“Here is a woman with a child at her shoulder,” said the guide in her shrill, matter-of-fact voice. “They were buried together at the time of epidemic! Here is a man who was killed by a sword thrust”—the candlelight disclosed a great gaping wound in his chest. “The lungs are still there,” she continued. “Listen!”
She thrust her hand through the wound and, under the tapping of her fingers, the lungs rattled and rustled like dead leaves. Mr. Ricardo shivered deliciously; he felt tremors up and down his spine and in the soles of his feet.
“What now?” he asked himself, wondering whether he could really endure more, when the guide stopped impressively beside the last figure in the row. She had, good showman that she was, kept her extra special supermummy for the last of the spectacle. And even before she had uttered one word of explanation a curious uneasiness and discomfort stirred amongst that little company; so vivid across all those centuries of interment remained this dreadful epitome of pain.
Mr. Ricardo saw the figure of a youth. His mouth was wide open as though he gasped for breath; his head was bent forward as though he sought by a thrust of his shoulders to rise; and one knee was drawn tensely up towards the chest as though it drove against a coffin lid.
“The doctors are agreed,” said the woman with a sort of pride. “It is supposed that the boy was a cataleptic or the victim of a ferocious cruelty. God be praised, we live in gentler days! He was buried alive, and waked. He screamed, you see, and gasped for air. The leg drawn up to lift all those feet of earth was so strained in agony that it could never be straightened again. It is fixed so. The poor one!”
She moralised for a moment or two upon the advantage of living in the gentler age of today, whilst up and down the red light of her candle flickered over that tormented figure; until a man’s rough voice cried out sharply:
“Enough, mother! That’s enough!”
It was for some such tribute to the success of her show, it appeared, that the woman waited. She snuffed out the candle between her forefinger and her thumb, without a word, and for a little while, so still was everyone and so silent in the pitch black cavern, that a new visitor coming down those winding steps must have believed it empty. Then the silence was broken, very faintly, at Mr. Ricardo’s elbow, by a sigh; and his blood turned cold as he heard it. There was neither pity in it, nor horror, but a passionate longing that such a penalty could still be exacted.
“Oh! Oh!”
It was a low cry of desire, savage and primitive, the desire to hurt as no one had yet been hurt, to punish as no one had yet been punished, a whisper of regret that no such punishment was possible.
Mr. Ricardo tried to figure out in his mind who it was that stood beside him. He had an impression that it was a woman, but he could not be sure; and whilst he still speculated the guide’s voice was raised again.
“Gentlemen, ladies, that is all. If you turn you will see a gleam of light from the steps. You, sir, who came last, the charge is fifty centimes. I will give you a ticket at the pay-box.”
The group of people stumbled with relief up the steps. Mr. Ricardo was detained at the top of them whilst he paid his half-franc and received his ticket. But his eyes were on the little group of people as they dispersed, and amongst them he saw a girl separate herself from the others and walk away alone. She was dressed with a quiet distinction which surprised him in a visitor to this macabre exhibition. There was something incongruous—he wondered whether it could be she who had sighed. He would have very much liked to cross-question her upon the subject. He was none the less, however, a trifle disconcerted when nine days later he was introduced to her in the drawing-room of the Château Suvlac.
Evelyn Devenish? The contrast between that murky cavern with its grim associations and this bright room overlooking the Gironde no doubt affected Mr. Ricardo’s judgment. That the woman who sighed in the cavern could be this smartly-robed girl who made so pretty a picture in the drawing-room was out of the question. He dismissed his suspicion from his mind—until a particular moment came immediately after dinner, when she challenged him to deny that they had stood in the same group, in the Cave of the Mummies. Her eyes had been withdrawn from him at once. Their glance had wandered to where Joyce Whipple lay back in her low chair. They had flashed with an implacable fury then, and they had moved up from the slim foot in its slipper of silver brocade to the knee, with a veritable hunger of hate. Oh, without a doubt Evelyn Devenish had been thinking at that moment of the distorted figure of that youth in the Cave of the Mummies! She had been putting Joyce Whipple in his place, had been watching her knee pressed in a despairing agony against the coffin-lid. Yes, it was Evelyn Devenish who had sighed. Therefore, since both the girls had disappeared from the Château Suvlac, and one had been murdered, that one assuredly was Joyce Whipple.
This was the story which Mr. Ricardo told as he drove through the sunlit country to Villeblanche. Hanaud gave to it all his attention, but at the
