The Eight Strokes of the Clock Page 2

  “I have reflected fully, monsieur. When I have once made up my mind to a thing, I do not change it.”

  “Yes, madame, you do, sometimes. If not, why are you here instead of there?”

  Hortense was confused for a moment. All her anger had subsided. She looked at Rénine with the surprise which one experiences when confronted with certain persons who are unlike their fellows, more capable of performing unusual actions, more generous and disinterested. She realised perfectly that he was acting without any ulterior motive or calculation, that he was, as he had said, merely fulfilling his duty as a gentleman to a woman who has taken the wrong turning.

  Speaking very gently, he said:

  “I know very little about you, madame, but enough to make me wish to be of use to you. You are twenty-six years old and have lost both your parents. Seven years ago, you became the wife of the Comte d’Aigleroche’s nephew by marriage, who proved to be of unsound mind, half insane indeed, and had to be confined. This made it impossible for you to obtain a divorce and compelled you, since your dowry had been squandered, to live with your uncle and at his expense. It’s a depressing environment. The count and countess do not agree. Years ago, the count was deserted by his first wife, who ran away with the countess’ first husband. The abandoned husband and wife decided out of spite to unite their fortunes, but found nothing but disappointment and ill will in this second marriage. And you suffer the consequences. They lead a monotonous, narrow, lonely life for eleven months or more out of the year. One day, you met M. Rossigny, who fell in love with you and suggested an elopement. You did not care for him. But you were bored, your youth was being wasted, you longed for the unexpected, for adventure … in a word, you accepted with the very definite intention of keeping your admirer at arm’s length, but also with the rather ingenuous hope that the scandal would force your uncle’s hand and make him account for his trusteeship and assure you of an independent existence. That is how you stand. At present you have to choose between placing yourself in M. Rossigny’s hands … or trusting yourself to me.”

  She raised her eyes to his. What did he mean? What was the purport of this offer which he made so seriously, like a friend who asks nothing but to prove his devotion?

  After a moment’s silence, he took the two horses by the bridle and tied them up. Then he examined the heavy gates, each of which was strengthened by two planks nailed crosswise. An electoral poster, dated twenty years earlier, showed that no one had entered the domain since that time.

  Rénine tore up one of the iron posts, which supported a railing that ran round the crescent, and used it as a lever. The rotten planks gave way. One of them uncovered the lock, which he attacked with a big knife, containing a number of blades and implements. A minute later, the gate opened on a waste of bracken, which led up to a long, dilapidated building, with a turret at each corner and a sort of a belvedere, built on a taller tower, in the middle.

  The Prince turned to Hortense:

  “You are in no hurry,” he said. “You will form your decision this evening; and, if M. Rossigny succeeds in persuading you for the second time, I give you my word of honour that I shall not cross your path. Until then, grant me the privilege of your company. We made up our minds yesterday to inspect the château. Let us do so. Will you? It is as good a way as any of passing the time, and I have a notion that it will not be uninteresting.”

  He had a way of talking, which compelled obedience. He seemed to be commanding and entreating at the same time. Hortense did not even seek to shake off the enervation into which her will was slowly sinking. She followed him to a half-demolished flight of steps at the top of which was a door likewise strengthened by planks nailed in the form of a cross.

  Rénine went to work in the same way as before. They entered a spacious hall paved with white and black flagstones, furnished with old sideboards and choir stalls and adorned with a carved escutcheon, which displayed the remains of armorial bearings, representing an eagle standing on a block of stone, all half-hidden behind a veil of cobwebs, which hung down over a pair of folding doors.

  “The door of the drawing room, evidently,” said Rénine.

  He found this more difficult to open, and it was only by repeatedly charging it with his shoulder that he was able to move one of the doors.

  Hortense had not spoken a word. She watched not without surprise this series of forcible entries, which were accomplished with a really masterly skill. He guessed her thoughts and, turning round, said in a serious voice:

  “It’s child’s play to me. I was a locksmith once.”

  She seized his arm and whispered:

  “Listen!”

  “To what?” he asked.

  She increased the pressure of her hand, to demand silence. The next moment, he murmured:

  “It’s really very strange.”

  “Listen, listen!” Hortense repeated, in bewilderment. “Can it be possible?”

  They heard, not far from where they were standing, a sharp sound, the sound of a light tap recurring at regular intervals, and they had only to listen attentively to recognise the ticking of a clock. Yes, it was this and nothing else that broke the profound silence of the dark room; it was indeed the deliberate ticking, rhythmical as the beat of a metronome, produced by a heavy brass pendulum. That was it! And nothing could be more impressive than the measured pulsation of this trivial mechanism, which by some miracle, some inexplicable phenomenon, had continued to live in the heart of the dead château.

  “And yet,” stammered Hortense, without daring to raise her voice, “no one has entered the house?”

  “No one.”

  “And it is quite impossible for that clock to have kept going for twenty years without being wound up?”

  “Quite impossible.”

  “Then …?”

  Serge Rénine opened the three windows and threw back the shutters.

  He and Hortense were in a drawing room, as he had thought, and the room showed not the least sign of disorder. The chairs were in their places. Not a piece of furniture was missing. The people who had lived there and who had made it the most individual room in their house had gone away, leaving everything just as it was, the books which they used to read, the knick-knacks on the tables and consoles.

  Rénine examined the old grandfather’s clock, contained in its tall carved case, which showed the disk of the pendulum through an oval pane of glass. He opened the door of the clock. The weights hanging from the cords were at their lowest point.

  At that moment there was a click. The clock struck eight with a serious note, which Hortense was never to forget.

  “How extraordinary!” she said.

  “Extraordinary indeed,” said he, “for the works are exceedingly simple and would hardly keep going for a week.”

  “And do you see nothing out of the common?”

  “No, nothing … or, at least …”

  He stooped and, from the back of the case, drew a metal tube, which was concealed by the weights. Holding it up to the light:

  “A telescope,” he said, thoughtfully. “Why did they hide it? … And they left it drawn out to its full length … That’s odd … What does it mean?”

  The clock, as is sometimes usual, began to strike a second time, sounding eight strokes. Rénine closed the case and continued his inspection without putting his telescope down. A wide arch led from the drawing room to a smaller apartment, a sort of smoking room. This also was furnished, but contained a glass case for guns, of which the rack was empty. Hanging on a panel nearby was a calendar with the date of the 5th of September.

  “Oh,” cried Hortense, in astonishment, “the same date as today! … They tore off the leaves until the 5th of September … And this is the anniversary! What an astonishing coincidence!”

  “Astonishing,” he echoed. “It’s the anniversary of their departure … twenty years ago today.”

  “You must admit,” she said, “that all this is incomp
rehensible.”

  “Yes, of course … but, all the same … perhaps not.”

  “Have you any idea?”

  He waited a few seconds before replying:

  “What puzzles me is this telescope hidden, dropped in that corner, at the last moment. I wonder what it was used for … From the ground-floor windows you see nothing but the trees in the garden … and the same, I expect, from all the windows … We are in a valley, without the least open horizon … To use the telescope, one would have to go up to the top of the house … Shall we go up?”

  She did not hesitate. The mystery surrounding the whole adventure excited her curiosity so keenly that she could think of nothing but accompanying Rénine and assisting him in his investigations.

  They went upstairs accordingly, and, on the second floor, came to a landing where they found the spiral staircase leading to the belvedere.

  At the top of this was a platform in the open air, but surrounded by a parapet over six feet high.

  “There must have been battlements which have been filled in since,” observed Prince Rénine. “Look here, there were loopholes at one time. They may have been blocked.”

  “In any case,” she said, “the telescope was of no use up here either and we may as well go down again.”

  “I don’t agree,” he said. “Logic tells us that there must have been some gap through which the country could be seen, and this was the spot where the telescope was used.”

  He hoisted himself by his wrists to the top of the parapet and then saw that this point of vantage commanded the whole of the valley, including the park, with its tall trees marking the horizon; and, beyond, a depression in a wood surmounting a hill, at a distance of some seven or eight hundred yards, stood another tower, squat and in ruins, covered with ivy from top to bottom.

  Rénine resumed his inspection. He seemed to consider that the key to the problem lay in the use to which the telescope was put and that the problem would be solved if only they could discover this use.

  He studied the loopholes one after the other. One of them, or rather the place which it had occupied, attracted his attention above the rest. In the middle of the layer of plaster, which had served to block it, there was a hollow filled with earth in which plants had grown. He pulled out the plants and removed the earth, thus clearing the mouth of a hole some five inches in diameter, which completely penetrated the wall. On bending forward, Rénine perceived that this deep and narrow opening inevitably carried the eye, above the dense tops of the trees and through the depression in the hill, to the ivy-clad tower.

  At the bottom of this channel, in a sort of groove which ran through it like a gutter, the telescope fitted so exactly that it was quite impossible to shift it, however little, either to the right or to the left.

  Rénine, after wiping the outside of the lenses, while taking care not to disturb the lie of the instrument by a hair’s breadth, put his eye to the small end.

  He remained for thirty or forty seconds, gazing attentively and silently. Then he drew himself up and said, in a husky voice:

  “It’s terrible … it’s really terrible.”

  “What is?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Look.”

  She bent down, but the image was not clear to her and the telescope had to be focused to suit her sight. The next moment she shuddered and said:

  “It’s two scarecrows, isn’t it, both stuck up on the top? But why?”

  “Look again,” he said. “Look more carefully under the hats … the faces …”

  “Oh!” she cried, turning faint with horror, “how awful!”

  The field of the telescope, like the circular picture shown by a magic lantern, presented this spectacle: the platform of a broken tower, the walls of which were higher in the more distant part and formed as it were a backdrop, over which surged waves of ivy. In front, amid a cluster of bushes, were two human beings, a man and a woman, leaning back against a heap of fallen stones.

  But the words man and woman could hardly be applied to these two forms, these two sinister puppets, which, it is true, wore clothes and hats—or rather shreds of clothes and remnants of hats—but had lost their eyes, their cheeks, their chins, every particle of flesh, until they were actually and positively nothing more than two skeletons.

  “Two skeletons,” stammered Hortense. “Two skeletons with clothes on. Who carried them up there?”

  “Nobody.”

  “But still …”

  “That man and that woman must have died at the top of the tower, years and years ago … and their flesh rotted under their clothes and the ravens ate them.”

  “But it’s hideous, hideous!” cried Hortense, pale as death, her face drawn with horror.

  Half an hour later, Hortense Daniel and Rénine left the Château de Halingre. Before their departure, they had gone as far as the ivy-grown tower, the remains of an old donjon keep more than half demolished. The inside was empty. There seemed to have been a way of climbing to the top, at a comparatively recent period, by means of wooden stairs and ladders, which now lay broken and scattered over the ground. The tower backed against the wall, which marked the end of the park.

  A curious fact, which surprised Hortense, was that Prince Rénine had neglected to pursue a more minute enquiry, as though the matter had lost all interest for him. He did not even speak of it any longer; and, in the inn at which they stopped and took a light meal in the nearest village, it was she who asked the landlord about the abandoned château. But she learned nothing from him, for the man was new to the district and could give her no particulars. He did not even know the name of the owner.

  They turned their horses’ heads towards La Marèze. Again and again Hortense recalled the squalid sight which had met their eyes. But Rénine, who was in a lively mood and full of attentions to his companion, seemed utterly indifferent to those questions.

  “But, after all,” she exclaimed, impatiently, “we can’t leave the matter there! It calls for a solution.”

  “As you say,” he replied, “a solution is called for. M. Rossigny has to know where he stands and you have to decide what to do about him.”

  She shrugged her shoulders: “He’s of no importance for the moment. The thing today …”

  “Is what?”

  “Is to know what those two dead bodies are.”

  “Still, Rossigny …”

  “Rossigny can wait. But I can’t. You have shown me a mystery, which is now the only thing that matters. What do you intend to do?”

  “To do?”

  “Yes. There are two bodies … You’ll inform the police, I suppose.”

  “Gracious goodness!” he exclaimed, laughing. “What for?”

  “Well, there’s a riddle that has to be cleared up at all costs, a terrible tragedy.”

  “We don’t need anyone to do that.”

  “What! Do you mean to say that you understand it?”

  “Almost as plainly as though I had read it in a book, told in full detail, with explanatory illustrations. It’s all so simple!”

  She looked at him askance, wondering if he was making fun of her. But he seemed quite serious.

  “Well?” she asked, quivering with curiosity.

  The light was beginning to wane. They had trotted at a good pace, and the hunt was returning as they neared La Marèze.

  “Well,” he said, “we shall get the rest of our information from people living round about … from your uncle, for instance, and you will see how logically all the facts fit in. When you hold the first link of a chain, you are bound, whether you like it or not, to reach the last. It’s the greatest fun in the world.”

  Once in the house, they separated. On going to her room, Hortense found her luggage and a furious letter from Rossigny in which he bade her good-bye and announced his departure.

  Then Rénine knocked at her door:

  “Your uncle is in the library,” he said. “Will you go down with me?
I’ve sent word that I am coming.”

  She went with him. He added:

  “One word more. This morning, when I thwarted your plans and begged you to trust me, I naturally undertook an obligation towards you, which I mean to fulfill without delay. I want to give you a positive proof of this.”

  She laughed:

  “The only obligation which you took upon yourself was to satisfy my curiosity.”

  “It shall be satisfied,” he assured her, gravely, “and more fully than you can possibly imagine.”

  M. d’Aigleroche was alone. He was smoking his pipe and drinking sherry. He offered a glass to Rénine, who refused.

  “Well, Hortense!” he said, in a rather thick voice. “You know that it’s pretty dull here, except in these September days. You must make the most of them. Have you had a pleasant ride with Rénine?”

  “That’s just what I wanted to talk about, my dear sir,” interrupted the prince.

  “You must excuse me, but I have to go to the station in ten minutes, to meet a friend of my wife’s.”

  “Oh, ten minutes will be ample!”

  “Just the time to smoke a cigarette?”

  “No longer.”

  He took a cigarette from the case which M. d’Aigleroche handed to him, lit it and said:

  “I must tell you that our ride happened to take us to an old domain which you are sure to know, the Domaine de Halingre.”

  “Certainly I know it. But it has been closed, boarded up for twenty-five years or so. You weren’t able to get in, I suppose?”

  “Yes, we were.”

  “Really? Was it interesting?”

  “Extremely. We discovered the strangest things.”

  “What things?” asked the count, looking at his watch.

  Rénine described what they had seen:

  “On a tower some way from the house there were two dead bodies, two skeletons rather … a man and a woman still wearing the clothes which they had on when they were murdered.”

  “Come, come, now! Murdered?”

  “Yes, and that is what we have come to trouble you about. The tragedy must date back to some twenty years ago. Was nothing known of it at the time?”