The Perfume of the Lady in Black

  Then the three of us left the Square Tower together, leaving Bernier in the corridor like a good watchdog, which indeed he was, and never ceased to be all his life. Just because one has done a little poaching, doesn’t mean that one cannot be a good watchdog. I say again that throughout all that followed Bernier did his duty and never spoke anything but the truth. His wife was a good woman, faithful, intelligent and discreet. She will be glad to read in these pages this homage to the devoted service rendered by her husband and herself. They both deserve it.

  It was about half-past six when, leaving the Square Tower, Rouletabille, Darzac and I went to pay a short visit to Old Bob in his study in the Round Tower. As soon as we crossed the threshold, M. Darzac exclaimed out loud on finding that a wash drawing, on which he had been at work the night before, had been spoiled. It was a large-scale drawing of the castle as it would have been in the fifteenth century, and was based upon documents which Arthur Rance had shown us. The sketch was completely ruined, and the paint all smudged. Darzac tried to get some explanation from Old Bob, but the latter was kneeling before a packing case containing a skeleton, and was so busy that he did not hear him.

  I must ask the reader to be patient with the wealth of detail that I am recording in chronicling everything that we did, but I would remind you that often even apparently insignificant incidents can be of the utmost importance and every step we then took was taken in the midst of a drama of which, at the time, we were not even aware.

  Since Old Bob was in such a foul temper, we left him, that is to say, Rouletabille and I did. Darzac remained staring at his drawing, evidently thinking about something else.

  As we left the Round Tower, we looked up at the sky, which was full of heavy, black clouds. The storm was approaching. Meanwhile, it had begun to rain, but the air was still heavy.

  ‘I’m going to lie down,’ I said. ‘I’m worn out. Maybe it’s cooler up there with all the windows open.’

  Rouletabille followed me into the New Castle. Suddenly, when we reached the first landing of the rickety old stairs, he stopped.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘she’s there!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Lady in Black. Can’t you feel the whole stairway laden with perfume?’

  He hid behind a door and begged me to go on without taking any notice of him, which I did.

  Imagine my astonishment on opening my door and finding myself face to face with Mathilde! She uttered a little cry and vanished into the shadows like a frightened bird. I ran to the stairs and leaned over the banister. She fled down the steps to the ground floor like a ghost. I saw Rouletabille leaning over the banister on the first landing.

  He came up towards me.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Poor, dear thing!’

  He seemed very upset and continued talking rapidly:

  ‘I told Darzac I needed eight days, but everything must be finished in twenty-four hours, or I shall break down.’ He fell in a heap into a chair. ‘I’m choking!’ he gasped. ‘Choking!’ He tore open his collar. ‘Water!’ I ran to fetch him some in a glass. ‘No, it is water from heaven that I want!’ And he shook his fist at the sky, which still withheld its torrents.

  He sat there for about ten minutes, thinking. I was surprised that he did not ask me what the Lady in Black was doing in my room. I was at a loss to know the answer. Finally, he stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To mount guard over the gatehouse.’

  He did not come in to dinner and asked to have his soup sent out to him as if he were a sentry. Dinner was served at half-past eight in La Louve. Robert Darzac, who had just left Old Bob, said that the latter did not want any dinner. Mrs Rance, fearing that he was ill, went at once to the Round Tower. She would not let her husband go with her. She seemed on very bad terms with Rance. Just then Mathilde Stangerson came in with the Professor. The Lady in Black gave me a reproachful look, which worried me greatly. She did not take her eyes off me. Nobody had any appetite. Arthur Rance spent the whole time staring at the Lady in Black. All the windows were open, but we were sweltering. There was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, and the storm broke suddenly. It was a veritable deluge. We all gave a sigh of relief. Mrs Rance got back just in time to escape being drowned in the torrents, which seemed likely to swamp our little peninsula.

  Mrs Rance told us that she had found Old Bob seated at his desk with his head in his hands. He had not replied when she spoke to him. She had shaken him playfully, but he continued to sulk. Then, since he refused to remove his hands from his ears, she pricked him with a little ruby pin which she generally used to fasten the light scarf she wore over her shoulders. He had grunted, wrenched the pin from her fingers and thrown it in a temper among the papers on his desk. Finally, he had spoken to her roughly, as he had never done before, saying:

  ‘You will oblige me, Madame, by leaving me at once.’

  Mrs Rance had been so hurt by this behaviour on her uncle’s part that she had stalked out, determined never to set foot in the old gentleman’s study again. As she stepped out of the Round Tower, she had turned in the doorway to get a last look at her uncle and was amazed at what she saw. The oldest skull in the world was upside down on her uncle’s desk and the jaw was all covered with blood, and old Bob, who had always behaved most respectfully towards it, was engaged in making faces at it! She fled in terror.

  Robert Darzac tried to calm Mrs Rance and assured her that what she had taken for blood was paint from his drawing.

  I was the first to leave the table, and I went to join Rouletabille. I have to confess that I was glad to escape from Mathilde’s stare. What had the Lady in Black been doing in my room? I was soon to find out.

  When I went outside, the thunder was immediately overhead, and it was raining harder than ever. I reached the gatehouse in a single leap. No Rouletabille! I found him on terrace B, watching the entrance to the Square Tower, and receiving the full force of the rain on his back. I shook him and tried to drag him back into the gatehouse.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ he said. ‘Leave me! Isn’t this deluge, this heavenly rage splendid! Don’t you want to howl with the storm? Well, then, listen to me. Hear me howl. Hoo—oo—ooo! Louder than the thunder! There, you can’t hear it any more!’

  His yell rang out above the noise of the storm and sounded like the voice of a savage. I was convinced that he had gone crazy. Poor chap. He was shouting in order to exorcise all the torment oppressing his heart, and which his heroic young soul could not shake of: the pain of being Larsan’s son.

  Suddenly I turned around, for a hand had seized me by the wrist, and a black figure clung to me in the storm.

  ‘Where is he? Where is he?’

  It was Madame Darzac, who was also looking for Rouletabille. Another peal of thunder resounded in our ears. Rouletabille, delirious, was yelling with all his might at the storm. She heard him. She saw him. We were drenched by the rain and the sea spray. Madame Darzac’s skirt fluttered in the wind like a black flag and wrapped round my feet. I held her up, for I could feel that she was fainting, and then a curious thing happened. Amidst the tumult of the elements, beneath that terrible rain, in the midst of the tempest, surrounded by the roaring sea, I suddenly became aware of her perfume, of the sweet, sorrowful, penetrating perfume of the Lady in Black. Ah, then I understood! I understood how Rouletabille had remembered it through all the long years.

  It truly was a sorrowful perfume, sweet and melancholy, like the perfume of tears, something like the perfume of an abandoned flower condemned to bloom alone in some desert waste. Alone! How can I say what it was like? It seemed like all these things to me when, later, I tried to analyse the feelings it aroused, because Rouletabille had so often spoken to me about it. In any case, it was a delicate, haunting perfume that suddenly intoxicated me in the midst of the battle between the wind and the waters and the thunder. It was an extraordinary perfume. Yes, extraordinary, for I had passed close by the Lad
y in Black twenty times or more and never smelled it, and it came to me at a time when the most persistent perfumes on earth – even perfumes so heavy they make your head ache – are swept away by the breath of the sea. This captivating, adorable perfume was one that would cling to you and me for a lifetime. One’s heart became somehow laden with its infinite sweetness for ever. It tugged at the heartstrings of a son when that son was Rouletabille, or it fired the heart of a lover, if that lover was Darzac, yet it poisoned the soul of a scoundrel, if that scoundrel was Larsan. Ah, once under its mysterious and wholly enthralling spell you could never, never tear yourself away from it. Thus I understood more fully Rouletabille and Darzac and Larsan, and all the misfortunes that had befallen Professor Stangerson’s daughter.

  So, in the midst of the tempest, the Lady in Black called out to Rouletabille, and once again Rouletabille escaped us, and fled into the darkness, saying in despairing tones: ‘The perfume of the Lady in Black! The perfume of the Lady in Black!’

  The unhappy woman was sobbing. She led me away towards the tower. She beat despairingly on the door with her fist until Bernier opened it for us, and still she wept. I tried to speak of ordinary things, begging her to be calm, and I would have given anything to find words with which, without betraying anyone, I could have let her know the part I played in the drama between mother and son.

  She suddenly led me into Old Bob’s sitting room, no doubt because the door leading into it stood wide open. Here we would be as alone as if we had gone into her own room, for we knew that Old Bob was working in the Round Tower. Of all my memories of that terrible night, the moments that I spent with the Lady in Black were the most painful. I was unexpectedly put to the test, for without saying anything about the storm, she asked me point-blank: ‘How long is it since you went to Tréport, M. Sainclair?’ I was more amazed than I had been by all the thunderbolts that had fallen about us out of the sky. I felt that, just as the storm outside was beginning to calm down, I was about to undergo a more dangerous battering than any dealt out by centuries of waves upon the Chateau d’Hercule. My face must have betrayed the emotions stirred up by her remark.

  At first, I didn’t answer, then I stammered a reply, and finally, I behaved like an utter idiot. It is years since all this happened, but I can see it all as plainly as if it were happening now. Some people do not look ridiculous when they are drenched. The Lady in Black, for example, though wet through, looked magnificent, with her hair all dishevelled, her collar unfastened, her beautiful shoulders, to which the flimsy silk of her dress clung as if it hoped never to leave them.

  I know that, carried away by my feelings, even after all these years, I write things that cannot be understood. I will say no more about it, but those who know Professor Stangerson’s daughter will understand me perhaps, and my only desire, with regard to Rouletabille, is to emphasise the feeling of respectful consternation that gripped me in the presence of his divinely beautiful mother who, in the midst of the storm raging within and without her, implored me to betray my word. For I had sworn to Rouletabille not to say anything and now, alas, my silence was more eloquent than any words I could have spoken!

  She took my hands in hers, and said, in a tone of voice which I shall remember to my dying day:

  ‘You are his friend. Tell him we have both suffered enough.’ And added, with a sob: ‘Why does he go on lying?’

  I did not answer. What could I say? This woman had always been so distant with everyone, and with me in particular. I had never seemed to exist as far as she was concerned, and now, after having made me breathe the perfume of the Lady in Black, she wept before me like an old friend.

  Yes, like an old friend. She told me everything. I learned the whole story in a few sentences, pitiful and simple as a mother’s love. She told me all that the little wretch Rouletabille had been keeping from me. Naturally, that game of hide-and-seek couldn’t last for ever, and they ended up finding each other out. Prompted by an unerring instinct, she had determined to discover who this young Rouletabille was who had saved her, who was the same age as that other young man and who looked so like him. A letter had recently proved to her that Rouletabille had lied, that he had never been to school at Bordeaux. She had at once asked the young man to explain his statement, but he had put her off. Nevertheless, he betrayed his emotion when she questioned him about Tréport, and the school at Eu, and the journey we had made to that place before coming to Menton.

  ‘How did you know we had been there?’ I exclaimed, foolishly giving myself away.

  She paid no attention to my innocent avowal, and in a few words told me the stratagem she had employed. The evening I caught her in my room was not the first time she had been there. My luggage still bore the recent label from Eu railway station.

  ‘Why did he not come into my arms when I opened them to him?’ she said. ‘Is it because he refuses to be Larsan’s son, that he will never consent to be mine?’

  Rouletabille had behaved cruelly towards this woman who had thought her child dead, who had wept bitterly over his loss, as I afterwards learned, and who, at last, in the midst of all her overwhelming sorrows, had tasted the joy of finding her son alive. Poor boy! The night before he had laughed in her face when she cried out to him that she had had a son, and that he was that child. He had laughed at her with tears in his eyes. She told me so herself. I would never have believed it possible that Rouletabille could be so cruel and so deceiving.

  He had, indeed, behaved abominably. He had gone so far as to tell her that he wasn’t sure he was anybody’s son, not even a thief’s! Then it was that she had gone into the Square Tower and wished that she might die. But she had not found her son only in order to lose him again so soon. I lost all self-possession. I covered her hands with kisses. I implored her to forgive Rouletabille.

  So this was the result of my friend’s policy. Under the pretext that he could better defend her against Larsan like that, he was killing her. I would not listen to any more. I knew too much already. I fled. I shouted to Bernier to open the door for me, and I left the Square Tower, cursing Rouletabille. I expected to find him in the courtyard of Charles the Bold, but it was empty.

  Mattoni had just gone on guard at the gatehouse. It was ten o’clock. There was a light on in my friend’s room. I rushed up the rickety stairs of the New Castle. I was at his door. I opened it. Rouletabille stood before me.

  ‘What do you want, Sainclair?’

  In a few broken sentences I poured forth my story and gave vent to my anger.

  ‘She has not told you everything, my friend,’ he said in icy tones. ‘She has not told you that she has forbidden me to touch that man.’

  ‘It’s true!’ I cried. ‘I heard her.’

  ‘Well, then, why don’t you tell me something new?’ he continued brutally. ‘You don’t know what she did yesterday. She ordered me to leave. She would rather die than see me struggling against my father.’

  And he gave the most awful laugh.

  ‘Against my father? She thinks he is stronger than I am.’

  It was dreadful to hear him talk like that. But suddenly his face lit up with a new beauty.

  ‘She is afraid for me, but I am afraid for her too, and I do not know my father or my mother!’

  Then the sound of a shot ripped through the stillness of the night. It was followed by a death-cry! Ah, there it was again, the same cry we had heard at the Chateau du Glandier! My hair stood on end, and Rouletabille swayed as if the shot had struck him.

  Then, springing to the open window, he filled the old fortress with the clamour of his despairing cry:

  ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’

  CHAPTER XI

  The attack in the Square Tower

  I sprang forward and threw my arms around him, fearing the consequences of his madness. There was such despair in his cry of ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ It was so full of longing or, rather, so full of a seemingly superhuman promise to help, that I was terrified lest he forgot that he was merely
a man, and therefore unable to fly like a bird from his window directly to the tower, to shoot like an arrow across the black space that lay between us and the scene of the crime! Suddenly, he turned, pushed me out of the way and fled, ran, tumbled, sprang down stairs, across rooms and corridors, over everything that stood between him and the accursed tower in which the death-cry had just rung out.

  As for me, I stayed by the window, petrified by the horror of that cry. I was still there when the door of the Square Tower opened, and I saw the figure of the Lady in Black framed in the light which shone from within. She stood straight and lithe and very much alive, notwithstanding the death-cry, but her pale and ghostly face bore an expression of indescribable terror. She held her arms out towards the night and from its shadows sprang Rouletabille. She clasped him to her breast, and I heard her sigh and moan, and again and again I could hear the words: ‘Mother! Mother!’

  I ran down into the courtyard, my heart frozen, my head throbbing. What I had seen in the doorway of the Square Tower had not reassured me in the least. I tried in vain to reason with myself. Just as we thought that everything was lost, had not, on the contrary, everything been saved? Had not the son found his mother? Had not the mother at last found her child? Then why that death-cry if she was alive? What was the cause of that agonised call before she appeared on the steps of the door to the tower?

  Curiously enough, there was not a soul in the courtyard of Charles the Bold as I crossed it. Had no one else heard the shot? Had no one heard the cry? Where was M. Darzac? Where was Old Bob? Could he still be at work in the Round Tower? I thought it probable, for I could see a slender line of light beneath the door of his study.