"You expect me to find the murderer of Marie Prévol, a man who escaped us ten years ago; and here are your pampered and over-paid English detectives who cannot find the man who threw Léonie Lemarque out of a railway-carriage last July. Is that common sense, do you think, Mr. Heathcote? No, sir; in Paris I am on my own ground. I know this great city from cellar to garret—her bridges, her suburbs, her quarries, her sewers, and caverns, and waste places, all the holes and crannies where crime and vice have hidden for the last forty years; but from the moment your criminal has got to the other side of the Channel, I wash my hands of him. My talents can serve you no further."
Mr. Heathcote recompensed the police-officer handsomely for the very little he had done; and so they parted, M. Drubarde vastly pleased with his client, but still better pleased with himself. He was a man whose benign consciousness of his own value in the social scale mellowed with advancing years.
Having been thus abandoned by both his gifted coadjutors, Edward Heathcote worked on by his own lights. There was one person, he told himself, who might be able to assist him—one person whose chief desire in life must be to see the murderer of Marie Prévol and her lover brought to his doom. Among the few scraps of information which Trottier had given to his friend there was the fact that the dowager Baronne de Maucroix, the widowed mother of the murdered man, was still living. She resided at her château in Normandy, where she led a life of strictest seclusion, devoting herself to acts of charity and to the severest religious exercises.
It was in the hope of obtaining an interview with this lady that Heathcote left Paris upon the very morning on which Miss Meyerstein telegraphed the news of Hilda's flight. He had no letter of introduction, no credentials to offer to Mdme. de Maucroix, except the one fact of his keen interest in the after-fate of her son's murderer. There was some audacity in the idea of so presenting himself before a venerable recluse of ancient family, a woman who, according to Sigismond Trottier, had been distinguished in her youth for pride and exclusiveness; a woman who had ranked herself with the Condés and the Mortemarts, who had ignored the house of Orleans, and loathed the Imperial rule.
The château of the Maucroix family was about five miles on the eastward side of Rouen. It was situate on low ground, a little way from the banks of the Seine—an imposing pile of Gothic architecture, guarded by a moat, and approached by an avenue of funereal yews. The surrounding landscape was flat and uninteresting. The broad bright river, winding in bold curves across the level meads, with here and there a willowy islet, gave a certain charm to scenery which would otherwise have been without a redeeming feature. Far off in the distance the chimney-shafts and spires of Rouen rose dark against the gray October sky.
Edward Heathcote felt the depressing influence of those level fields, the gloom of that dark avenue and sunless day. It seemed to him as if he were going into a grave, a place whence life and hope had fled for ever.
He crossed the low stone bridge which spanned the moat, and found himself in an old-fashioned garden of that stately period which gave grandeur to the fountains and parterres of Versailles. Here, too, there were large marble basins, Tritons and Nereids: but the fountains were not playing; there was no pleasant plashing of silvery water-drops to break the dreary stillness of that deserted garden. Everything was in perfect order, not a withered leaf upon the velvet lawns or the smooth gravel paths. But even amidst this neatness there was a neglected look. No flowers brightened the dark borders. There were only the gloomy evergreens of a century's growth, some of them pyramids of dark foliage, others cut into fantastic shapes, an artistic development of the gardeners of the past, which had been carefully preserved by the gardeners of the present.
A white-haired maître d'hôtel came out into the echoing hall to answer the stranger's inquiries.
"Madame la Baronne is at home," he replied stiffly. "Madame rarely goes out of doors, except to her church, or, under peculiar circumstances, to her poor. Madame la Baronne receives no one except her priest."
"I hope that Madame will make another exception in my favour," said Heathcote quietly. "Be good enough to take her that letter."