wrapped in thought; there was a short silence before the unhappy father replied:

"Unfortunately there is evidence against you," he said at last; "and damning evidence, too!" he added with a glance at his son that seemed to pulverise him. "Terrible evidence! Consider, Charles: the magistrates have decided, as a result of their investigations, that no one got into the château on the fatal night; you were the only man who slept there; and none but a man could possibly have committed such a horrible crime, such a monstrous piece of butchery!"

"Someone might have got in from outside," the unhappy lad urged, as if trying to escape from the network in which he was being entangled.

"No one did," Etienne Rambert insisted; "besides, how could you prove it?"

Charles was silent. He stood in the middle of the room, with trembling legs and haggard eyes, seemingly stupefied and incapable of coherent thought, vacantly watching his father. With bent head and shoulders bowed as though beneath a too-heavy load, Etienne Rambert moved towards the dressing-room attached to the bedroom.

"Come here," he said in an almost inaudible voice; "follow me."

He went into the dressing-room, and picking up the towels that were heaped anyhow on the lower rail of the washstand, he selected a very crumpled one and held it out in front of his son.

"Look at that!" he said in a low, curt tone.

And on the towel, thus held in the light, Charles Rambert saw red stains of blood. The lad started, and was about to burst into some protestation, but Etienne Rambert imperiously checked him.

"Do you still deny it? Unhappy, wretched boy, there is the convincing, irrefutable evidence of your guilt! These stains of blood proclaim it. Something always is overlooked! How are you to explain the presence of this blood-stained linen in your room? Can you still deny that it is proof positive of your guilt?"

"But I do deny it, I do deny it! I don't understand! I know nothing about it!" and once more Charles Rambert collapsed into the arm-chair; the unhappy lad was nothing but a human wreck, with no strength to argue or even utter a word.

His father's eyes rested on him, filled with infinite affection and profoundest pity.

"My poor, poor boy!" the unhappy Etienne Rambert murmured, and added, as if speaking only to himself: "I wonder if you are not entirely responsible—if there are circumstances to plead for you!"

"Do you still accuse me, papa? Do you really believe I am the murderer?"

Etienne Rambert shook his head hopelessly.

"Oh, I wish, I wish," he exclaimed, "that for the honour of our name, and for the sake of those who love us, I could prove you had congenital, hereditary tendencies that made you not responsible! Why could not I have watched over your upbringing? Why has fate decreed that I should only see my son three times at most in eighteen years, and come home to find him—a criminal? Oh, if science could but establish the fact that the child of a tainted mother——"

"Tainted?" Charles exclaimed; "what do you mean?"

"Tainted with a terrible and mysterious disease," Etienne Rambert went on: "a disease before which we are powerless and unarmed—insanity!"

"What?" cried Charles, growing momentarily more distressed and bewildered; "what is that, papa? Are my wits going? My mother insane?" And then he added hopelessly: "My God! You must be right! Often and often I have been amazed by her strange, puzzling looks and behaviour! But I—I have all my proper senses: I know what I am doing!"

"Was it, perhaps, some appalling hallucination," Etienne Rambert suggested: "some moment of irresponsibility?"

But Charles saw what he meant and cut him short.

"No, no, papa! I am not mad! I am not mad! I am not mad!"

In his intense excitement the young fellow never thought of moderating the tone of his voice, but shouted out what was in his mind, shouted it into the silence of the night, heedless of all but this terrible discussion he was having with the father whom he loved. Nor did Etienne Rambert lower his voice: his son's impassioned protest wrung the retort from him:

"Then, Charles, if you are right, your crime is beyond forgiveness! Murderer! Murderer!"

The two men stopped short as a slight sound in the passage caught their attention. A silence fell upon them that they could not break, and they stood dumbfounded, nervous and overwrought.

The door of the room opened very slowly, and a white form appeared against the darkness of the corridor outside.

Robed in a long night-dress, Thérèse stood there, with hair dishevelled, bloodless lips, and eyes dilated with horror; the child was shaking from head to foot; as if every movement hurt her, she painfully raised her arm and pointed to Charles.

"Thérèse!" Etienne Rambert muttered: "Thérèse, you were outside?"

The child's lips moved: she seemed to be making a more than human effort, and a whisper escaped her lips:

"Yes——"

But she could say no more: her eyes rolled, her whole frame tottered, and then, without sign or cry, she fell rigid and unconscious to the floor.

Twelve or thirteen miles from Souillac the main line from Brives to Cahors, which flanks the slope, describes a rather sharp curve. The journey is a particularly picturesque one, and travellers who make it during the daytime have much that is interesting and agreeable to see; but while they are admiring the country, which marks the transition from the severe region of the Limousin to the more laughing landscapes on the confines of the Midi, the train suddenly plunges into a tunnel which runs for half a mile and more through the heart of the mountain slope. Leaving the tunnel, the line continues along the slope, then gradually descends towards Souillac. Two or three miles from that little station, which is a junction, the line runs alongside the highroad to Salignac, skirts for a brief distance the Corrèze, one of the largest tributaries on the right bank of the Dordogne, and then plunges into the heart of Lot.

Torrential winter rains had seriously affected the railway embankment, particularly near the mouth of the tunnel; a succession of heavy storms in the early part of December had so greatly weakened the ballast that the chief engineers of the Company had been hastily summoned to the scene of the mischief. The experts decided that very important repairs were required close to the Souillac end of the tunnel. It was necessary to put in a complete system of drainage, with underground pipes through which the water that came down from the mountain could escape between the ballast and the side of the rock and so pass underneath the permanent way. The sleepers, too, had been loosened by the bad weather, and some of them had perished so much that the chairs were no longer fast, a matter which was all the more serious because the line described a very sharp curve at that precise spot.

Gangs of first-class navvies had been hurriedly requisitioned, but in spite of the fact that an exceptional rate of wages was paid, a local strike had broken out and for some days all work was stopped. Gradually, however, moderate counsels prevailed and for over a week now, nearly all the men had taken up their tools again. Nevertheless, for a month past, these various circumstances had resulted in all the trains running between Brives and Cahors, being regularly half an hour late. Further, in view of the dangerous state of the line, all engine drivers coming from Brives had received orders to stop their trains two hundred yards from the end of the tunnel, and all drivers coming from Cahors to stop their trains five hundred yards before the entrance to the tunnel, so that should a train appear while any work was going on which rendered it dangerous to pass, it could wait until the work was completed. The order was also issued with the primary object of preventing the workers on the line from being taken by surprise.

Day was just breaking this grey December morning, when the gang of navvies set to work under a foreman, fixing on the down line the new sleepers which had been brought up the day before. Suddenly a shrill whistle was heard, and in the gaping black mouth of the tunnel the light of two lamps became visible; a train bound for Cahors had stopped in accordance with orders, and was calling for permission to pass.

The foreman ranged his men on either side of the down line and walked to a small cabin erected at the mouth of the tunnel, where he pulled the hand-signal so as to show the green light, thereby authorising the train to proceed on its way.

There was a second short, sharp whistle; heavy puffs escaped from the engine, and belching forth a dense volume of black smoke it slowly emerged from the tunnel, followed by a long train of carriages, the windows of which were frosted all over by the cold temperature outside.

A man approached the cabin allotted to the plate-layer in charge of that section of the line in which the tunnel was included.

"I suppose this is the train due at Verrières at 6.55?" he said carelessly.

"Yes," the plate-layer answered, "but it's late, for the clock down there in the valley struck seven several minutes ago."

The train had gone by: the three red lamps fastened at the end of it were already lost in the morning mist.

The man who spoke to the plate-layer was no other than François Paul, the tramp who had been discharged by the magistrate installed at the château of Beaulieu, at precisely the same time the day before, after a brief examination. In spite of the deep wrinkle furrowed in his brow the man seemed to make an effort to appear friendly and to want to carry on the conversation.

"There aren't many people in this morning train," he remarked, "specially in the first-class carriages."

The plate-layer appeared in no wise unwilling to postpone for a few moments his tiring and chilly underground patrol; he put down his pick before answering.

"Well, that's not surprising, is it? People who are rich enough to travel first-class always come by the express