Читать книгу The Man in Grey - Baroness Orczy - Страница 10

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And once again the silence of the forest was broken in the night by the sound of human creatures on the prowl. Through the undergrowth which lies thickest at the Lonrai end of the woods, to the left of the intersecting main road, the measured tread of a footfall could be faintly perceived—it was a strange and halting footfall, as of a man walking with a stump.

Behind the secular willow, which stands in the centre of the small clearing beside the stagnant pool in the very heart of this dense portion of the forest, a lonely watcher crouched, waiting. He had lain there and waited night after night, and for hours at a stretch the surrounding gloom held him in its close embrace: his ears and senses were strained to hear that uneven footfall, whenever its faint thud broke the absolute silence. To no other sound, no other sight, did he pay any attention, or no doubt he would have noticed that in the thicket behind him another watcher cowered. The stalker was stalked in his turn: the watcher was watched. Someone else was waiting in this dense corner for the man with the wooden leg—a small figure rapped in a dark mantle, a silent, furtive creature, more motionless, more noiseless than any beast in its lair.

At last, to-night, that faint, uneven thud of a wooden stump against the soft carpet of the woods reached the straining ears of the two watchers. Anon the feeble flicker of a dark lanthorn was vaguely discernible in the undergrowth.

The man who was crouching behind the willow drew in his breath with a faint, hissing sound; his hand grasped more convulsively the pistol which it held. He was lying flat upon his stomach, like a creeping reptile watching for its prey; his eyes were fixed upon the tiny flickering light as it slowly drew near towards the stagnant pool.

In the thicket behind him the other watcher also lay in wait: his hand, too, closed upon a pistol with a firm and determined grip; the dark mantle slid noiselessly down from his shoulders. But he did not move, and not a twig that helped to give him cover, quivered at his touch.

The next moment a man dressed in a rough blouse and coarse breeches and with a woollen cap pulled over his shaggy hair came out into the clearing. He walked deliberately up to the willow tree. In addition to the small dark lantern which he held in one hand, he carried a spade upon his shoulder. Presently he threw down the spade and then proceeded so to arrange the lantern that its light fell full upon one particular spot, where the dry moss appeared to have been recently disturbed. The man crouching behind the willow watched his every movement; the other behind the thicket hardly dared to breathe.

Then the newcomer did a very curious thing. Sitting down upon the soft, sodden earth, he stretched his wooden stump out before him: it was fastened with straps to the leg which was bent at the knee, the shin and foot beyond appearing like a thick and shapeless mass, swathed with bandages. The supposed maimed man, however, now set to work to undo the straps which bound the wooden stump to his leg, then he removed the stump, straightened out his knee, unwound the few métres of bandages which concealed the shape of his shin and foot, and finally stood up on both legs, as straight and hale as nature had originally made him. The watcher behind the willow had viewed all his movements with tense attention. Now he could scarcely repress a gasp of mingled astonishment and rage, or the vengeful curse which had risen to his lips.

The newcomer took up his spade and, selecting the spot where the moss, and the earth bore traces of having been disturbed, he bent to his task and started to dig. The man behind the tree raised his pistol and fired: the other staggered backwards with a groan—partly of terror and partly of pain—and his left hand went up to his right shoulder with a quick, convulsive gesture. But already the assassin, casting, his still smoking pistol aside, had fallen upon his victim; there was a struggle, brief and grim, a smothered call for help, a savage exclamation of rage and satisfied vengeance, and the wounded man fell at last with a final cry of horror, as his enemy’s grip fastened around his throat.

For a second or two the murderer stood quite still contemplating his work. With a couple of vigorous kicks with his boot he turned the body callously over. Then he picked up the lanthorn and allowed the light to play on the dead man’s face; he gave one cursory glance at the straight, marble-like features, and at the full, shaggy beard and hair which disfigured the face, and another contemptuous one at the wooden stump which still lay on the ground close by.

“So dies an informer!” he ejaculated with a harsh laugh.

He searched for his pistol and having found it he tucked it into his belt; then putting his fingers to his lips he gave a cry like that of a screech-owl. The cry was answered by a similar one some little distance away; a minute or two later another man appeared through the undergrowth.

“Have you done for him?” queried this stranger in a husky whisper.

“He is dead,” replied the other curtly. “Come nearer, Mole-Skin,” he added, “you will see something that will amaze you.”

Mole-Skin did as his mate ordered; he, too, stood aghast when Hare-Lip pointed to the wooden stump and to the dead man’s legs.

“It was not a bad idea!” said Hare-Lip after a while. “It put the police on a wrong scent all the time: while they searched for a man with one leg, he just walked about on two. Silver-Leg was no fool. But,” he added savagely, “he was a traitor, and now he’ll neither bully nor betray us again.”

“What about the money?”

“We’d best get that now. Didn’t I tell you that Silver-Leg would come here sooner or later? We lost nothing by lying in wait for him.”

Without another word MoleSkin picked up the spade, and in his turn began to dig at the spot where Silver-Leg had toiled when the bullet of his betrayed comrade laid him low. There was only the one spade and Hare-Lip kept watch while his comrade dug. The light from the dark lantern revealed the two miscreants at their work.

While Hare-Lip had thus taken the law into his own hands against the informer, the watcher in the thicket had not stirred. But now he, also, began to crawl slowly and cautiously out of his hiding-place. No snake, or lizard, or crawling, furtive beast could have been more noiseless than he was; the moss beneath him dulled the sound of every movement, till he, too, had reached the willow tree.

The two Chouans were less than thirty paces away from him. Intent upon their work they had been oblivious of every other sound. Now when the tracker of his human quarry raised his arm to fire, Hare-Lip suddenly turned and at once gave a warning call to his mate. But the call broke upon his lips, there came a sharp report, immediately followed by another—the two brigands, illumined by the lanthorn, had been an easy target, and the hand which wielded the pistol was steady and unerring.

And now stillness more absolute than before reigned in the heart of the forest. Summary justice had been meted out to a base informer by the vengeful arm of the comrades whom he had betrayed, and to the two determined criminals by an equally relentless and retributive hand.

The man who had so inexorably accomplished this last act of unfaltering justice waited for a moment or two until the last lingering echo of the double pistol shot had ceased to resound through the woods. Then he put two fingers to his lips and gave a shrill prolonged whistle; after which he came out from behind the willow. He was small and insignificant-looking, with a pale face and colourless eyes. He was dressed in grey and a grey cap was pulled low down over his forehead. He went up to where the two miscreants whom he had shot were lying, and with a practised eye and hand assured himself that they were indeed dead. He turned the light of the dark lantern first on the man with the queer-shaped lip and then on the latter’s companion. The two Chouans had at any rate paid for some of their crimes with their lives; it remained for the Almighty judge to pardon or to punish as they deserved. The third man lay, stark and rigid, where a kick from the other man had roughly cast him aside. His eyes, wide open and inscrutable, had still around them a strange look of authority and pride; the features appeared calm and marble-like; the mouth under the obviously false beard was tightly closed, as if it strove even in death to suppress every sound which might betray the secret that had been so jealously guarded throughout life. Near by lay the wooden stump which had thrown such a cloud of dust into the eyes of good M. Lefèvre and his local police.

With slow deliberation the Man in Grey picked up the wooden stump, and so replaced it against the dead man’s leg that in the feeble light and dense black shadows it looked as real as it had done in life—a support for an amputated limb. A moment or two later, the flickering light of a lantern showed through the thicket, and soon the lusty voice of the commissary of police broke in on the watcher’s loneliness.

“We heard three distinct shots,” explained M. Lefèvre, as soon as he reached the clearing and caught sight of the secret agent.

“Three acts of justice,” replied the Man in Grey quietly, as he pointed to the bodies of the three Chouans.

“The man with the wooden leg!” exclaimed the commissary in tones wherein astonishment and unmistakable elation struggled with a momentary feeling of horror. “You have got him?”

“Yes,” answered the Man in Grey simply. “Where are your men?”

“I left them at the junction of the bridle-path, as you ordered me to do,” growled the commissary sullenly, for he still felt sore and aggrieved at the peremptory commands which had been given to him by the secret agent earlier on that day.

“Then go back and send half a dozen of them here with improvised stretchers to remove the bodies.”

“Then it was you, who—” murmured Lefèvre, not knowing, indeed, what to say or do in the face of this puzzling and grim emergency.

“What else would you have had me do?” rejoined the Man in Grey, as, with a steady hand, he removed the false hair and beard which disguised the pale, aristocratic face of M. de Saint-Tropèze.

“Monsieur le Procureur Impérial!” ejaculated Lefèvre hoarsely. “I—I—don’t understand—you—you—have killed him—he—oh, my God!”

“The Chouans whom he betrayed killed him, my good Lefèvre,” replied the Man in Grey quietly. “He was their chief and kept the secret of his anonymity even from them. When he was amongst them and led them to their many nefarious deeds he was not content to hide his face behind a tangle of false and shaggy hair, or to appear in rough clothes and with grimy hands. No! His artistry in crime went a step farther than that; he strapped a wooden leg to his own whole one and while you scoured the countryside in search of a Chouan with a wooden leg, the latter had resumed his personality as the haughty and well-connected M. de Saint-Tropèze, Procureur at the tribunal of Alençon to His Majesty the Emperor. Here is the stump,” added the Man in Grey, as with the point of his boot he, kicked the wooden stump aside, “and there,” he concluded, pointing to the two dead Chouans, “are the men who wreaked their vengeance upon their chief.”

“But how—” interjected Lefèvre, who was too bewildered to speak or even to think coherently, “how did you find out—how—”

“Later I may tell you,” broke in the Man in Grey shortly, “now we must see to the removal of the bodies. But remember,” he added peremptorily and with solemn earnestness, “that everything you have seen and heard to-night must remain for ever a secret within your breast. For the honour of our administration, for the honour of our newly-founded Empire, the dual personality and countless crimes of such a highly placed official as M. de Saint-Tropèze must never be known to the public. I saved the hangman’s work when I killed these two men—there is no one living now, save you and I, who can tell the tale of M. de Saint-Tropèze’s double entity. Remember that to the public who knew him, to his servants, to your men who will carry his body in all respect and reverence, he has died here by my side in the execution of his duty—disguised in rough clothes in order to help me track these infernal Chouans to their lair. I shall never speak of what I know, and as for you—”

The Man in Grey paused and, even through the gloom, the commissary felt the strength and menace of those colourless eyes fixed steadfastly upon him.

“Your oath, Monsieur le Commissaire de Police,” concluded the secret agent in firm, commanding tones.

Awed and subdued—not to say terrified—the chief commissary gave the required oath of absolute secrecy.

“Now go and fetch your men, my good Lefèvre,” enjoined the Man in Grey quietly.

Mechanically the commissary turned to go. He felt as if he were in a dream from which he would presently awake. The man whom he had respected and feared, the Procurator of His Majesty the Emperor, whose authority the whole countryside acknowledged, was identical with that nefarious Chouan with the wooden leg whom the entire province loathed and feared.

Indeed, the curious enigma of that dual personality was enough to addle even a clearer intellect than that of the worthy commissary of police. Guided by the light of the lanthorn he carried he made his way back through the thicket whence he had come.

Alone in the forest, the Man in Grey watched over the dead. He looked down meditatively on the pale, aristocratic face of the man who had lied and schemed and planned, robbed and murdered, who had risked so much and committed such villainies, for a purpose which would henceforth and for ever remain an unfathomable mystery.

Was passionate loyalty for the decadent Royalist cause at the root of all the crimes perpetrated by this man of culture and position—or was it merely vulgar greed, vulgar and insatiable worship of money, that drove him to mean and sordid crimes? To what uses did he put the money wrung from peaceable citizens? Did it go to swell the coffers of a hopeless Cause, or to contribute to M. de Saint-Tropèzes own love of luxury?

The Man in Grey pondered these, things in the loneliness and silence of the night. All such questions must henceforth be left unanswered. For the sake of officialdom, of the government of the new Empire, the memory of such a man as M. de Sant-Tropèze must remain for ever untarnished.

Anon the posse of police under the command of a sergeant arrived upon the scene. They had improvised three stretchers; one of these was reverently covered with a mantle, upon which they laid the body of M. le Procureur Impérial, killed in the discharge of his duty whilst aiding to track a gang of desperate Chouans.