Carefully but quickly Ralph pulled aside the bricks and scooped away the heap of earth. When he had finished the cries had ceased, but the sound of words came to his ears hardly louder than a whisper. He had, therefore, to continue his work and clear the upper part of the passage. Then, lying with his head well down in it, he could hear distinctly. Two voices were speaking in turn—the voice of Leonard and a woman’s voice, without doubt the voice of Madam Rousselin. The unfortunate woman seemed to be at the end of her strength and a prey to indescribable terror.
“Yes ... yes,” she murmured, “I’m going to tell you, since I said I would. But I’m so worn out you must excuse me, good gentleman.... Besides.... All these things happened such a long time ago.... Twenty-two years have passed since....”
“Stop babbling and come to the point!” growled Leonard.
“Yes,” she replied. “I am coming to the point. It was at the time of the war with Prussia, twenty-two years ago.... And as the Prussians were advancing on Rouen, where we were living, two gentlemen came to my poor husband, who was a carrier ... gentlemen whom we had never seen before. They wished to get out of the country, with their trunks, like a great many other people at that time, you know. My husband accepted their offer and without wasting any more time, for they were in a hurry, set out with them in his carrier’s cart. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that our other horses had been requisitioned, we had only one horse, and that one wasn’t up to much. Besides, it was snowing.... Seven miles out of Rouen he fell down and could not get up again.... The gentlemen were shivering with fear, for the Prussians might turn up at any moment.... It was then that a man from Rouen, who my husband knew quite well, a confidential servant of the Cardinal de Bonnechose—Monsieur Jaubert his name was—drove up in a dog-cart.... You can see what happened.... They talked.... The two gentlemen offered him a large sum for his horse.... Jaubert refused. They begged him, and then they threatened him.... And then they threw themselves on him like madmen, and in spite of the prayers of my husband, knocked him on the head.... After that they looked into his dog-cart, found in it a casket, which they took, harnessed Jaubert’s horse to the carrier’s cart, and went off leaving the poor man half dead.”
“Quite dead,” said Leonard more accurately.
“Yes: my husband learned that months later, when he was able to enter Rouen again.”
“And didn’t he inform the police about it?”
Madam Rousselin appeared to hesitate; then she said: “Yes.... No doubt he ought to have done so ... perhaps.... Only——”
“Only they’d bought his silence, hadn’t they?” sneered Leonard. “They opened the casket in front of him and found jewels in it and gave your husband his share of the loot.”
“Yes—yes ... the rings ... the seven rings,” she said. “But that wasn’t his reason for keeping silence.... The poor man was ill. He died a little while after he came back from Rouen.”