Mr. Ricardo could hardly repress a cry, as he comprehended the careful scrutiny which Hanaud had made of the torn piece of fine linen in which the body of Evelyn Devenish had been wrapped. But the Abbé actually uttered one. His jaw dropped; he stood and stared at the detective, his face an effigy of horror.
“You are sure of that abomination?” he stammered, and he did not wait for an answer to his question. His defences were down. He had no big fat stone and no sling to launch it with. He tottered to the bench and, dropping down upon it heavily, fumbled for his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. But Hanaud would not leave him in peace. He stepped up in front of him. He suddenly uncovered the mask with its curious obscene beauty, and held it under the Abbé’s eyes.
“Can you imagine a use for it?” he asked.
“At a time of carnival,” said the Abbé with the wraith of a smile. He had not looked at the mask very closely. But Hanaud held it so that his eyes could not avoid it, and he looked at it and looked again, and shrank from it as from a touch that was contagious. He rose up on to his feet.
“There was a young woman alive in this house last night, who is now foully murdered,” said Hanaud, standing in front of him.
“I shall pray for her soul,” returned the Abbé.
“But there is also a young girl with all her life in front of her, a joy to herself and an inspiration to others, who has disappeared. What of her, Monsieur l’Abbé?”
“I shall pray that no harm may come to her.”
“But you will give me no other help!”
Hanaud’s voice rang out over the terrace and the garden. His words were a reproach and more than a reproach—an accusation. But they fell upon ears which were quite deaf. The Abbé’s eyes were now set upon a very distant horizon. A life or two? Some few hours of suffering? The Abbé Fauriel was not looking at the garden, nor at the Gironde, nor at the rising shore beyond the Gironde. He watched a procession of the ages, in which a life or two, or a few hours of suffering, mattered not at all.
“Monsieur,” he said with a remarkable quiet dignity, “a terrible crime has been committed. Of that crime there may be some quite hideous explanation. You know more about it than I do. I beg you to excuse me.”
To Hanaud’s thinking he was a broken man. He had suffered a shock that afternoon from which he was not likely to recover. Even Hanaud stepped back as he moved away, and let him pass out of sight through the open window of the drawing-room without another effort to detain him. But as soon as the Abbé Fauriel had gone, Hanaud’s manner quite changed. He grimaced in the most childish fashion at the window.
“Ah, the old fox,” he cried in a low voice. “He knows a great deal more than he will tell. But he has told me, none the less, much more than he meant to tell me, by his reluctance to tell me anything at all.”
He turned upon Mr. Ricardo.
“You dined here last night, and the Abbé Fauriel dined too?”
“Yes.”
Hanaud took Ricardo by the arm and drew him down beside him on the bench.
“You shall tell me at once, anything which he said last night—anything which he did.”
Anything which he did! Yes, there was something which he had done. Mr. Ricardo recalled the scene. … There had been something said—yes—and the Abbé had ceased from talking—had made a little movement with his hand—yes!
“There was a moment when under the cover of the tablecloth he made the sign of the Cross,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Oho! Tell me about that moment!” Hanaud urged, pressing his friend’s arm.
“Let me see!” said Mr. Ricardo. “It can hardly have been important or I should have remembered it. Oh, yes! I was puzzled at the time. I certainly was puzzled.”
“It is very interesting that you were puzzled,” Hanaud remarked patiently.
“Yes, that’s it. I was puzzled.”
Mr. Ricardo was triumphant. His memory had not failed him. No; he remembered very accurately that he had been puzzled.
“Then, my friend, something puzzled you,” said Hanaud.
“That’s true,” Mr. Ricardo replied, with a little disappointment. “To be sure, I wasn’t likely to have been puzzled unless something had puzzled me. Now what was it?”
“Yes! What was it? Make a scene of that dinner-table in your mind. Mrs. Tasborough here, the Abbé there—”
And suddenly Mr. Ricardo chirruped:
“I’ve got it. One of them—sitting not so far from me—wait!—on the same side of the table—yes!” He held his hand in the air with a look of intense concentration upon his face. “Evelyn Devenish!” he cried. “She shivered suddenly and rather violently.”
“Yes.”
“And someone—oh, of course, it was that which puzzled me,” and Mr. Ricardo leaned back against the rail of the bench and relapsed into contentment.
“But you haven’t told me what puzzled you,” said Hanaud in the gentlest voice.
None the less Mr. Ricardo uttered a cry of pain.
“You are hurting my arm.”
Hanaud’s fingers were gripped about it like a vice. He relaxed his hold immediately.
“I am sorry, my friend.”
“You have reason to be,” said Mr. Ricardo rather indignantly, as he massaged the bruised limb. “I shall be terribly bruised tomorrow. The last time my arm hurt me as it does now was after an archery meeting in the country. I was not an adept with the bow—it was at a house in Berkshire—yes! Let me see! Whose house was it?”
It was some while ago. Mr. Ricardo had already begun to run over the names of his acquaintances in Berkshire for the locality of that archery meeting, when Hanaud observed:
“And so Evelyn Devenish shivered unexpectedly and violently.”
Mr. Ricardo stared for a second or so at his companion, and came
