The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  Olivier could speak no more for sorrow. He held both hands over his face, and sobbed violently. At last he conquered the wild pain with a mighty effort, and went on:

  “Madelon looked on me with favour, and came oftener and oftener into the workshop. Her father watched closely but many a stolen hand-clasp marked our covenant. Cardillac did not seem to notice. My idea was, that if I could gain his good-will and attain Master’s rank, I should ask his consent to our marriage. One morning, when I was going in to begin work, he came to me with anger and contempt in his face.

  “‘I don’t want any more of your work,’ he said. ‘Get out of this house, and don’t let my eyes ever rest on you again. I have no need to tell you the reason. The dainty fruit you are trying to gather is beyond the reach of a beggar like you!’

  “I tried to speak, but he seized me and pitched me out of the door with such violence that I fell, and hurt my head and my arm. Furious, and smarting with the pain, I went off, and at last found a kindhearted acquaintance in the Faubourg St. Germain, who gave me quarters in his garret. I had no peace nor rest. At night I wandered round Cardillac’s house, hoping that Madelon would hear my sighs and lamentations, and perhaps manage to speak to me at the window, undiscovered. All sorts of desperate plans, to which I thought I might persuade her, jostled each other in my brain. Cardillac’s house in the Rue Niçaise abuts on to a high wall with niches, containing old, partly-broken statues.

  “One night I was standing close to one of those figures, looking up at the windows of the house which open on the courtyard which the wall encloses. Suddenly I saw a light in Cardillac’s workshop. It was midnight, and he was never awake at that time, as he always went to bed exactly at nine. My heart beat anxiously: I thought something might be going on which would let me get into the house. But the light disappeared again immediately. I pressed myself closely into the niche, and against the statue; but I started back in alarm, feeling a return of my pressure, as if the statue had come to life. In the faint moonlight I saw that the stone was slowly turning, and behind it appeared a dark form, which crept softly out and went down the street with stealthy tread. I sprang to the statue: it was standing close to the wall again, as before. Involuntarily, as if impelled by some power within me, I followed the receding dark figure. In passing an image of the Virgin, this figure looked round, the light of the lamp before the image falling upon his face. It was Cardillac! An indescribable fear fell upon me; an eerie shudder came over me.

  “As if driven by some spell, I felt I must follow this spectre-like sleep-walker—for that was what I thought my master was, though it was not full moon, the time when that kind of impulse falls upon sleepers. At length Cardillac disappeared in a deep shadow; but by a certain easily distinguishable sound I knew that he had gone into the entry of a house. What was the meaning of this? I asked myself in amazement; what was he going to do? I pressed myself close to the wall. Presently there came up a gentleman, trilling and singing, with a white plume distinct in the darkness, and clanking spurs. Cardillac darted out upon him from the darkness, like a tiger on his prey; the man fell to the ground gasping. I rushed up with a cry of terror. Cardillac was leaning over him as he lay on the ground.

  “‘Master Cardillac, what are you about?’ I cried aloud. ‘Curses upon you!’ he cried and, running by me with lightning speed, disappeared. Quite out of my senses—scarcely able to walk a step—I went up to the gentleman on the ground, and knelt down beside him, thinking it might still be possible to save him. But there was no trace of life left in him. In my alarm I scarcely noticed that the Marechaussée had come up and surrounded me.

  “‘Another one laid low by the demons!’ they cried, all speaking at once. ‘Ah! ha! youngster! what are you doing here?—are you one of the band?’ and they seized me. I stammered out in the best way I could that I was incapable of such a terrible deed, and that they must let me go. Then one of them held a lantern to my face, and said, with a laugh: ‘This is Olivier Brusson; the goldsmith who works with our worthy Master René Cardillac. He murder folks in the street!—very likely story! Who ever heard of a murderer lamenting over the body, and letting himself be nabbed? Tell us all about it, my lad; out with it straight.’

  “‘Right before my eyes,’ I said, ‘someone sprang out upon this man, stabbed him and ran off like lightning. I cried as loud as I could. I tried to see if he could be saved.’

  “‘No, my son,’ cried one of those who had lifted up the body, ‘he’s done for!—the dagger-stab right through his heart, as usual.’ ‘The deuce!’ said another; ‘just too late again, as we were the day before yesterday.’ And they went away with the body.

  “What I thought of all this I really cannot tell you. I pinched myself, to see if I were not in some horrible dream. I felt as if I must wake up directly, and marvel at the absurdity of what I had been dreaming. Cardillac—my Madelon’s father—an atrocious murderer! I had sunk down powerless on the stone steps of a house; the daylight was growing brighter and brighter. An officer’s hat with a fine plume was lying before me on the pavement. Cardillac’s deed of blood, committed on the spot, came clearly back to my mental vision. I ran away in horror.

  “With my mind in a whirl, almost unconscious, I was sitting in my garret, when the door opened, and René Cardillac came in. ‘For Christ’s sake! what do you want?’ I cried. Paying no heed to this, however, he came up smiling with a calmness and urbanity which increased my inward horror. He drew forward an old rickety stool, and sat down beside me; for I was unable to rise from my straw bed, where I had thrown myself. ‘Well, Olivier,’ he began, ‘how is it with you, my poor boy? I really was too hasty in turning you out of doors. l miss you at every turn. Just now I nave a job in hand which 1 shall never be able to finish without you; won’t you come back and work with me? You don’t answer. Yes, I know very well I insulted you. I won’t pretend that I was not angry about your making up to my Madelon; but I have been thinking matters well over, and I see that I couldn’t have a better son-in-law than you, with your abilities, your skill, diligence and trustworthiness. Come back with me, and see how soon you and Madelon can make a match of it.’

  “His words pierced my heart; I shuddered at his wickedness; I could not utter a syllable.

  “‘You hesitate,’ he said sharply, while his sparkling eyes transfixed me. ‘Perhaps you can’t come today. You have other things to do. Perhaps you want to go and see Desgrais, or have an interview with D’Argenson or La Regnie. Take care, my boy, that the talons you are thinking of calling down on others, don’t tear you.’ At this my sorely tried spirit found vent.

  “‘Those,’ I said, ‘who are conscious of horrible crimes may dread the names which you have mentioned, but I do not. I have nothing to do with them.’

  “‘Remember, Olivier,’ he resumed, ‘that it is an honour to you to work with me—the most renowned Master of his time everywhere highly esteemed for his truth and goodness; any foul calumny would fall back on the head of its originator. As to Madelon, I must tell you that it is her alone whom you have to thank for my yielding. She loves you with a devotion that I should never have believed her capable of. As soon as you were gone, she fell at my feet, clasped my knees and vowed with copious tears, that she could never live without you. I thought this was mere imagination, for those young things always think they’re going to die of love whenever a young wheyface looks at them a little kindly. But my Madelon really did fall quite sick and ill; and when I tried to talk her out of the silly nonsense, she called out your name a thousand times. Last evening I told her I gave in and agreed to everything, and would go to fetch you today; so this morning she is blooming again like any rose, and waiting for you, quite beside herself with longing.’

  “May the eternal power of Heaven forgive me, but—I don’t know how it came about—I suddenly found myself in Cardillac’s house, where Madelon, with loud cries of ‘Olivier!—my Olivier!—my belove
d! my husband!’ clasped both her arms about me, and pressed me to her heart; whilst I, in the plenitude of my bliss, swore by the Virgin and all the Saints never, never to leave her.”

  Overcome by the remembrance of this decisive moment, Olivier was obliged to pause. Horrified at the crime of a man whom she had looked on as the incarnation of probity and goodness, Mademoiselle de Scudéri cried: “Dreadful!—René Cardillac a member of that band of murderers who have so long made Paris into a robbers’ den!”

  “A member of the band, do you say, Mademoiselle?” said Olivier. “There never was any band; it was René Cardillac alone who sought and found his victims with such diabolical ingenuity and activity. It was in the fact of his being alone that his impunity lay—the practical impossibility of coming upon the murderer’s track. But let me go on. What is coming will clear up the mystery, and reveal the secrets of the wickedest and at the same time most wretched of all mankind. You at once see the position in which I now stood towards my master. The step was taken, and I could not go back. At times it seemed to me that I had rendered myself Cardillac’s accomplice in murder, and it was only in Madelon’s love that I temporarily forgot the inward pain which tortured me; only in her society could I drive away all outward traces of the nameless horror. When I was at work with the old man in the workshop, I could not look him in the face could—scarcely speak a word—for the horror which pervaded me in the presence of this terrible being, who fulfilled all the duties of the tender father and the good citizen, while the night shrouded his atrocities. Madelon, pure and pious as an angel, hung upon him with the most idolatrous affection. It pierced my heart when I thought that, if ever vengeance should overtake this masked criminal she would be the victim of the most terrible despair. That, of itself closed my lips, though the consequence of my silence should be a criminal’s death for myself. Although much was to be gathered from what the Marechaussée had said, still Cardillac’s crimes, their motive and the manner in which he carried them out, were a riddle to me. The solution of it soon came.

  One day Cardillac—who usually excited my horror by laughing and jesting during our work, in the highest of spirits—was very grave and thoughtful. Suddenly he threw the piece of work he was engaged on aside, so that the pearls and other stones rolled about the floor, started to his feet, and said: ‘Olivier! things cannot go on between us like this; the situation is unendurable What the ablest and most ingenious efforts of Desgrais and his myrmidons failed to find out, chance has thrown into your hands. You saw me at my nocturnal work, to which my Evil Star compels me, so that no resistance is possible for me; and it was your own Evil Star, moreover which led you to follow me; which wrapped and hid you in an impenetrable mantle; which gave that lightness to your footfall that enabled you to move along with the noiselessness of the smaller animals, so that I—who see clear by night, as doth the tiger, and hear the smallest sound, the humming of the gnats, streets away—did not observe you. Your Evil Star brought you to me, my comrade—my accomplice! You see, now, that you can’t betray me; therefore you shall know all.”

  “I would have cried out: ‘Never, never shall I be your comrade your accomplice, you atrocious miscreant.’ But the inward horror which I felt at his words paralysed my tongue. Instead of words I could only utter an unintelligible noise. Cardillac sat down in his working chair again, wiped the perspiration from his brow, and seemed to find it difficult to pull himself together, hard beset by the recollection of the past. At length he began: ‘Wise men have much to say of the strange impulses which come to women when they are enceinte, and the strange influence which those vivid, involuntary impulses exercise upon the child. A wonderful tale is told of my mother. When she was a month gone with me she was looking on, with other women, at a court pageant at the Trianon, and saw a certain cavalier in Spanish dress, with a glittering chain of jewels about his neck, from which she could not remove her eyes. Her whole being longed for those sparkling stones, which seemed to her more than earthly. This same cavalier had at a previous time, before my mother was married, had designs on her virtue, which she rejected with indignation. She recognised him, but now, irradiated by the light of the gems, he seemed to her a creature of a higher sphere, the very incarnation of beauty. The cavalier noticed the longing, fiery looks which she was bending on him, and thought he was in better luck now than of old.

  “‘He managed to get near her, to separate her from her companions, and entice her to a lonely place. There he clasped her eagerly in his arms. My mother grasped at the beautiful chain; but at that moment he fell down, dragging her with him. Whether it was apoplexy, or what, I do not know; but he was dead. My mother struggled in vain to free herself from the clasp of the arms, stiffened as they were in death. With the hollow eyes, whence vision had departed, fixed on her, the corpse rolled with her to the ground. Her shrieks at length reached people who were passing at some distance; they hastened to her, and rescued her from the embrace of this gruesome lover.

  “‘Her fright laid her on a bed of dangerous sickness. Her life was despaired of as well as mine; but she recovered, and her confinement was more prosperous than had been thought possible. But the terrors of that awful moment had set their mark on me. My Evil Star had risen, and darted into me those rays which kindled in me one of the strangest and most fatal of passions. Even in my earliest childhood I thought there was nothing to compare with glittering diamonds in golden settings. This was looked upon as a childish fancy; but it was otherwise, for as a boy I stole gold and jewels wherever I could lay hands on them, and I knew the difference between good ones and bad, instinctively, like the most accomplished connoisseur. Only the pure and valuable attracted me; I would not touch alloyed or coined gold. Those inborn cravings were kept in check by my father’s severe chastisements; but, so that I might always have to do with gold and precious stones, I took up the goldsmith’s calling. I worked at it with passion, and soon became the first living master of that art. Then began a period when the natural bent within me, so long restrained, shot forth in power, and waxed with might, bearing everything away before it. As soon as I finished a piece of work and delivered it, I fell into a state of restlessness and disconsolateness which prevented my sleeping, ruined my health, and left me no enjoyment in my life. The person for whom I made the work haunted me day and night like a spectre. I saw that person continually before my mental vision, with my beautiful jewels on, and a voice kept whispering to me: “They belong to you! take them; what’s the use of diamonds to the dead?” At last I betook myself to thieving. I had access to the houses of the great; I took advantage quickly of every opportunity. No locks withstood my skill, and I soon had my work back in my hands again. But this was not enough to calm my unrest. That mysterious voice made itself heard again, jeering at me, and saying: “Ho, ho! one of the dead is wearing your jewels.” I did not know whence it came, but I had an indescribable hatred for all those for whom I made jewellery. More than that, in the depths of my heart I began to long to kill them; this frightened me. Just then I bought this house. I had concluded the bargain with the owner: here in this very room we were sitting, drinking a bottle of wine in honour of the transaction.

  “‘Night had come on, he was going to leave when he said to me: “Look here, Maître René before I go I must let you into a secret about this house.” He opened that cupboard, which is built into the wall there, and pushed the back of it in; this let him into a little closet, where he bowed down and raised a trap-door. This showed us a steep, narrow stair, which we went down, and at the bottom of it was a little narrow door, which let us out into the open courtyard. There he went up to the wall, pushed a piece of iron which projected a very little, and immediately a piece of the wall turned round, so that a person could get out through the opening into the street. You must see this contrivance sometime, Olivier; the sly old monks of the convent, which this house once was, must have had it made so as to be able to slip in and out secretly. It is wood but covered with l
ime and mortar on the outside, and to the outer side of it is fitted a statue, also of wood, through looking exactly like stone, which turns on wooden hinges. When I saw this arrangement, dark ideas surged up in my mind; it seemed to me that deeds, as yet mysterious to myself, were here prearranged for.

  “‘I had just finished a splendid set of ornaments for a gentleman of the court who, I knew, was going to give them to an opera dancer. Soon my deadly torture was on me; the spectre dogged my steps, the whispering devil was at my ear. I went back into the house, bathed in a sweat of agony; I rolled about on my bed, sleepless. In my mind’s eye I saw the man riding to his dancer with my beautiful jewels. Full of fury I sprang up, threw my cloak round me, went down the secret stair, out through the wall into the Rue Niçaise. He came, I fell upon him, he cried out; but, seizing him from behind, I plunged my dagger into his heart. The jewels were mine. When this was done, I felt a peace, a contentment within me which I had never known before. The spectre had vanished—the voice of the demon was still. Now I knew what was the behest of my Evil Star, which I had to obey, or perish.

  “‘You know all now, Olivier. Don’t think that, because I must do that which I cannot avoid, I have clean renounced all sense of that mercy or kindly feeling which is the portion of all humanity, and inherent in man’s nature. You know how hard I find it to let any of my work go out of my hands, many there are to whom I would not bring death, and for them nothing will induce me to work; indeed, in cases when I feel that my spectre will have to be exorcised with blood on the morrow, I settle the business that day by a smashing blow, which lays the holder of my jewels on the ground, so that I get them back into my own hands.’