In fact, the order to advance was brought to the colonel a few moments later. The regiment was to follow the road and deploy in the meadows on the right.
"Come along, gentlemen," he said to his officers. "Sergeant Delroze's section will march in front. His objective will be the Château d'Ornequin. There are two little short cuts. Take both of them."
"Very well, sir."
All Paul's sorrow and rage were intensified in a boundless need for action; when he marched off with his men, he felt an inexhaustible strength, felt capable of conquering the enemy's position all by himself. He moved from one to the other with the untiring hurry of a sheep-dog hustling his flock. He never ceased advising and encouraging his men:
"You're one of the plucky ones, old chap, I know, you're no shirker. . . . Nor you either . . . Only you think too much about your skin, you keep grumbling, when you ought to be cheerful. . . . Who's downhearted, eh? There's a bit more collar-work to do and we're going to do it without looking behind us, what?"
Overhead, the shells followed their march in the air, whistling and moaning and exploding till they formed a sort of canopy of steel and grape-shot.
"Duck your heads! Lie down flat!" cried Paul.
He himself remained standing, indifferent to the flight of the enemy's shells. But with what terror he listened to our own, those coming from behind, from all the hills hard by, whizzing ahead of them to carry destruction and death. Where would this one fall? And that one, where would its murderous rain of bullets and splinters descend?
He was obsessed with the vision of his wife, wounded, dying, and kept on murmuring her name. For many days now, ever since the day when he learnt that Élisabeth had refused to leave the Château d'Ornequin, he could not think of her without a loving emotion that was never spoilt by any impulse of revolt, any movement of anger. He no longer mingled the detestable memories of the past with the charming reality of his love. When he thought of the hated mother, the image of the daughter no longer appeared before his mind. They were two creatures of a different race, having no connection one with the other. Élisabeth, full of courage, risking her life to obey a duty to which she attached a value greater than her life, acquired in Paul's eyes a singular dignity. She was indeed the woman whom he had loved and cherished, the woman whom he loved still.
Paul stopped. He had ventured with his men into an open piece of ground, probably marked down in advance, which the enemy was now peppering with shrapnel. A number of men were hit.
"Halt!" he cried. "Flat on your stomachs, all of you!"
He caught hold of Bernard:
"Lie down, kid, can't you? Why expose yourself unnecessarily? . . . Stay there. Don't move."
He held him to the ground with a friendly pressure, keeping his arm round Bernard's neck and speaking to him with gentleness, as though he were trying to display to the brother all the affection that rose to his heart for his dear Élisabeth. He forgot the harsh words which he had addressed to Bernard and uttered quite different words, throbbing with a fondness which he had denied the evening before:
"Don't move, youngster. You see, I had no business to bring you with me or to drag you into this hot place. I'm responsible for you and I'm not going to have you hurt."
The fire diminished in intensity. By crawling over the ground, the men reached a double row of poplars which led them, by a gentle ascent, towards a ridge intersected by a hollow road. Paul, on climbing the slope which overlooked the Ornequin plateau, saw the ruins of the village in the distance, with its shattered church, and, farther to the left, a wilderness of trees and stones whence rose the walls of a building. This was the château. On every side around were blazing farmhouses, haystacks and barns.
Behind the section, the French troops were scattering forward in all directions. A battery had taken up its position in the shelter of a wood closeby and was firing incessantly. Paul could see the shells bursting over the château and among the ruins.
Unable to bear the sight any longer, he resumed his march at the head of his section. The enemy's guns had ceased thundering, had doubtless been reduced to silence. But, when they were well within two miles of Ornequin, the bullets whistled around them and Paul saw a detachment of Germans falling back upon the village, firing as they went. And the seventy-fives and Rimailhos kept on growling. The din was terrible.
Paul gripped Bernard by the arm and, in a quivering voice, said:
"If anything happens to me, tell Élisabeth that I beg her to forgive me. Do you understand? I beg her to forgive me."
He was suddenly afraid that fate would not allow him to see his wife again; and he realized that he had behaved to her with unpardonable cruelty, deserting her as though she were guilty of a fault which she had not committed and abandoning her to every form of distress and torment. And he walked on briskly, followed at a distance by his men.
But, at the spot where the short cut joins the high road, in sight of the Liseron, a cyclist rode up to him. The colonel had ordered that the section should wait for the main body of the regiment in order to make an attack in full force.
This was the cruelest test of all. Paul, a victimto ever-increasing excitement, trembled with fever and rage.
"Come, Paul," said Bernard, "don't work yourself into such a state! We shall get there in time."
"In time for what?" he retorted. "To find her dead or wounded? Or not to find her at all? Oh, hang it, why can't our guns stop their damned row? What are they shelling, now that the enemy's no longer replying? Dead bodies and demolished houses! . . ."
"What about the rearguard covering the German retreat?"
"Well, aren't we here, the infantry? This is our job. All we have to do is to send out our sharpshooters and follow up with a good bayonet-charge. . . ."
At last the section set out again, reinforced by the remainder of the ninth company and under the command of the captain. A detachment of hussars galloped by, pricking towards the village to cut off the fugitives. The company swerved towards the château.
Opposite them, all was silent as the grave. Was it a trap? Was there not every reason to believe that enemy forces, strongly entrenched and barricaded as these were, would prepare to offer a last resistance? And yet there was nothing suspicious in the avenue of old oaks that led to the front court, not a sign of life to be seen or heard.
Paul and Bernard, still keeping ahead, with theirfingers on the trigger of their rifles, searched the dim light of the underwood with a keen glance. Columns of smoke rose above the wall, which was now quite near, yawning with breach upon breach. As they approached, they heard moans, followed by the heart-rending sound of a death-rattle. It was the German wounded.
And suddenly the earth shook as though an inner upheaval had shattered its crust and from the other side of the wall came a tremendous explosion, or rather a series of explosions, like so many peals of thunder. The air was darkened with a cloud of sand and dust which sent forth all sorts of stones and rubbish. The enemy had blown up the château.
"That was meant for us, I expect," said Bernard. "We were to have been blown up at the same time. They were out in their calculations."
When they had passed the gate, the sight of the mined court-yard, of the shattered turrets, of the demolished château, of the out-houses in flames, of the dying in their last throes and the thickly stacked corpses of the dead startled them into recoiling.
"Forward! Forward!" shouted the colonel, galloping up. "There are troops that must have made off across the park."
Paul knew the road, which he had covered a few weeks earlier in such tragic circumstances. He rushed across the lawns, among blocks of stone and uprooted trees. But, as he passed in sight of a little lodge that stood at the entrance to the wood, hestopped, nailed to the ground. And Bernard and all the men stood stupefied, opening their mouths wide with horror.
Against the lodge, two corpses rested on their feet, fastened to rings in the wall by a single chain wound round their waists. Their bodies were bent over the chains and their arms hung to the ground.
They were the corpses of a man and a woman. Paul recognized Jérôme and Rosalie. They had been shot.
The chain continued beyond them. There was a third ring in the wall. The plaster was stained with blood and there were visible traces of bullets. There had been a third victim, without a doubt, and the body had been removed.
As he approached, Paul noticed a splinter of bomb-shell embedded in the plaster. Around the hole thus formed, between the plaster and the splinter, was a handful of fair hair with golden lights in it, hair torn from the head of Élisabeth.
Paul's first feeling was an immense need of revenge, then and there, at all costs, a need outweighing any sense of horror or despair. He gazed around him, as though all the wounded men who lay dying in the park were guilty of the monstrous crime:
"The cowards!" he snarled. "The murderers!"
"Are you sure," stammered Bernard, "are you sure it's Élisabeth's hair?"
"Why, of course I am. They've shot her as they shot the two others. I know them both: it's the keeper and his wife. Oh, the blackguards! . . ."
He raised the butt of his rifle over a German dragging himself in the grass and was about to strike him, when the Colonel came up to him:
"Hullo, Delroze, what are you doing? Where's your company?"
"Oh, sir, if you only knew! . . ."
He rushed up to his colonel. He looked like a madman and brandished his rifle as he spoke:
"They've killed her, sir, yes, they've shot my wife. . . . Look, against the wall there, with the two people who were in her service. . . . They've shot her.. . . She was twenty years old, sir. . . . Oh, we must kill them all like dogs!"
But Bernard was dragging him away:
"Don't let us waste time, Paul; we can take our revenge on those who are still fighting. . . . I hear firing over there. Some of them are surrounded, I expect."
Paul hardly knew what he was doing. He started running again, drunk with rage and grief.
Ten minutes later, he had rejoined his company and was crossing the open space where his father had been stabbed. The chapel was in front of him. Farther on, instead of the little door that used to be in the wall, a great breach had been made, to admit the convoys of wagons for provisioning the castle. Eight hundred yards beyond it, a violent rifle-fire crackled over the fields, at the crossing of the road and the highway.
A few dozen retreating Germans were trying to force their way through the hussars who had come by the high road. They were attacked from behind by Paul's company, but succeeded in taking shelter in a square patch of trees and copsewood, where they defended themselves with fierce energy, retiring step by step and dropping one after the other.
"Why don't they surrender?" muttered Paul, who was firing continually and who was gradually being calmed by the heat of the fray. "You would think they were trying to gain time."
"Look over there!" said Bernard, in a husky voice.
Under the trees, a motor-car had just come from the frontier, crammed with German soldiers. Was it bringing reinforcements? No, the motor turned almost in its own length; and between it and the last of the combatants stood an officer in a long gray cloak, who, revolver in hand, exhorted them to persevere in their resistance, while he himself effected his retreat towards the car sent to his rescue.
"Look, Paul," Bernard repeated, "look!"
Paul was dumfounded. That officer to whom Bernard was calling his attention was . . . but no, it could not be. And yet . . .
"What do you mean to suggest, Bernard?" he asked.
"It's the same face," muttered Bernard, "the same face as yesterday, you know, Paul: the face of the woman who asked me those questions about you, Paul."
And Paul on his side recognized beyond the possibility of a doubt the mysterious individual who had tried to kill him at the little door leading out of the park, the creature who presented such an unconceivable resemblance to his father's murderess, to the woman of the portrait, to Hermine d'Andeville, Élisabeth's mother and Bernard's.
Bernard raised his rifle to fire.
"No, don't do that!" cried Paul, terrified at the movement.
"Why not?"
"Let's try and take him alive."
He darted forward in a mad rush of hatred, but the officer had run to the car. The German soldiers held out their hands and hoisted him into their midst. Paul shot the one who was seated at the wheel. The officer caught hold of it just as the car was about to strike a tree, changed the direction and, skilfully guiding the car past the intervening obstacles, drove it behind a bend in the ground and from there towards the frontier. He was saved.
As soon as he was beyond the range of the bullets, the German soldiers who were still fighting surrendered.
Paul was trembling with impotent fury. To him this individual represented every imaginable form of evil; and, from the first to the last minute of that long series of tragedies, murders, attempts at spying and assassination, treacheries and deliberate shootings, all conceived with the same object and the same spirit, that one figure stood out as the very genius of crime.
Nothing short of the creature's death would have appeased Paul's hatred. It was he, the monster, Paul never entertained a doubt of it, who had ordered Élisabeth to be shot. Élisabeth shot! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, infernal vision that tormented him! . . .
"Who is he?" he cried. "How can we find out? How can we get at him and torture him and kill him?"
"Question a prisoner," said Bernard.
The captain considered it wiser to advance no farther and ordered the company to fall back, so as to remain in touch with the remainder of the regiment. Paul was told off specially to occupy the château with his section and to take the prisoners there.
He lost no time in questioning two or three non-commissioned officers and some of the soldiers, as they went. But he could obtain nothing but a mass of conflicting particulars from them, for they had arrived from Corvigny the day before and had only spent the night at the château. They did not even know the name of the officer in the flowing gray cloak for whom so many of them had sacrificed their lives. He was called the major; and that was all.
"But still," Paul insisted, "he was your actual commanding officer?"
"No. The leader of the rearguard detachment to which we belong is an Oberleutnant who was wounded by the exploding of the mines, when we ran away. We wanted to take him with us, but the major objected, leveling his revolver at us, telling us to march in front of him and threatening to shoot the first man who left him in the lurch. And just now, while we were fighting, he stood ten paces behind us and kept threatening us with his revolver to compel us to defend him. He shot three of us, as a matter of fact."
"He was reckoning on the assistance of the car, wasn't he?"
"Yes; and also on reinforcements which were to save us all, so he said. But only the car came; and it just saved him."
"The Oberleutnant would know his name, of course. Is he badly wounded?"
"He's got a broken leg. We made him comfortable in a lodge in the park."
"The lodge against which your people put to death . . . those civilians?"
"Yes."
They were nearing the lodge, a sort of little orangery into which the plants were taken in winter. Rosalie and Jérôme's bodies had been removed. But the sinister chain was still hanging on the wall, fastened to the three iron rings; and Paul once more beheld, with a shudder of dread, the marks left by the bullet and the little splinter of bomb-shell that kept Élisabeth's hair embedded in the plaster.
A French bomb-shell! An added horror to the atrocity of the murder!
It was therefore Paul who, on the day before, by capturing the armored motor-car and effecting his daring raid on Corvigny, thus opening the road to the French troops, had brought about the events that ended in his wife's being murdered! The enemy had revenged himself for his retreat by shooting the inhabitants of the château! Élisabeth fastened to the wall by a chain had been riddled with bullets. And, by a hideous irony, her corpse had received in addition the splinters of the first shells which theFrench guns had fired before night-fall, from the top of the hills near Corvigny.
Paul pulled out the fragments of shell and removed the golden strands, which he put away religiously. He and Bernard then entered the lodge, where the Red Cross men had established a temporary ambulance. They found the Oberleutnant lying on a truss of straw, well looked after and able to answer questions.
One point at once became quite clear, which was that the German troops which had garrisoned the Château d'Ornequin had, so to speak, never been in touch at all with those which, the day before, had retreated from Corvigny and the adjoining forts. The garrison had been evacuated immediately upon the arrival of the fighting troops, as though to avoid any indiscretion on the subject of what had happened during the occupation of the château.
"At that moment," said the Oberleutnant, who belonged to the fighting force, not to the garrison, "it was seven o'clock in the evening. Your seventy-fives had already got the range of the château; and we found no one there but a number of generals and other officers of superior rank. Their baggage-wagons were leaving and their motors were ready to leave. I was ordered to hold out as long as I could to blow up the château. The major had made all the arrangements beforehand."
"What was the major's name?"
"I don't know. He was walking about with ayoung officer whom even the generals addressed with respect. This same officer called me over to him and charged me to obey the major 'as I would the emperor.'"
"And who was the young officer?"
"Prince Conrad."
"A son of the Kaiser's?"
"Yes. He left the château yesterday, late in the day."
"And did the major spend the night here?"
"I suppose so; at any rate, he was there this morning. We fired the mines and left . . . a bit late, for I was wounded near this lodge . . . near the wall. . . ."
Paul mastered his emotion and said:
"You mean, the wall against which your people shot three French civilians, don't you?"
"Yes."
"When were they shot?"
"About six o'clock in the afternoon, I believe, before we arrived from Corvigny."
"Who ordered them to be shot?"
"The major."
Paul felt the perspiration trickling from the top of his head down his neck and forehead. It was as he thought: Élisabeth had been shot by the orders of that nameless and more than mysterious individual whose face was the very image of the face of Hermine d'Andeville, Élisabeth's mother!
He went on, in a trembling voice:
"So there were three people shot? You're quite sure?"
"Yes, the people of the château. They had been guilty of treachery."
"A man and two women?"
"Yes."
"But there were only two bodies fastened to the wall of the lodge."
"Yes, only two. The major had the lady of the house buried by Prince Conrad's orders."
"Where?"
"He didn't tell me."
"But why was she shot?"
"I understand that she had got hold of some very important secrets."
"They could have taken her away and kept her as a prisoner."
"Certainly, but Prince Conrad was tired of her."
Paul gave a start:
"What's that you say?"
The officer resumed, with a smile that might mean anything:
"Well, damn it all, everybody knows Prince Conrad! He's the Don Juan of the family. He'd been staying at the château for some weeks and had time to make an impression, had he not? . . . And then . . . and then to get tired. . . . Besides, the major maintained that the woman and her two servants had tried to poison the prince. So you see . . ."
He did not finish his sentence. Paul was bendingover him and, with a face distorted with rage, took him by the throat and shouted:
"Another word, you dog, and I'll throttle the life out of you! Ah, you can thank your stars that you're wounded! . . . If you weren't . . . if you weren't . . . !"
And Bernard, beside himself with rage, joined in:
"Yes, you can think yourself lucky. As for your Prince Conrad, he's a swine, let me tell you . . . and I mean to tellhimso to his face. . . . He's a swine like all his beastly family and like the whole lot of you! . . ."
They left the Oberleutnant utterly dazed and unable to understand a word of this sudden outburst. But, once outside, Paul had a fit of despair. His nerves relaxed. All his anger and all his hatred were changed into infinite depression. He could hardly contain his tears.
"Come, Paul," exclaimed Bernard, "surely you don't believe a word . . . ?"
"No, no, and again no! But I can guess what happened. That drunken brute of a prince must have tried to make eyes at Élisabeth and to take advantage of his position. Just think! A woman, alone and defenseless: that was a conquest worth making! What tortures the poor darling must have undergone, what humiliations! . . . A daily struggle, with threats and brutalities. . . . And, at the last moment, death, to punish her for her resistance. . . ."
"We shall avenge her, Paul," said Bernard, in a low voice.
"We shall; but shall I ever forget that it was on my account, through my fault, that she stayed here? I will explain what I mean later on; and you will understand how hard and unjust I have been. . . . And yet . . ."
He stood gloomily thinking. He was haunted by the image of the major and he repeated:
"And yet . . . and yet . . . there are things that seem so strange. . . ."
All that afternoon, French troops kept streaming in through the valley of the Liseron and the village of Ornequin in order to resist any counter-attack by the enemy. Paul's section was resting; and he and Bernard took advantage of this to make a minute search in the park and among the ruins of the château. But there was no clue to reveal to them where Élisabeth's body lay hidden.
At five o'clock, they gave Rosalie and Jérôme a decent burial. Two crosses were set up on a little mound strewn with flowers. An army chaplain came and said the prayers for the dead. And Paul was moved to tears when he knelt on the grave of those two faithful servants whose devotion had been their undoing.
Then also Paul promised to avenge. And his longing for vengeance evoked in his mind, with almost painful intensity, the hated image of the major, thatimage which had now become inseparable from his recollections of the Comtesse d'Andeville.
He led Bernard away from the grave and asked:
"Are you sure that you were not mistaken in connecting the major and the supposed peasant-woman who questioned you at Corvigny?"
"Absolutely."
"Then come with me. I told you of a woman's portrait. We will go and look at it and you shall tell me what impression it makes upon you."
Paul had noticed that that part of the castle which contained Hermine d'Andeville's bedroom and boudoir had not been entirely demolished by the explosion of either the mines or shells. It was possible that the boudoir was still in its former condition.
The staircase had been destroyed; and they had to clamber up the shattered masonry in order to reach the first floor. Traces of the corridor were visible here and there. All the doors were gone; and the rooms presented an appearance of pitiful chaos.
"It's here," said Paul, pointing to an open place between two pieces of wall that remained standing as by a miracle.
It was indeed Hermine d'Andeville's boudoir, shattered and dilapidated, cracked from top to bottom and filled with plaster and rubbish, but quite recognizable and containing all the furniture which Paul had noticed on the evening of his marriage. The window-shutters darkened the room partly, but therewas enough light for Paul to see the whereabouts of the wall opposite. And he at once exclaimed:
"The portrait has been taken away!"
It was a great disappointment to him and, at the same time, a proof of the great importance which his enemy attached to the portrait, which could only have been removed because it constituted an overwhelming piece of evidence.
"I assure you," said Bernard, "that this does not affect my opinion in the least. There was no need to verify my conviction about the major and that peasant-woman at Corvigny. Whose portrait was it?"
"I told you, a woman."
"What woman? Was it a picture which my father hung there, one of the pictures of his collection?"
"That was it," said Paul, welcoming the opportunity of throwing his brother-in-law off the scent.
Opening one of the shutters, he saw a mark on the wall of the rectangular space which the picture used to occupy; and he was able to perceive, from certain details, that the removal had been effected in a hurry. For instance, the gilt scroll had dropped from the frame and was lying on the floor. Paul picked it up stealthily so that Bernard should not see the inscription engraved upon it.
But, while he was examining the panel more attentively after Bernard had unfastened the other shutter, he gave an exclamation.
"What's the matter?" asked Bernard.
"There . . . look . . . that signature on the wall . . . where the picture was: a signature and a date."
It was written in pencil; two lines across the white plaster, at a man's height. The date, "Wednesday evening, 16 September, 1914," followed by the signature: "Major Hermann."
Major Hermann! Even before Paul was aware of it, his eyes had seized upon a detail in which all the significance of those two lines of writing was concentrated; and, while Bernard came forward to look in his turn, he muttered, in boundless surprise:
"Hermann! . . . Hermine! . . ."
The two words were almost alike. Hermine began with the same letters as the Christian or surname which the major had written, after his rank, on the wall. Major Hermann! The Comtesse Hermine! H, E, R, M: The four letters on the dagger with which Paul had nearly been killed! H, E, R, M: the four letters on the dagger of the spy whom he had captured in the church-steeple!
Bernard said:
"It looks to me like a woman's writing. But, if so. . . ." And he continued thoughtfully, "If so . . . what conclusion are we to draw? Either the peasant-woman and Major Hermann are one and the same person, which means that the peasant-woman is a man or that the major is not, or else we are dealing with two distinct persons, a woman and a man. I believe that is how it is, in spite of the uncanny resemblance between that man and thatwoman. For, after all, how can we suppose that the same person can have written this signature yesterday evening, passed through the French lines and spoken to me at Corvigny disguised as a peasant-woman . . . and then be able to return here, disguised as a German major, blow up the house, take to flight and, after killing some of his own soldiers, make his escape in a motor-car?"
Paul, absorbed by his thoughts, did not answer. Presently he went into the adjoining room, which separated the boudoir from the set of rooms which his wife had occupied. Of these nothing remained except debris. But the room in between had not suffered so very much; and it was very easy to see, by the wash-hand-stand and the condition of the bed, that it was used as a bedroom and that some one had slept in it the night before.
On the table Paul found some German newspapers and a French one, dated 10 September, in which thecommuniquételling of the great victory of the Marne was struck out with two great dashes in red pencil and annotated with the word "Lies!" followed by the initial H.
"We're in Major Hermann's room right enough," said Paul to Bernard.
"And Major Hermann," Bernard declared, "burnt some compromising papers last night. Look at that heap of ashes in the fire-place." He stooped and picked up a few envelopes, a few half-burnt sheets of paper containing consecutive words, nothing but incoherent sentences. On turning his eyes to the bed, however, he saw under the bolster a parcel of clothes hidden or perhaps forgotten in the hurry of departure. He pulled them out and at once cried: "I say, just look at this!"
"At what?" asked Paul, who was searching another part of the room.
"These clothes, look, peasant clothes, the clothes I saw on the woman at Corvigny. There's no mistaking them: they are the same brown color and the same sort of serge stuff. And then here's the black-lace scarf which I told you about. . . ."
"What's that?" exclaimed Paul, running up to him.
"Here, see for yourself, it's a scarf of sorts and not one of the newest, either. How worn and torn it is! And the brooch I described to you is still in it. Do you see?"
Paul had noticed the brooch at once with the greatest horror. What a terrible significance it lent to the discovery of the clothes in the room occupied by Major Hermann, the room next to Hermine d'Andeville's boudoir! The cameo was carved with a swan with its wings outspread and was set in a gold snake with ruby eyes. Paul had known that cameo since his early boyhood, from seeing it in the dress of the woman who killed his father, and he knew it also because he had seen it again, with every smallest detail reproduced, in the Comtesse Hermine's portrait. And now he was finding the actual brooch, stuck in the black-lace scarf among the Corvigny peasant-woman's clothes and left behind in Major Hermann's room!
"This completes the evidence," said Bernard. "The fact that the clothes are here proves that the woman who asked me about you came back here last night; but what is the connection between her and that officer who is her living likeness? Is the person who questioned me about you the same as the individual who ordered Élisabeth to be shot two hours earlier? And who are these people? What band of murderers and spies have we run up against?"
"They are simply Germans," was Paul's reply. "To them spying and murdering are natural and permissible forms of warfare . . . in a war, mark you, which they began and are carrying on in the midst of a perfectly peaceful period. I have told you so before, Bernard: we have been the victims of war for nearly twenty years. My father's murder opened the tragedy. And to-day we are mourning our poor Élisabeth. And that is not the end of it."
"Still," said Bernard, "he has taken to flight."
"We shall see him again, be sure of that. If he doesn't come back, I will go and find him. And, when that day comes. . . ."
There were two easy-chairs in the room. Paul and Bernard resolved to spend the night there and, without further delay, wrote their names on the wall of the passage. Then Paul went back to his men, in order to see that they were comfortably settled in the barns and out-houses that remained standing.Here the soldier who served as his orderly, a decent Auvergnat called Gériflour, told him that he had dug out two pairs of sheets and a couple of clean mattresses from a little house next to the guard-room and that the beds were ready. Paul accepted the offer for Bernard and himself. It was arranged that Gériflour and one of his companions should go to the château and sleep in the two easy-chairs.
The night passed without any alarm. It was a feverish and sleepless night for Paul, who was haunted by the thought of Élisabeth. In the morning he fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed by nightmares. The reveille woke him with a start. Bernard was waiting for him.
The roll was called in the courtyard of the château. Paul noticed that his orderly, Gériflour, and the other man were missing.
"They must be asleep," he said to Bernard. "Let's go and shake them awake."
They went back, through the ruins, to the first floor and along the demolished bedroom. In the room which Major Hermann had occupied they found Private Gériflour, huddled on the bed, covered with blood, dead. His friend was lying back in one of the chairs, also dead. There was no disorder, no trace of a struggle around the bodies. The two soldiers must have been killed in their sleep.
Paul at once saw the weapon with which they had been murdered. It was a dagger with the letters H, E, R, M. on the handle.
This double murder, following upon a series of tragic incidents all of which were closely connected, was the climax to such an accumulation of horrors and of shocking disasters that the two young men did not utter a word or stir a limb. Death, whose breath they had already felt so often on the battlefield, had never appeared to them under a more hateful or forbidding guise.
Death! They beheld it, not as an insidious disease that strikes at hazard, but as a specter creeping in the shadow, watching its adversary, choosing its moment and raising its arm with deliberate intention. And this specter bore for them the very shape and features of Major Hermann.
When Paul spoke at last, his voice had the dull, scared tone that seems to summon up the evil powers of darkness:
"He came last night. He came and, as we had written our names on the wall, the names of Bernard d'Andeville and Paul Delroze which represent the names of two enemies in his eyes, he took the opportunity to rid himself of those two enemies. Persuaded that it was you and I who were sleeping in this room, he struck . . . and those whom he struck were poor Gériflour and his friend, who have died in our stead."
After a long pause, he whispered:
"They have died as my father died . . . and as Élisabeth died . . . and the keeper also and his wife; and by the same hand, by the same hand, Bernard, do you understand? . . . Yes, it's inadmissible, is it not? My brain refuses to admit it. . . . And yet it is always the same hand that holds the dagger . . . then and now."
Bernard examined the dagger. At the sight of the four letters, he said:
"That stands for Hermann, I suppose? Major Hermann?"
"Yes," said Paul, eagerly. "Is it his real name, though? And who is he actually? I don't know. But what I do know is that the criminal who committed all those murders is the same who signs with these four letters, H, E, R, M."
After giving the alarm to the men of his section and sending to inform the chaplain and the surgeons, Paul resolved to ask for a private interview with his colonel and to tell him the whole of the secret story, hoping that it might throw some light on the execution of Élisabeth and the assassination of the two soldiers. But he learnt that the colonel and his regiment were fighting on the other side of the frontier and that the 3rd Company had been hurriedly sentfor, all but a detachment which was to remain at the château under Sergeant Delroze's orders. Paul therefore made his own investigation with his men.
It yielded nothing. There was no possibility of discovering the least clue to the manner in which the murderer had made his way first into the park, next into the ruins and lastly into the bedroom. As no civilian had passed, were they to conclude that the perpetrator of the two crimes was one of the privates of the 3rd company? Obviously not. And yet what other theory was there to adopt?
Nor did Paul discover anything to tell him of his wife's death or of the place where she was buried. And this was the hardest trial of all.
He encountered the same ignorance among the German wounded as among the prisoners. They had all heard of the execution of a man and two women, but they had all arrived after the execution and after the departure of the troops that occupied the château.
He went on to the village, thinking that they might know something there; that the inhabitants had some news to tell of the lady of the château, of the life she led, of her martyrdom and death. But Ornequin was empty, with not a woman even, not an old man left in it. The enemy must have sent all the inhabitants into Germany, doubtless from the start, with the manifest object of destroying every witness to his actions during the occupation and of creating a desert around the château.
Paul in this way devoted three days to the pursuit of fruitless inquiries.
"And yet," he said to Bernard, "Élisabeth cannot have disappeared entirely. Even if I cannot find her grave, can I not find the least trace of her existence? She lived here. She suffered here. I would give anything for a relic of her."
They had succeeded in fixing upon the exact site of the room in which she used to sleep and even, in the midst of the ruins, the exact heap of stones and plaster that remained of it. It was all mixed up with the wreckage of the ground-floor rooms, into which the first-floor ceilings had been precipitated; and it was in this chaos, under the pile of walls and furniture reduced to dust and fragments, that one morning he picked up a little broken mirror, followed by a tortoise-shell hair-brush, a silver pen-knife and a set of scissors, all of which had belonged to Élisabeth.
But what affected him even more was the discovery of a thick diary, in which he knew that his wife, before her marriage, used to note down her expenses, the errands or visits that had to be remembered and, occasionally, some more private details of her life. Now all that was left of her diary was the binding, with the date, 1914, and the part containing the entries for the first seven months of the year. All the sheets for the last five months had been not torn out but removed separately from the strings that fastened them to the binding.
Paul at once thought to himself:
"They were removed by Élisabeth, removed at her leisure, at a time when there was no hurry and when she merely wished to use those pages for writing on from day to day. What would she want to write? Just those more personal notes which she used formerly to put down in her diary between the entry of a disbursement and a receipt. And as there can have been no accounts to keep since my departure and as her existence was nothing but a hideous tragedy, there is no doubt that she confided her distress to those pages, her complaints, possibly her shrinking from me."
That day, in Bernard's absence, Paul increased the thoroughness of his search. He rummaged under every stone and in every hole. The broken slabs of marble, the twisted lustres, the torn carpets, the beams blackened by the flames, he lifted them all. He persisted for hours. He divided the ruins into sections which he examined patiently in rotation; and, when the ruins refused to answer his questions, he renewed his minute investigations in the ground.
His efforts were useless; and Paul knew that they were bound to be so. Élisabeth must have attached far too much value to those pages not to have either destroyed them or hidden them beyond the possibility of discovery. Unless:
"Unless," he said to himself, "they have been stolen from her. The major must have kept a constant watch upon her. And, in that case, who knows?"
An idea occurred to Paul's mind. After findingthe peasant-woman's clothes and black lace scarf, he had left them on the bed, attaching no further importance to them; and he now asked himself if the major, on the night when he had murdered the two soldiers, had not come with the intention of fetching away the clothes, or at least the contents of their pockets, which he had not been able to do because they were hidden under Private Gériflour, who was sleeping on the top of them. Now Paul seemed to remember that, when unfolding that peasant's skirt and bodice, he had noticed a rustling of paper in one of the pockets. Was it not reasonable to conclude that this was Élisabeth's diary, which had been discovered and stolen by Major Hermann?
Paul hastened to the room in which the murders had been committed, snatched up the clothes and looked through them:
"Ah," he at once exclaimed, with genuine delight, "here they are!"
There was a large, yellow envelope filled with the pages removed from the diary. These were crumpled and here and there torn; and Paul saw at a glance that the pages corresponded only with the months of August and September and that even some days in each of these months were missing.
And he saw Élisabeth's handwriting.
It was not a full or detailed diary. It consisted merely of notes, poor little notes in which a bruised heart found an outlet. At times, when they ran to greater length, an extra page had been added. Thenotes had been jotted down by day or night, anyhow, in ink and pencil; they were sometimes hardly legible; and they gave the impression of a trembling hand, of eyes veiled with tears and of a mind crazed with suffering.
Paul was moved to the very depths of his being. He was alone and he read: