All the mischief died out of Hanaud’s eyes. He looked at Ricardo in the oddest way; like some fencer when a despised antagonist slips through beneath his guard.
“Go on!” he said, and Mr. Ricardo was only too pleased to go on.
“The sympathy, the gentle remorse that your rough world of crime must break in upon the elegance of that drawing-room—and then suddenly the crude word spoken violently, like a blow—‘hacked.’ ‘Hacked off at the wrist.’ My friend, you looked for some reaction—yes—some definite reaction from someone in that room.”
Hanaud did not admit the intention. On the other hand he did not deny it. He remarked rather sulkily:
“If I did, I didn’t get it. Come! It is high time that we went off to Villeblanche and identified this poor Madame Devenish. You have your car, no doubt? Yes? Then you and I will go in it and we will leave the police car to Monsieur Herbesthal the commissaire.”
Yet once more during the passage of a morning, Mr. Ricardo was really to astonish the detective.
“We will use my car by all means,” he said slowly. “But I do not think that we shall identify Evelyn Devenish.”
Hanaud’s big frame stiffened.
“Oho!” he murmured. “So that was it! Yes! It was you who insisted that Miss Joyce Whipple should be roused from her long sleep. Yes. From the moment when I finished my story, you were troubled by a great fear. Even I, Hanaud, who grow old, could appreciate that. For that reason I wished to drive alone with you to Villeblanche. Yes! It is your little friend, the American, you expect to find in that cold mortuary,” and he shook his shoulders, as though the chill of that place reached out and caught him here on the sunlit terrace. “Let us go! You shall tell me why you fear this, as we go.”
VII
The Cave of the Mummies
The two men walked from that house of calamity down the hill to the farm buildings and the garage; Hanaud lost in his own thoughts and Mr. Ricardo a little surprised to see the peasants going about their daily labour, and the world astir. “It seems somehow against nature,” he said, and Hanaud woke from his reflections to reply: “After all, we may both of us be wrong. There are many houses along the Gironde.” But it was clear that he put no atom of faith into his words, and as soon as the great car was running smoothly on the white road between the vineyards, he turned briskly to his companion.
Mr. Ricardo began with some excuses. For he had at the back of his mind a suspicion that his taste for what was odd and bizarre was not altogether seemly in a man of his ripe years and honourable condition. But he had to come to the Cave of the Mummies in the end.
“I had always meant to see it,” he cried in an honest burst, “and ten days ago I did.”
He described how he walked to the high tower of St. Michel opposite to the doors of the church in a great square. At the foot of the tower he found a pay-box, which was closed, and by the side of it a winding staircase descending into darkness. He peered down the staircase and from the darkness, but surprisingly near to him, a woman’s high voice cried out:
“Descend then, monsieur! You shall pay afterwards. I am about to begin.”
He obeyed, feeling for the steps with his feet and for the side walls with his hand. There were only a few treads to that old brick stairway, but it twisted, and with his back to the daylight he could see nothing at all.
“One more step, monsieur. So!”
He was taken by the elbow and guided for a few steps to his left. The woman, with the thrift of her kind, did not light her tallow dip to illumine her gruesome exhibition until she had gathered her little flock of sightseers at the point of departure. Mr. Ricardo was vaguely aware that he stood on the edge of a group. He had a sensation, too, of immense space. But when the match was struck, and the red, smoky flame of the cheap candle held aloft, he saw that the cavern was a tiny rough excavation. It was too dark still for him to distinguish anything of the rest of the party, except that they were of both the sexes. But the light shone upon the face of the guide, and he was as disappointed by her appearance as he had been by the cavern’s tininess. He had expected an old, witch-like crone. He beheld a practical, apple-faced, middle-aged woman of the most respectable mien with a black shawl about her shoulders.
She passed within an iron rail which guarded the line of her grim exhibits, and delivered her preliminary lecture. There were mummies, of course, in Egypt, but none of them, from Tutankhamen downwards, were a patch upon hers. Egypt’s mummies were the work of men, stuffed and cured like animals for the table. Hers were the only real natural mummies in the world, and a glory to the great city of Bordeaux.
“Gentlemen, ladies, they were found, just as you will see them, in an ancient graveyard of the city close to this spot. A chemical ingredient of the soil, which is nowhere else known to exist, has preserved them. Attention, gentlemen! Ladies!”
Mr. Ricardo’s eyes were popping out of his head in his effort to see over the shoulders of the happy people who had got the front places. The curator of this queer museum passed slowly along the line of the dead people propped up on an eternal parade. They stood with loin cloths about their waists, their skin greenish in colour and of the texture of
