There he breakfasted, and over his breakfast he read [[80]]in the local papers more or less fantastic accounts of the murders in the express. At two o’clock in the afternoon he left the hotel, so changed in dress and countenance that it would have been almost impossible for Marescal to recognize him. But how should Marescal suspect that the man who had tricked him would have the audacity to substitute himself for Miss Bakersfield in the burglary at the Villa?
“When a fruit is ripe, one gathers it,” Ralph said to himself. “And this one seems to me quite ripe and I should certainly be too stupid for anything if I let it rot. And I’m sure that that unfortunate Miss Bakersfield would never forgive me if I did so.”
The Villa Faradoni stands on the edge of the road and looks over a vast stretch of mountainous country covered with olive trees. Stony paths, almost always empty, run beside the other three walls which surround it. Ralph made a careful inspection of them, observed the small, worm-eaten, wooden door and further on a padlocked door. He perceived also in a neighboring field the cottage which must be that of the laundress, and came back to the high road in time to see a rackety old carriage on its way to Nice. The Count Faradoni and his staff were going shopping. It was three o’clock.
“The house is empty,” thought Ralph. “It’s hardly probable that Miss Bakersfield’s correspondent, who cannot be ignorant of the murder of his accomplice, is [[81]]likely to try to do the job himself. The broken violin-case therefore belongs to me.”
He retraced his steps nearly to the little worm-eaten door, to a spot at which he had observed that some projections in the wall would make it easy to climb. Forthwith he climbed over it easily enough and took his way towards the house along little-used paths. All the long windows of the ground floor were open. That of the hall led him to the staircase at the top of which rose the turret. But even as he set foot on the first step of it an electric bell rang.
“Confound it!” he said to himself. “Is the house full of burglar alarms? Can the Count be on his guard against something?”
The bell which was ringing in the hall, with a sustained and disquieting ring, stopped, without Ralph’s having stirred. Wishing to make sure, he examined the bell which was fixed near the ceiling, followed the wire which ran along the moulding, and ascertained that it went through the outside wall of the house. The ringing therefore was not the result of any action of his; but someone outside had set it going.
He went out of the house. The wire ran through the air at a good height, fastened to branches of trees, and in the very direction from which he himself had come. It did not take him long to understand what had happened.
“When one opens the little worm-eaten door, the [[82]]bell is set in action. Consequently some one was on the point of entering and stopped on hearing the bell ring.”
He went quickly and quietly to the top of a hillock on his left, covered with shrubs, from which one had a view of the house, most of the garden, and some parts of the wall. The part in which the little door was set was one of them.