GOTHIC CRIME MYSTERIES: The Phantom of the Opera, The Secret of the Night, The Mystery of the Yellow Room,The Man with the Black Feather & Balaoo. Gaston Leroux
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do it, seeing that the blinds remained fastened on the inside? He passed through them like a shadow. But what is more bewildering than all is that it is impossible to form any idea as to how the murderer got out of The Yellow Room, or how he got across the laboratory to reach the vestibule! Ah, yes, Monsieur Rouletabille, it is altogether as you said, a fine case, the key to which will not be discovered for a long time, I hope.”
“You hope, Monsieur?”
Monsieur de Marquet corrected himself.
“I do not hope so,—I think so.”
“Could that window have been closed and refastened after the flight of the assassin?” asked Rouletabille.
“That is what occurred to me for a moment; but it would imply an accomplice or accomplices,—and I don’t see—”
After a short silence he added:
“Ah—if Mademoiselle Stangerson were only well enough to-day to be questioned!”
Rouletabille following up his thought, asked:
“And the attic?—There must be some opening to that?”
“Yes; there is a window, or rather skylight, in it, which, as it looks out towards the country, Monsieur Stangerson has had barred, like the rest of the windows. These bars, as in the other windows, have remained intact, and the blinds, which naturally open inwards, have not been unfastened. For the rest, we have not discovered anything to lead us to suspect that the murderer had passed through the attic.”
“It seems clear to you, then, Monsieur, that the murderer escaped—nobody knows how—by the window in the vestibule?”
“Everything goes to prove it.”
“I think so, too,” confessed Rouletabille gravely.
After a brief silence, he continued:
“If you have not found any traces of the murderer in the attic, such as the dirty footmarks similar to those on the floor of The Yellow Room, you must come to the conclusion that it was not he who stole Daddy Jacques’s revolver.”
“There are no footmarks in the attic other than those of Daddy Jacques himself,” said the magistrate with a significant turn of his head. Then, after an apparent decision, he added: “Daddy Jacques was with Monsieur Stangerson in the laboratory—and it was lucky for him he was.”
“Then what part did his revolver play in the tragedy?—It seems very clear that this weapon did less harm to Mademoiselle Stangerson than it did to the murderer.”
The magistrate made no reply to this question, which doubtless embarrassed him. “Monsieur Stangerson,” he said, “tells us that the two bullets have been found in The Yellow Room, one embedded in the wall stained with the impression of a red hand—a man’s large hand—and the other in the ceiling.”
“Oh! oh! in the ceiling!” muttered Rouletabille. “In the ceiling! That’s very curious!—In the ceiling!”
He puffed awhile in silence at his pipe, enveloping himself in the smoke. When we reached Savigny-sur-Orge, I had to tap him on the shoulder to arouse him from his dream and come out on to the platform of the station.
There, the magistrate and his Registrar bowed to us, and by rapidly getting into a cab that was awaiting them, made us understand that they had seen enough of us.
“How long will it take to walk to the Chateau du Glandier?” Rouletabille asked one of the railway porters.
“An hour and a half or an hour and three quarters—easy walking,” the man replied.
Rouletabille looked up at the sky and, no doubt, finding its appearance satisfactory, took my arm and said:
“Come on!—I need a walk.”
“Are things getting less entangled?” I asked.
“Not a bit of it!” he said, “more entangled than ever! It’s true, I have an idea—”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you what it is just at present—it’s an idea involving the life or death of two persons at least.”
“Do you think there were accomplices?”
“I don’t think it—”
We fell into silence. Presently he went on:
“It was a bit of luck, our falling in with that examining magistrate and his Registrar, eh? What did I tell you about that revolver?” His head was bent down, he had his hands in his pockets, and he was whistling. After a while I heard him murmur:
“Poor woman!”
“Is it Mademoiselle Stangerson you are pitying?”
“Yes; she’s a noble woman and worthy of being pitied!—a woman of a great, a very great character—I imagine—I imagine.”
“You know her then?”
“Not at all. I have never seen her.”
“Why, then, do you say that she is a woman of great character?”
“Because she bravely faced the murderer; because she courageously defended herself—and, above all, because of the bullet in the ceiling.”
I looked at Rouletabille and inwardly wondered whether he was not mocking me, or whether he had not suddenly gone out of his senses. But I saw that he had never been less inclined to laugh, and the brightness of his keenly intelligent eyes assured me that he retained all his reason. Then, too, I was used to his broken way of talking, which only left me puzzled as to his meaning, till, with a very few clear, rapidly uttered words, he would make the drift of his ideas clear to me, and I saw that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void of meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how it was I had not understood him sooner.
Chapter 4. “In the Bosom of Wild Nature”
The Chateau du Glandier is one of the oldest chateaux in the Ile de France, where so many building remains of the feudal period are still standing. Built originally in the heart of the forest, in the reign of Philip le Bel, it now could be seen a few hundred yards from the road leading from the village of Sainte-Genevieve to Monthery. A mass of inharmonious structures, it is dominated by a donjon. When the visitor has mounted the crumbling steps of this ancient donjon, he reaches a little plateau where, in the seventeenth century, Georges Philibert de Sequigny, Lord of the Glandier, Maisons-Neuves and other places, built the existing town in an abominably rococo style of architecture.
It was in this place, seemingly belonging entirely to the past, that Professor Stangerson and his daughter installed themselves to lay the foundations for the science of the future. Its solitude, in the depths of woods, was what, more than all, had pleased them. They would have none to witness their labours and intrude on their hopes, but the aged stones and grand old oaks. The Glandier—ancient Glandierum—was so called from the quantity of glands (acorns) which, in all times, had been gathered in that neighbourhood. This land, of present mournful interest, had fallen back, owing to the negligence or abandonment of its owners, into the wild character of primitive nature. The buildings alone, which were hidden there, had preserved traces of their strange metamorphoses. Every age had left on them its imprint; a bit of architecture with which was bound up the remembrance of some terrible event, some bloody adventure. Such was the chateau in which science had taken refuge—a place seemingly designed to be the theatre of mysteries, terror, and death.
Having explained so far, I cannot refrain from making one further reflection. If I have lingered a little over this description of the Glandier, it is not because I have reached the right moment for creating the necessary atmosphere for the unfolding of the tragedy before the eyes of the reader. Indeed,