Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 22).djvu/525

Rh "A very beautiful creature!" he said. "But for a young girl her face is too sad."

"Ah! You should have known her before this affair," answered the other. "Full of vivacity, blooming and smiling as Hebe. Well, we can do little for her but trust to time."

Raymond told himself he should like to aid time in winning her back to lightheartedness.

Arrived at Gex he was enabled, through the influence of Puivert, to slip into the judge's room, amongst the reporters and other minor officials, whence he might assist at the interrogations, himself unobserved.

How well he remembered the man who was now brought in between two prison warders! The burly, swart-faced man with the bull's throat, the small, suspicious pig's eyes, the muscular, hairy hands, every detail of whose appearance struck Raymond familiarly, as if not two years but two hours only lay between then and now. The rough voice in which Leroy answered the questions put him seemed never to have ceased snarling at Raymond's ear.

But the judge extracted nothing from these answers beyond a repetition of the already admitted facts.

Yes. A gentleman had visited the inn on the night in question, had asked for a bed, and had been refused it, as the only two rooms available were already occupied by two waggoners (whose separate testimony had confirmed the statement's truth). The gentleman, therefore, having eaten his supper, had paid and gone away, and that was all Leroy knew, so help him God.

He was removed that his wife might be introduced, and, brute-beast as was the man, about the woman there was something still more sinister. This stout, squat, dark little woman with the eyes set too close together, and the loose, cruel mouth, might well have served as the evil spirit of even such a ruffian as Leroy. If his was the hand to carry out their crimes, hers was the turpitude to suggest them.

But the story concocted to save their necks from those crimes' consequence had evidently been well rehearsed. Point for point, word for word, the woman repeated the asseverations of the man. The couple had been separated over two weeks, but not the discrepancy of a pin's head could be found between the two tales.

"No, my good monsieur," she whined, "we had no bed to give the gentleman. Besides our own room we have but two others, which were occupied on that night by two waggoners, Hugues and Rebelle. This is God's truth, and they will tell you so themselves."

At this moment there was a movement among the reporters on the judge's left. Raymond had pushed back his chair, risen, and now came forward.

"Pardon me, monsieur," he said, bowing to the judge, "will you allow me to ask a question?"

Then, turning to the woman, "But your third room, the attic over the stable? Did you not put Victor Maréchal to sleep there?"

Her mouth fell open as she stared at the speaker, but no word came.

Raymond, however, answered for her, emphatically and fluently, as though he were become the mouthpiece of some superior force.

"Yes!" he cried, "you put the unfortunate young man to sleep in that little lonely attic room, separated from the rest of the house by a long passage, with nothing below him but the disused stable, so that his cries, if he should cry out, would not be heard.

"But you gave him no opportunity of crying out. You waited until he slept profoundly, and then you and your husband came up through the stable by the ladder leading to the cupboard's secret door, and while you held the lantern to guide the blow, Leroy stabbed the victim in his sleep.

"After which the two of you carried the body down the way you had come to bury it beneath the flags of the stable floor; but because you needed light on the way down, and neither of you had a hand to spare, Leroy carried the lantern by holding the ring between his teeth."

The woman's face had changed to the colour of ashes during this denunciation, while her eyes, globular and ringed with white, seemed to move forward from their sockets.

"What! You were there, then?" she exclaimed. "You saw everything? But how is that possible?"

A thrill ran through the room as these incriminating words were uttered and written down.

Recognising the next instant her fatal blunder, the woman now took refuge in a savage silence, except when refusing in violent language to sign her deposition presently read over to her.

But when it was read over to Leroy,