Several months later he kept his promise. Ceneri, he told me, had been arrested in St. Petersburg for participation in some anarchist plot, and was on his way to Siberia. Of his own personal history he discoursed at length. His name, it appeared, was really March, and he was Pauline's brother. In common with his sister, he had been robbed by Ceneri of his fortune.
He asked to see his sister, but when they met, Pauline showed no recollection of him. He called often, and she watched him, I noticed, with an eager, troubled look. One night, after dinner, as he described how, in a battle, he had killed a white-coated Austrian, he seized a knife from the table, and illustrated the downward blow with which he had saved his own life. I heard a deep sigh behind me, and turning, I saw Pauline in a dead faint. I carried her to her room. When she came to herself again, or rather when she rose in her bed and turned her face to mine, I saw in her eyes, what, by the mercy of God, I shall never again see there.
With eyes fixed and immovable, and dilated to their utmost extent, she rose and passed out of the room. I followed her. Swiftly she passed out of the house into the street, and without the slightest hesitation, turning at right angles, moved swiftly up a long, straight road. After turning once more she stopped at a three-storeyed house. Going up to the door, she laid her hand upon it. I tried to lead her gently away, but she resisted. What was I to do? The house was an empty one. I paused. Once before my latch-key had opened a strange door. Would it open this one? I tried it. It fitted exactly.
Without waiting for me, Pauline ran in ahead. I shut the door. All was darkness. I could hear Pauline moving about on the first floor. I followed her, and, striking a match, found myself in a room with folding-doors. It was furnished, but the dust lay deep everywhere. Pauline stood in the middle of the room, holding her head in her hands, striving, it seemed, to remember something. I entered the back room with the candle I had found. There was a piano there. Something induced me to sit down at it and to play the first few notes of the song I had heard that terrible night.
A nervous trembling seemed to seize Pauline. She crossed the floor towards me, and I made room for her at the piano. With a master hand she played brilliantly the prelude of the song of which I had struck a few vagrant notes. I waited breathlessly, expecting her to sing. Suddenly she started wildly to her feet and, uttering a wild cry of horror, sank into my arms. I laid her on a sofa close by. As I held her there, a strange thing happened.
The room beyond the folding-doors was lit with a brilliant light. Grouped round a table were four men. One of them was Ceneri, the other Macari. The third man was a stranger to me. These three men were looking at a fourth man--a young man who appeared to be falling out of his chair, clutching convulsively the hilt of a dagger, the blade of which had been buried in his heart, clearly by Macari, who stood over him.
I cannot explain this vision. I only saw it when I held Pauline's hand. When I let her hand drop the scene vanished. You may call it cataleptic, clairvoyant, anything you will; it was as I relate.
IV.--Seeking the Truth in Siberia
Macari called on me the day after this strange scene to ask me about the memorial to Victor Emanuel.
"Before I consent to help you," I said, "I must know why you murdered a man three years ago in a house in Horace Street."