The Perfume of the Lady in Black

  ‘Where can he be, then?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘ I really can’t tell you, since he is no longer in the sack.’

  Mrs Rance gave him a withering glance and went out, followed by her husband. As soon as they were gone, Robert Darzac expressed his amazement at the story of the sack. He had thrown it into the ravine with Larsan in it, and now it came back to us empty!

  As for Rouletabille, he said:

  ‘Larsan isn’t dead, you may be sure of that. The situation has never been more terrifying. I must go at once. I have not a moment to lose. In twenty-four hours I hope to be back. You must both swear to me that you will not leave the castle. Swear to me, M. Darzac, that you will watch over Madame Darzac, and that you will even use force, if need be, to prevent her going outside these walls. Oh, yes! And you must not stay in the Square Tower! No, I insist upon it. There are a couple of rooms empty on the floor occupied by Professor Stangerson. You must take up your quarters there. Sainclair, you will see to the move, won’t you? When I am gone, not one of you must set foot inside the Square Tower. Goodbye! Oh, I must embrace each one of you!’

  He threw his arms first around Darzac, then around me, and when he came to the Lady in Black, he burst into tears. Notwithstanding the gravity of the situation, Rouletabille’s behaviour seemed utterly incomprehensible to me. Later, however, I understood.

  CHAPTER XV

  The sighs of the night

  Two o’clock in the morning. In the castle, everything and everybody seemed asleep, but across the silent sea came the words of a strange song. The refrain somehow conjured up the image which had evidently made such an impression on Mrs Rance, and which to me was so unappealing. Why did she put up with him, with his languishing eyes, his long lashes and his songs? I was irritated by her liking for him, but only, I think, because Prince Galitch and Larsan were connected in my mind. He had not been seen at the castle since that luncheon party when he was introduced to us, that is to say, since the day before yesterday.

  I left my room, went down into the courtyard of Charles the Bold and hurried across to the ramparts of the Round Tower. I arrived just in time to see Prince Galitch’s boat come ashore on the beach beneath the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’. He jumped out, and his companion, having tied up the boat, did the same. I recognised master and servant, Prince Galitch and his faithful servant, Ivan. They soon disappeared behind the protective shade of the palms and the eucalyptus trees.

  I walked round the ramparts of Charles the Bold’s Tower, and with beating heart, went towards the first courtyard. The paving stones echoed beneath my solitary tread, and I thought I saw the shadow of someone standing in the ruined archway of the chapel. I stopped for a moment in the black shadow of the gardener’s tower, and felt for the revolver in my pocket. The shadow by the chapel had not moved. Was it the shadow of someone listening? I slipped behind a hedge of verbena bordering the path which leads directly to La Louve through thicket and shrubbery. The shadow stepped forward. It was the Lady in Black, but when I saw her framed in the archway, she was all in white. Suddenly she disappeared, as if by enchantment. I approached the chapel, and as I drew nearer I seemed to hear her whispering – tear-laden murmurings so sorrowful that my own eyes grew moist.

  The Lady in Black was leaning against a pillar. Was she alone? Had she chosen this night, heavy with anguish, to come and pray among these ruins?

  Suddenly I saw another shadow beside hers, and recognised Robert Darzac. From where I was I could hear everything they said. I suppose it was wrong of me, but somehow I considered it my duty to listen. I no longer thought of Mrs Rance and Prince Galitch, but of Larsan. Why? And why should the thought of Larsan make me want to know what they were saying? I gathered that Mathilde had crept silently out of La Louve to seek refuge here, where she might vent her grief, and that she had been followed by her husband. The Lady in Black was crying. She had taken Darzac’s hands and was saying: ‘I know your sorrow. You need not tell me about it again. When I see you so changed, so unhappy, it breaks my heart to think that I am the cause of it all, but don’t tell me that I do not love you any more. Oh, I shall love you again, Robert, as I used to! I promise you.’ She seemed to reflect a moment, then went on, with earnest conviction: ‘I promise you I shall.’

  She pressed his hand again and left, giving him, as she went, so sweet but so mournful a smile that I wondered how she could ever have spoken to him of possible happiness. She brushed against me as she passed, but did not see me. She was gone, filling the air with her perfume, so that I was no longer conscious of the perfume of the laurels behind which I was hiding.

  Darzac stayed where he was. He watched her, and I heard him say with a violence that startled me:

  ‘Yes, we must be happy, we must!’

  There was no doubt about it, he could stand no more. His despair betrayed itself in a gesture of rebellion against Fate, as if he were clasping the Lady in Black in his arms, holding her close against his heart, and becoming master of her for all time.

  He had no sooner done this than my mind was made up. My thoughts, which had hovered over the Larsan idea, came to a full stop on Darzac. I remember very well that, at that moment, I allowed this thought to come into my mind:

  ‘Suppose he is Larsan.’

  And my instinct flashed back the answer:

  ‘It is Larsan!’

  I was so horrified that, seeing Darzac come towards me, I turned to flee and so revealed my presence. He saw me and recognised me, and taking me by the arm, said:

  ‘So you were there, Sainclair, watching! We are all watching, my friend. You heard what she said. I tell you, this is beyond endurance. We would have been happy, even she believed that Fate had forgotten her, when suddenly everything was ruined by the reappearance of Larsan! Now it’s all over. She will not love me. She has bowed to Fate, persuaded that she will never be able to escape it. It took a tragedy like last night to prove to me that she loved me, once. For an instant, she feared for me, and I have committed a murder only for her sake. But she has returned to her former indifference. She no longer thinks of anything if she thinks at all, but goes about with her father.’

  He sighed so sadly and so sincerely that my dreadful suspicions fled. I could think of nothing but the irony of Fate which had deprived him of the woman he loved just as she had found her son, whose existence he still knew nothing of. Indeed, the Lady in Black’s attitude towards him, the ease with which she thrust him from her life, must have puzzled him.

  Darzac continued to complain:

  ‘What good will it have done for me to strike him down? Why did I kill him? Why does she impose this cruel silence upon me if she does not mean to reward me with love! Is she afraid to have me appear again before the courts? No, not even that, Sainclair! All she fears is that the shock of a new scandal would prove too much for her father. Her father! Always her father. I have waited for her twenty years, and when at last I think she has come to me, she goes to her father!’

  Inwardly I commented:

  ‘Her father and her child.’

  He sat down upon a fallen piece of masonry and exclaimed disconsolately, as if talking to himself:

  ‘I shall take her away from here. I cannot bear to see her wandering around here leaning upon her father’s arm as if I did not exist!’

  While he spoke, my mind conjured up the picture of that forlorn father and daughter passing back and forth in the grim shadow of the North Tower, and it seemed to me that the wrath of Heaven weighed upon them.

  Suddenly, without my knowing why, perhaps because of some movement that Darzac made, the horrible thought flashed through my brain again, and I asked him point-blank:

  ‘How was it that the sack was empty?’

  He seemed not in the least disturbed by my abruptness, and answered simply:

  ‘Perhaps Rouletabille will be able to tell us.’

  He shook hands with me and moved off into the trees. I watched him go.

  I believe I am going mad!
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  CHAPTER XVI

  The discovery of Australia

  The moon is shining full on his face. He thinks himself alone in the night. Now, surely, he will throw off his disguise and be himself. To begin with, he has taken off his dark glasses. For many hours he has been playing a part and his shoulders are cramped from keeping them unnaturally hunched. Now, at last, he is offstage, and I shall see Larsan’s tall form relax. Oh, why doesn’t he let himself go? I am watching him from behind the fig trees. Not a single one of his movements can escape me.

  Now he is standing on the western rampart as if upon a pedestal, and the moon’s cold rays beat full upon him. Is it you, Darzac, or your ghost, or the spectre of Larsan back from the dead? I am mad! We should all be pitied, for we are all mad! We see Larsan everywhere. Perhaps even Darzac has looked at me once and said to himself: ‘Suppose he were Larsan!’ Once! I say that as if we had been shut up in this castle for years, and yet it has only been four days. We came here on the evening of 8th April.

  Never has my heart beat so wildly as when I pondered the terrible question with regard to the others. Perhaps it was less terrible where the others were concerned. And yet, curiously enough, my mind, instead of recoiling in terror from such a supposition, is irresistibly drawn to it. I cannot take my eyes off the figure on the ramparts, and I imagine I see all sorts of similarities in the way he stands, the way he looks from behind, in profile, and also from the front. At one moment, he is exactly like Larsan, at another he resembles Darzac.

  Why does this idea strike me tonight for the first time? Now I come to think of it, it should have occurred to us at once. In The Mystery of the Yellow Room did not Larsan’s figure appear so exactly like Darzac’s at the time of the crime as to be mistaken for it? Was not the Darzac who called at the post office for Miss Stangerson’s letter Larsan himself? Had not that master of disguises so successfully passed himself off as Darzac that he had caused the latter to be accused of the crime he had himself committed?

  Of course, of course! But nevertheless, if I bade my heart be still and listen to the voice of reason, I must admit that my suspicions are ridiculous. Ridiculous? Why? There goes Larsan’s tall ghost stretching his long legs like a pair of scissors as he walks. But the shoulders are Darzac’s.

  I call my suspicions preposterous because it was easy enough at Glandier, in the distance and darkness, for him to pass for Darzac, but here we are in broad daylight, we are close to the man, we live with him, we are in hourly contact with him.

  Live with him? No!

  To begin with, he is seldom with us. He is nearly always shut up in his room, or poring over his pointless labours. By the by, what a fine pretext drawing is for never showing one’s face, and for talking to people in the room without turning one’s head!

  But he is not always drawing. That is true, but when he is outside, he always has his dark glasses on, except tonight. That accident in the laboratory was cleverly planned. I always said that the little lamp knew what it was about when it exploded, and how useful it would be to Larsan when he took Darzac’s place. It has enabled him to avoid bright daylight, because of his weak eyes. Why, even Madame Darzac and Rouletabille have gone out of their way to find dark corners where Darzac could sit without hurting his eyes. When I think of it, I remember that he himself has taken special care to keep in the dark. We have seen him but little and always in a subdued light. The tiny meeting room is dark, and so is La Louve, and out of the two rooms in the Square Tower he chose the one that is always plunged in darkness.

  On the other hand, oh, come, come, come! You can’t trick Rouletabille like that! And yet, as the boy says, Larsan was born before Rouletabille, since Larsan is his father.

  I remember now the very first thing that Darzac did when he met us at Cannes and took his place in our compartment. He pulled down the window blind. Bright light was the last thing he wanted.

  The spectre on the rampart has turned my way. I can see him perfectly. He has taken off his glasses.

  Now he is standing motionless, as if he were about to be photographed. I can imagine the photographer saying: ‘Quite still, please! Thank you!’ It is Robert Darzac!

  He begins to walk again, and once more I am filled with doubt. The something that would make me recognise Darzac’s walk as Larsan’s is missing. But what is it?

  Surely Rouletabille would have seen it if he had been there. I don’t know, though, Rouletabille reasons more than he observes. Besides, he has not had that much time to look. We must not forget that Darzac was away in the South of France for three months. Three months! Here we have something to go on. For three months nobody saw him. When he went away he was ill, and when he returned, he was well. There is nothing extraordinary about a man’s appearance changing when he goes away looking like a corpse and comes back in good health.

  The marriage took place almost at once. How little he let us see of him before, and afterwards too! And it all happened less than a week ago, and surely a Larsan could keep up a deception like that for over a week.

  The man – Darzac or Larsan? – comes down from his pedestal and walks straight towards me. Has he seen me? I crouch behind my friendly fig tree.

  Yes, three months, and in that time Larsan would have had time to study every one of Darzac’s characteristics. Then Darzac is got rid of, Larsan takes his place and his wife, and the thing is done!

  What about the voice? Nothing easier than to imitate a Southerner’s voice. A little more or less of the Southern accent makes no difference. It did seem to me that his accent was more marked than it was before. Yes, the Darzac of today has more of an accent than the other Darzac, the one before the marriage.

  He is so close, he almost touches me!

  It is Larsan! I tell you it is Larsan!

  But he stops, gazes sadly at all the sleeping things round him and he moans, unhappy creature that he is.

  It is Darzac!

  He has gone, and I sink down behind the fig tree, overcome by what I had dared to think.

  I do not know how long I stayed there. One hour, perhaps two. When I got up to leave, my bones ached, and I was mentally exhausted. I had gone so far in the course of my bewildering hypotheses as to wonder whether by chance (by chance!) the Larsan who was in the potato sack had, on the road to Castellar, managed to take the place of the Darzac who was driving Toby. I imagined the expiring body suddenly coming to and begging M. Darzac to take its place. To drive this utterly idiotic supposition from my mind, I had to recall a strictly private conversation I had had with M. Darzac that very morning when we came out of the Square Tower, after the painful interview, during which we had settled the difficulties of the problem of the extra body. I had questioned him about Prince Galitch, who was pretty constantly in my thoughts. He replied by alluding to a conversation on a scientific topic which Darzac and I had had the night before, and which could not possibly have been overheard by anyone. The conversation had been confidential and no one but he knew about it. Consequently, there could be no doubt that the Darzac with whom I had now to deal could be any other than the Darzac with whom I had been conversing the night before.

  Ridiculous as this idea of a substitution was, I may be pardoned for having given in to it. It was, to some extent, Rouletabille’s fault for talking about his father as a master of metamorphosis. Back I came to the only possible hypothesis, that is to say, a Larsan who had taken Darzac’s place – namely, that of the substitution having taken place at the time of the wedding, when Miss Stangerson’s fiancé returned to Paris after an absence of three months in the South.

  The heartrending cry uttered by Robert Darzac a few moments ago, when he thought himself alone, did not altogether succeed in driving the idea from my mind. I could see him going into the church of St Nicholas du Chardonnet, where he had insisted that the wedding should take place, perhaps, I thought, because it was the darkest church in Paris. What absurd ideas one gets into one’s head when one is alone in the moonlight, crouching behind a fig tree a
nd absorbed with the Larsan problem!

  ‘Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,’ I said to myself, as I stealthily crossed the courtyard and made my way back towards my solitary little bedroom in the New Castle. As Rouletabille had pointed out, if Larsan had been Darzac, then all he had to do was to carry off his beautiful victim, and he would hardly have amused himself by coming back as Larsan for the sake of terrifying Mathilde. Neither would he have brought her to the Chateau d’Hercule to be amongst her friends. Nor would he have shown us the threatening form of Ballmeyer standing in Tullio’s boat.

  At that time, Mathilde was his. It was afterwards that she refused herself to him. Larsan’s appearance had robbed Darzac of the Lady in Black. Consequently Darzac was not Larsan. Oh, how my head aches! That dazzling moonlight must have affected my brain. I am moonstruck!

  Besides, did he not show himself to Arthur Rance in the gardens at Menton, shortly after Darzac had been seen off on the train to Cannes, where he met us? If Arthur Rance was telling the truth, then I can go to bed and sleep peacefully. And why should Rance lie? Arthur Rance! Yet another who is in love with the Lady in Black, and always has been. Edith is not an idiot. She has eyes in her head! Really, it’s time to go to bed!

  I was still standing under the gardener’s gatehouse, and was just about to go into the courtyard of Charles the Bold when I thought I heard a noise. It sounded like wood rubbing against iron, as if a door had been closed. I looked out quickly and thought I saw a human figure near the door of the New Castle. I got my revolver ready and sprang forward. But there was nothing to be seen. The door was closed, though I fancied I had left it ajar. This greatly excited me. I felt that I was not alone. Who could possibly be about at that hour? It was evident that, unless the figure was a product of my jangled nerves, he or she must be in the castle, for the courtyard was empty.

  I opened the door cautiously and went into the New Castle. For at least five minutes I stood listening intently. I could hear nothing. I must have made a mistake. However, I struck no matches, and, climbing the stairs as silently as possible, reached my room. On going in, I bolted the door, and only then did I breathe freely.