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CHAPTER XXI

The examination of the prisoner by the magistrate lasted but a very short time, for the reason that no replies of any kind could be obtained to the questions put to him. He maintained a dogged silence, and although the magistrate impressed upon him that this silence was in itself a strong proof of his guilt, and that if he had anything to say in his defence it would be to his advantage to say it at once, not a word could be extracted from him, and he was taken to his cell, instructions being given that he should not be unbound and that a strict watch should be kept over him. While the unsuccessful examination was proceeding I observed the man two or three times raise his eyes furtively to mine, or rather endeavour to raise them, for he could not, for the hundredth part of a second, meet my stern gaze, and each time he made the attempt it ended in his drooping his head with a shudder. On other occasions I observed his eyes wandering round the room in a wild, disordered way, and these proceedings, which to my mind were the result of a low, premeditated cunning, led me to the conclusion that he wished to convey the impression that he was not in his right senses, and therefore not entirely responsible for his crime. When the monster was taken away I spoke of this, and the magistrate fell in with my views, and said that the assumption of pretended insanity was not an uncommon trick on the part of criminals. I then asked him and Doctor Louis whether they would accompany me in a search for the weapon with which the dreadful deed was committed (for none had been found on the prisoner), and in a further examination of the ground the man had traversed after he had killed his comrade in guilt. Doctor Louis expressed his willingness, but the magistrate said he had certain duties to attend to which would occupy him half an hour or so, and that he would join us later on. So Doctor Louis and I departed alone to continue the investigation I had already commenced.

We began at the window at the back of the doctor's house, and I again propounded to Doctor Louis my theory of the course of events, to which he listened attentively, but was no more convinced than he had been before that a struggle had taken place.

"But," he said, "whether a struggle for life did or did not take place there is not the slightest doubt of the man's guilt, I have always viewed circumstantial evidence with the greatest suspicion, but in this instance I should have no hesitation, were I the monster's judge, to mete out to him the punishment for his crime."

Shortly afterwards we were joined by the magistrate who had news to communicate to us.

"I have had," he said, "another interview with the prisoner, and have succeeded in unlocking his tongue. I went to his cell, unaccompanied, and again questioned him. To my surprise he asked me if I was alone. I moved back a pace or two, having the idea that he had managed to loosen the ropes by which he was bound, and that he wished to know if I was alone for the purpose of attacking me. In a moment, however, the fear was dispelled, for I saw that his arms were tightly and closely bound to his side, and that it was out of his power to injure me. He repeated his question, and I answered that I was quite alone, and that his question was a foolish one, for he had the evidence of his senses to convince him. He shook his head at this, and said in a strange voice that the evidence of his senses was sufficient in the case of men and women, but not in the case of spirits and demons. I smiled inwardly at this-for it does not do for a magistrate to allow a prisoner from whom he wishes to extract evidence to detect any signs of levity in his judge-and I thought of the view you had presented to me that the man wished to convey an impression that he was a madman, in order to escape to some extent the consequences of the crime he had committed. 'Put spirits and demons,' I said to him, 'out of the question. If you have anything to say or confess, speak at once; and if you wish to convince yourself that there are no witnesses either in this cell-though that is plainly evident-or outside, here is the proof.' I threw open the door, and showed him that no one was listening to our speech. 'I cannot put spirits or demons out of the question,' he said, 'because I am haunted by one, who has brought me to this.' He looked down at his ropes and imprisoned limbs. 'Are you guilty or not guilty?' I asked. 'I am not guilty,' he replied; 'I did not kill him.' 'But he is murdered,' I said. 'Yes,' he replied, 'he is murdered.' 'If you did not kill him,' I continued, 'who did?' What do you think he answered? 'A demon killed him,' he said, 'and would have killed me, if I had not fled and played him a trick.' I gazed at him in thought, wondering whether he had the slightest hope that he was imposing upon me by his lame attempt at being out of his senses. 'A demon?' I said questioningly. 'Yes, a demon,' he replied. 'But,' I said, and I admit that my tone was somewhat bantering, 'demons are more powerful than mortals.' 'That is where it is,' he said; 'that is why I am here.' 'You are a clumsy scoundrel,' I said, 'and I will prove it to you; then you may be induced to speak the truth-in which,' I added, 'lies your only hope of a mitigation of punishment. Not that I hold out to you any such hope; but if you can establish, when you are ready to confess, that what you did was done in self-defence, it will be a point in your favour.' 'I cannot confess,' he said, 'to a crime which I did not commit. I am a clumsy scoundrel perhaps, but not in the way you mean. Prove it to me if you can.' 'You say,' I began, 'that a demon killed your comrade.' 'He did,' persisted the prisoner. 'And,' I continued, 'that he would have killed you if you had not fled from him.' 'He would,' said the prisoner. 'But,' I said, 'demons are more powerful than men. Of what avail would have been your flight? Men can only walk or run; demons can fly. The demon you have invented could have easily overtaken you and finished you as you say he finished the man you murdered.' He was a little staggered at this, and I saw him pondering over it. 'It isn't for me,' he said presently, 'to pretend to know why he did not suspect the trick I played him; he could have killed me if he wanted. I have spoken the truth. I heard him pursuing me.' 'There again,' I said, wondering that there should be in the world men with such a low order of intelligence, 'you heard him pursuing you. Demons glide noiselessly along. It is impossible you could have heard this one. You will have to invent another story.' 'I have invented none,' he persisted doggedly, and repeated, 'I have spoken the truth.' As I could get nothing further out of him than a determined adherence to his ridiculous defence, I left him."

"Do you think," asked Doctor Louis, "that he has any, even the remotest belief in the story? Men sometimes delude themselves."

"I cannot believe it," replied the magistrate, "and yet I confess to being slightly puzzled. There was an air of sincerity about him which might be to his advantage had he to deal with judges who were ignorant of the cunning of criminals."

"Which means," said Doctor Louis, "that it is really not impossible that the man's mind is diseased."

"No," said the magistrate, in a positive tone, "I cannot for a moment admit it. A tale in which a spirit or a demon is the principal actor! In this age it is too absurd!"

At that moment I made a discovery; I drew from the midst of a bush a stick, one end of which was stained with blood. From its position it seemed as if it had been thrown hastily away; there had certainly been no attempt at concealment.

"Here is the weapon," I cried, "with which the deed was done!"

The magistrate took it immediately from my hand, and examined it.

"Here," I said, pointing downwards, "is the direct line of flight taken by the prisoner, and he must have flung the stick away in terror as he ran."

"It is an improvised weapon," said the magistrate, "cut but lately from a tree, and fashioned so as to fit the hand and be used with effect."

I, in my turn, then examined the weapon, and was struck by its resemblance to the branch I had myself cut the previous night during the watch I kept upon the ruffians. I spoke of the resemblance, and said that it looked to me as if it were the self-same stick I had shaped with my knife.

"Do you remember," asked the magistrate, "what you did with it after your suspicions were allayed?"

"No," I replied, "I have not the slightest remembrance what I did with it. I could not have carried it home with me, or I should have seen it this morning before I left my house. I have no doubt that, after my mind was at ease as to the intentions of the ruffians, I flung it aside into the woods, having no further use for it. When the men set out to perpetrate the robbery they must have stumbled upon the branch, and, appreciating the pains I had bestowed upon it, took it with them. There appears to be no other solution to their possession of it."

"It is the only solution," said the magistrate.

"So that," I said with a sudden thrill of horror, "I am indirectly responsible for the direction of the tragedy, and should have been responsible had they used the weapon against those I love! It is terrible to think of."

Doctor Louis pressed my hand. "We have all happily been spared, Gabriel," he said. "It is only the guilty who have suffered."

We continued our search for some time, without meeting with any further evidence, and I spent the evening with Doctor Louis's family, and was deeply grateful that Providence had frustrated the villainous schemes of the wretches who had conspired against them. On this evening Lauretta and I seemed to be drawn closer to each other, and once, when I held her hand in mine for a moment or two (it was done unconsciously), and her father's eyes were upon us, I was satisfied that he did not deem it a breach of the obligation into which we had entered with respect to my love for his daughter. Indeed it was not possible that all manifestations of a love so profound and absorbing as mine should be successfully kept out of sight; it would have been contrary to nature.

I slept that night in Doctor Louis's house, and the next morning Lauretta and Lauretta's mother said that they had experienced a feeling of security because of my presence.

At noon I was on my way to the magistrate's office.

CHAPTER XXII

My purpose was to obtain, by the magistrate's permission, an interview with the prisoner. His account of the man's sincere or pretended belief in spirits and demons had deeply interested me, and I wished to have some conversation with him respecting this particular adventure which had ended in murder. I obtained without difficulty the permission I sought. I asked if the prisoner had made any further admissions or confession, and the magistrate answered no, and that the man persisted in a sullen adherence to the tale he had invented in his own defence.

"I saw him this morning," the magistrate said, "and interrogated him with severity, to no effect. He continues to declare himself to be innocent, and reiterates his fable of the demon."

"Have you asked him," I inquired, "to give you an account of all that transpired within his knowledge from the moment he entered Nerac until the moment he was arrested?"

"No," said the magistrate, "it did not occur to me to demand of him so close a description of his movements; and I doubt whether I should have been able to drag it from him. The truth he will not tell, and his invention is not strong enough to go into minute details. He is conscious of this, conscious that I should trip him up again and again on minor points which would be fatal to him, and his cunning nature warns him not to thrust his head into the trap. He belongs to the lowest order of criminals."

My idea was to obtain from the prisoner just such a circumstantial account of his movements as I thought it likely the magistrate would have extracted from him; and I felt that I had the power to succeed where the magistrate had failed. This power I determined to use.

I was taken into the man's cell, and left there without a word. He was still bound; his brute face was even more brute and haggard than before, his hair was matted, his eyes had a look in them of mingled terror and ferocity. He spoke no word, but he raised his head and lowered it again when the door of the cell was closed behind me.

"What is your name?" I asked. But I had to repeat the question twice before he answered me.

"Pierre," he said.

"Why did you not reply to me at once?" But to this question, although I repeated it also twice, he made no response.

"It is useless," I said sternly, "to attempt evasion with me, or to think that I will be content with silence. I have come here to obtain a confession from you-a true confession, Pierre-and I will force it from you, if you do not give it willingly. Do you understand me? I will force it from you."

"I understand you," he said, keeping his face averted from me, "but I will not speak."

"Why?" I demanded.

"Because you know all; because you are only playing with me; because you have a design against me."

His words astonished me, and made me more determined to carry out my intention. He had made it clear to me that there was something hidden in his mind, and I was resolved to get at it.

"What design can I have against you," I said, "of which you need be afraid? You are in sufficient peril already, and there is no hope for you. Your life is forfeit. What worse danger can befall you? Soon you will be as dead as the man you murdered."

"I did not murder him," was the strange reply, "and you know it."

"Fool!" I exclaimed. "You are playing the same trick upon me that you played upon your judge. It was unsuccessful with him; it will be as unsuccessful with me. Answer me. What further danger can threaten you than the danger, the certain, positive danger, in which you now stand? You are doomed, Pierre."

"My body is, perhaps," he muttered, "but not my soul."

"Oh," I said, in a tone of contempt, "you believe in a soul."

"Yes," he replied, "do not you?"

"I? Yes. With reason, with intelligence. Not out of my fears, but out of my hopes."

"I have no hopes and no fears," he said. "I have done wrong, but not the wrong with which I am charged."

"Look at me, Pierre."

His response to this was to hide his head closer on his breast, to make an even stronger endeavour to avoid my glance.

"When I next command you," I said, "you will obey. About your soul? Believing that you possess one, what worse peril can threaten it than the pass to which you have brought it by your crime."

And still he doggedly repeated, "I have committed no crime."

"You fear me?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you are here to tempt me, to ensnare me. I will not look at you."

I strode to his side, and with my strong hand on his shoulder, forced him to raise his head, forced him to look me straight in the face. His eyes wavered for a few moments, shifted as though they would escape my compelling power, and finally became fixed on mine. He had no power to resist me. The will in me was strong, and produced its effects on the weaker mind. Gradually what brilliancy there was in his eyes became dimmed, and drew but a reflected, shadowy light from mine. Thus we remained face to face for four or five minutes, and then I spoke.

"Relate to me," I said, "all that you know from the time you and the man who is dead conceived the idea of coming to Nerac up to the present moment. Conceal nothing. The truth, the bare, naked truth!"

"We were poor, both of us," Pierre commenced, "and had been poor all our lives. That would not have mattered had we been able to obtain meat and wine. But we could not. We were neither of us honest, and had been in prison more than once for theft. We were never innocent when we were convicted, although we swore we were. I got tired of it; starvation is a poor game. I would have been contented with a little, and so would he, but we could not make sure of that little. Nothing else was left to us but to take what we wanted. The wild beasts do; why should not we? But we were too well known in our village, some sixty miles from Nerac, so, talking it over, we said we would come here and try our luck. We had heard of Doctor Louis, and that he was a rich man. He can spare what we want, we said; we will go and take. We had no idea of blood; we only wanted money, to buy meat and wine with. So we started, with nothing in our pockets. On the first day we had a slice of luck. We met a man and waylaid him, and took from him all the money he had in his pockets. It was not much, but enough to carry us to Nerac. No more; but we were satisfied. We did not hurt the man; a knock on the head did not take his senses from him, but brought him to them; so, being convinced, he gave us what he had, and we departed on our way. We were not fast walkers, and, besides, we did not know the straightest road to Nerac, so we were four days on the journey. When we entered the inn of the Three Black Crows we had just enough money left to pay for a bottle of red wine. We called for it, and sat drinking. While we were there a spirit entered in the shape of a man. This spirit, whom I did not then know to be a demon, sat talking with the landlord of the Three Black Crows. He looked towards the place where we were sitting, and I wondered whether he and the landlord were talking of us; I could not tell, because what they said did not reach my ears. He went away, and we went away, too, some time afterwards. We wanted another bottle of red wine, but the landlord would not give it to us without our paying for it, and we had no money; our pockets were bare. So out we went into the night. It was very dark. We had settled our plan. Before we entered the Three Black Crows we had found out Doctor Louis's house, and knew exactly how it was situated; there would be no difficulty in finding it later on, despite the darkness. We had decided not to make the attempt until at least two hours past midnight, but, for all that, when we left the inn we walked in the direction of the doctor's house. I do not know if we should have continued our way, because, although I saw nothing and heard nothing, I had a fancy that we were being followed; I couldn't say by what, but the idea was in my mind. So, talking quietly together, he and I determined to turn back to some woods on the outskirts of Nerac which we had passed through before we reached the village, and there to sleep an hour or two till the time arrived to put our plan into execution. Back we turned, and as we went there came a sign to me. I don't know how; it was through the senses, for I don't remember hearing anything that I could not put down to the wind. My mate heard it too, and we stopped in fear. 'What was that?' my mate said. 'Are we being followed?' I said nothing. We stood quiet a long while, and heard nothing. Then my mate said, 'It was the wind;' and we went on till we came to the woods, which we entered. Down upon the ground we threw ourselves, and in a minute my mate was asleep. Not so I; but I pretended to be. Then came a Shadow that bent over us. I did not move; I even breathed regularly to put it off the scent. Presently it departed, and I opened my eyes; nothing was near us. Then, being tired with the long day's walk, and knowing that there was work before us which would be better done after a little rest, I fell asleep myself. We both slept, I can't say how long, but from the appearance of the night I judged till about the time we had resolved to do our work. I woke first, and awoke my mate, and off we set to the doctor's house. We reached it in less than an hour, and nothing disturbed us on the way. That made me think that I had been deceived, and that my senses had been playing tricks with me. I told my mate of my fears, and he laughed at me, and I laughed, too, glad to be relieved. We walked round the doctor's house, to decide where we should commence. The front of it faces the road, and we thought that too dangerous, so we made our way to the back, and, talking in whispers, settled to bore a hole through the shutters there. We were very quiet; no fear of our being heard. The hole being bored, it was easy to cut away wood enough to enable us to open the window and make our way into the house. We did not intend violence, that is, not more than was necessary for our safety. We had talked it over, and had decided that no blood was to be shed. Robbers we were, but not murderers. Our plan was to gag and tie up any one who interfered with us. My mate and I had had no quarrel; we were faithful partners; and I had no other thought than to remain true to him as he had no other thought than to remain true to me. Share and share alike-that was what we both intended. So he worked away at the shutter, while I looked on. Suddenly, crack! A blow came, from the air it seemed, and down fell my mate, struck dead! He did not move; he did not speak; he died, unshriven. I looked down, dazed, when I heard a swishing sound in the air behind me, as though a great club was making a circle and about to fall upon my head. It was all in a minute, and I turned and saw the demon. Dark as it was, I saw him. I slanted my body aside, and the club, instead of falling upon my head, fell upon my shoulder. I ran for my life, and down came another blow, on my head this time, but it did not kill me. I raced like a madman, tearing at the bushes, and the demon after me. I was struck again and again, but not killed. Wounded and bleeding, I continued my flight, till flat I fell like a log. Not because all my strength was gone; no, there was still a little left; but I showed myself more cunning than the demon, for down I went as if I was dead, and he left me, thinking me so. Then, when he was gone, I opened my eyes, and managed to drag myself away to the place where I was found yesterday more dead than alive. I did not kill my mate; I never raised my hand against him. What I have said is the truth, as I hope for mercy in the next world, if I don't get it in this!"

This was the incredible story related to me by the villain who had threatened the life of the woman I loved; for he did not deceive me; murder was in his heart, and his low cunning only served to show him in a blacker light. However, I did not leave him immediately. I released him from the spell I had cast upon him, and he stood before me, shaking and trembling, with a look in his eyes as though he had just been awakened from sleep.

"What have I said?" he muttered.

"You have confessed all," I said, meeting cunning with cunning.

"All!" he muttered. "What do you mean?"

Then I told him that he had made a full confession of his crime, and in the telling expounded my own theory, as if it had come from his lips, of the thoughts which led to it, and of its final committal-my hope being that he would even now admit that he was the murderer. But he vehemently defended himself.

"If I have said as much," he said, "it is you who have driven me to it, and it is you who have come here to set a snare for my destruction. But it is not possible, because what you have told me is false from beginning to end."

So I left him, amazed at his dogged, determined obstinacy, which I knew would not avail him. He was doomed, and justly doomed.