Wyllard's Weird: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon

The clock of the monastery on the opposite hill was striking five as he drove away from the convent, a silvery chime that could be heard all over Dinan.

He dined at the table d'hôte at the Hôtel de la Poste, and walked on the terrace on the town walls after dinner. There is no fairer view in Brittany than the panorama of wooded hills from that walk above the town walls. The cool night air, the silvery moonlight, soothed Edward Heathcote's nerves. He was able to meditate upon his afternoon's work, to think over the story he had heard from Sister Gudule, and to speculate upon the chances of his being able to follow up this thread of a life-history until it led him to some point which would throw a light upon the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death.

Reflecting upon Sister Gudule's story, he could but conclude that the child Léonie had been the witness of some scene of violence in which a woman had been the victim—a murder possibly, or it might be only an attempted murder. Blood had been spilt. Hence that awful cry, "Take away the blood, take away the dark forest!"—a child's appeal to some unknown power to remove an object of terror.

One and one only clue had he obtained from Sister Gudule as to the person of the victim, and even that indication might be a false light leading him astray.

The girl's painful emotion at the utterance of her aunt's name suggested that the victim had been that aunt. The mere mention of the name would conjure up all the horror of that scene which had so nearly wrecked the child's reason.

It therefore seemed plain to Heathcote's mind that a murder, or an attempt at murder, had been committed in a dark wood, and that the victim had been Léonie Lemarque's aunt. So deeply interested was he in this mystery of ten years back, so powerfully moved by this strange story of a child's suffering, that he almost forgot that the business which had brought him across the Channel was to find out the true story of the French girl's death, and not to unravel the mystery of this old and perhaps forgotten crime in the unknown wood. So interested was he that he resolved at any cost of trouble to himself to discover the details of the scene reproduced so often in the child's fevered dreams.

"Who knows whether that may not be the surest way of arriving at the truth about the girl's death?" he argued with himself. "At any rate it is the only way that offers itself at present."

He walked late upon the walls of Dinan, enjoying the quiet of the moonlit scene, hearing the bells chime again and again, silver-clear across the vale, from the monastery where the madmen were dreaming their disjointed dreams, or wandering sane and healed in the spirit-land of the past, amid the faces of friends long dead. He walked late, thinking of a face that had looked at him with trusting eyes in the moment of parting, lovely eyes whose every expression he knew, but most of all that tender pathetic look which had once tried to soothe the agony of loss.

"To serve her and work for her, surely that is enough for a man's bliss," he thought, with a sad, half-satirical smile. "In the good old days of chivalry her knight would have deemed it happiness to bleed and perish for her sake far away in Palestine—glory and honour enough to have worn her colours in his helmet. Are we a meaner race, we men of the present, that we cannot love without hope of reward? Well, I have pledged myself to my crusade. I have put on my lady's colours, and I will work for her as faithfully as if my love were not hopeless. I will prove to her that there is some chivalry still left in this degenerate world, under the modern guise of disinterested friendship."

He started for Paris by the first train next morning, a fourteen hours' journey, a journey of dust and weariness, though the road lay through a fair country, with glimpses of the blue sea, and then by the widening river, till the tall houses and the many church-towers of the great city glimmered whitely before him, under the September moon. He put up at his old resting-place, the Hôtel de Bade, amidst the roar and hustle of the Boulevard; and he set out the next morning after an early breakfast in quest of Monsieur Drubarde's apartment, which was situated in that older and shabbier Paris of the left bank.