The great Skene mystery

by Bernard Capes

My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina, du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne, Camporcier—they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin, d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful—informed with secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.

In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither, in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young English héritière and orphan, and her only living relative, Madame Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear, and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two, then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so there they went and remained for six months and more.

In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I heard—partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the neighbourhood.

This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and—for the chief reason that the young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite proportion—was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt, lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.

So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord disappeared, and was never heard of again.

Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls, which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover, she declared that they were husband and wife—that, in short, on a certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she believed, by Mr Skene.

Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion; unless—unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip could find no data for detraction.

They may have lied, or spoken the truth—I know not. But this I know: she was wax in their powerful hands—a poor, dazed, heartbroken, will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old witch Gondran was found dead in her bed—struck down, in the moment of triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.

But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really, in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains, since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative, to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to thinking more, and again more.

For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring booths of the fair—they could possess for me an equal madness of attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital? Yes, that was it—that might always have been the difficulty, had I not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then, was my potential.