The delegato arrived. It was easily to be seen that he was enchanted, even though he had not had the time to finish his repast. A crime! actually a crime! And in the Château of Hercules. He was fairly radiant; his eyes shone. He was full of business, full of importance. He ordered the brigadier to station one of his men at the gate of the château with directions to permit no person to pass in or out. Then he knelt down beside the body while a gendarme, despite her protestations and tears, led Mere Bernier away to the Square Tower, where her groans sounded louder than ever. The delegato examined the wound and said in very good French:
“That was a magnificent stroke!”
The man was enchanted. If he had had the assassin under arrest, he would assuredly have paid him his compliments. He looked at us. Then he looked at us again. Perhaps he was seeking among us for the criminal to tell him of his admiration. At last he rose from his knees.
“And now how did all this happen?” he asked encouragingly, smacking his lips as though in the anticipation of hearing a story of thrilling interest. “It is terrible!” he added—“terrible! In the five years that I have been delegato, we have never had a murder. Monsieur the examining magistrate——.” Here he checked himself but we knew well what he had been on the point of saying: “Monsieur the examining magistrate will be very much pleased.” He brushed away the white dust which covered his knees, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and repeated “It is terrible!” his Southern accent seeming to grow stronger. And at that moment, he noticed in a new arrival who entered the court, a doctor from Mentone who had come to continue his treatment of Old Bob.
“Ah, doctor, I am glad that you are here! Just look at this wound and tell me what you think of such a knife stroke. But be as careful as possible about changing the position of the corpse before the arrival of the examining magistrate.”
The doctor sounded the depth of the wound and gave us all the technical details which we could desire. There was no doubt about it at all. It was a truly magnificent stroke of the knife which had penetrated from high to low in the cardiac region and the point of the knife had certainly opened a ventricle. During the colloquy between the delegato and the doctor, Rouletabille never took his eyes off Mme. Edith, who was still clinging to my arm as though she knew that I was her only refuge. Her eyes fell before the eyes of Rouletabille which seemed to hypnotize her and to command her to be silent. But I knew that she was trembling with the desire to speak.
* * * * *
At the request of the delegato, we all entered the Square Tower. We took our places in Old Bob’s sitting room, where the inquest was to be held and where each of us in turn recounted what we had seen and heard. Mere Bernier was first questioned, but little or nothing could be gained from her testimony. She declared that she knew nothing about anything. She had been in Old Bob’s bedroom, attending to the needs of the injured man, when we had rushed madly into the room. She had been with Old Bob for an hour, having left her husband in the lodge of the Square Tower, ready to work at making a rope.
It was a curious fact, but I was less interested at that moment in what was going on under my eyes than in what I could not see and yet knew that I expected.
Would Edith speak? She was looking out of the open window, her lips compressed, her brows drawn. A gendarme was standing near the corpse over the face of which a handkerchief had been laid. Edith, like myself, was paying very little heed to what was going on inside the room. Her eyes were fixed upon Bernier’s body.