Murder Abroad (33 page)

“Yes,” Bobby answered, and knew enough of his strange old companion's whims to ask no further questions.

“Give me your arm,” the old man said when they were outside in the garden surrounding the house, “for I have need of support on this ground that I do not know. Once I have traversed it, I know it as well as another, but the first time it is difficult.”

Bobby complied though he felt a little foolish. He was not sure he was not being made a victim of the other's vanity and love of display. Absurd, he felt, in such a search as this, to trust to the guidance of an old, blind man. Père Trouché, with that uncanny instinct of his, seemed to guess Bobby's thought, and said with his accustomed chuckle:

“The blind leading not the blind but the seeing, and where shall that end?”

“Not in the ditch, I hope,” Bobby grumbled.

“There is a gate at the back that gives admittance directly to the Massif, isn't there?” Père Trouché asked. “We leave by that.”

Two gendarmes had been left in charge, chosen for an age and corpulence that did not suggest them as very suitable explorers of the Massif. They watched with a good deal of amusement the departure of the blind beggar and the young Englishman, but as good soldiers—the gendarmerie is supposed to be a military, not a police, force—they made no attempt to interfere, since they had no orders to do so. One of them did indeed ask if there were any message for the commissaire, and Bobby said ‘No', and Père Trouché said:

“Tell him there are times when the blind can find where those with eyes seek in vain.”

Outside the garden, on the bare slope of the Massif, here rising fairly steeply, Père Trouché said:

“It is five o'clock, you told me? Exact? Good. Then at this time in the evening, at five, that used once to be four before our good officials decided to issue regulations for the clocks as well as for everything else, it needs the sun directly on our backs.” He turned a little. “So,” he said. “One feels it. The shadows straight in front, aren't they? The sun exactly behind? Good. Forward.”

They walked on, Bobby more and more inclined to ask himself why he had embarked on this preposterous search under the guidance of a blind man. The blind leading not the blind, but a fool, he feared. Yet the old man had a brisk and confidant air, his features were alert, he carried his head a little forward, turning it quickly from side to side. Easy to imagine he was in fact sensitive to a thousand subtle impressions that passed others unperceived or that they failed to interpret. Abruptly Bobby said:

“Are you really blind or can you see like another, and is your blindness merely professional?”

“It is a foolish question,” the old man answered, “the question of one who thinks that the eyes are all, who does not know that we can hear and taste and feel as well, who does not understand that when God takes away, then at the same time He gives. But without doubt you are thinking of your hundred-franc note you dropped so cunningly in order to make sure, wasn't it?”

“You know about that?” Bobby cried. “Then you can see, you lying old fraud.”

“Hé, hé, less language, if you please,” retorted Père Trouché. “What does that prove if I know about your tricks of a little child, of a little child of limited intelligence, for that matter? Could not another have found your note you dropped so cleverly, so cunningly, there by the roadside. And if another found it, should I not hear of it? I, who hear of all things? Ah, bah, my friend, all that was not very well imagined.”

Bobby said nothing and felt rather suppressed. The old man indulged again in his usual chuckle. 

“Good sight, poor sense,” he said and added in a different tone: “Yet, my friend, I would willingly know what is this thing they call ‘light' that they all talk about and yet that none can describe. If indeed the sun has, besides its heat, something called ‘light'; well, then, tell me what it is, this light.”

Bobby had no answer, for he knew he had no words in which to tell of light, loveliest of all things here below.

“You, too, you cannot tell me,” the blind man said. “I think myself there is no such thing or, if there is, that it is without importance.”

Bobby made no attempt to answer. They were walking on, at a brisk pace, keeping always the sun directly at their backs, Père Trouché, with the help of his staff, keeping his footing wonderfully, though several times he would have tripped and fallen on unexpected obstacles but for Bobby's strong, supporting arm.

“We are growing near,” Père Trouché said. “The ground is level now, we have ceased to climb, haven't we? It is level or nearly level for about half a mile before it begins to rise again? The edge of the ridge is clearly marked on our right?”

“Yes,” agreed Bobby.

“It is as my grandfather said. Then we must move along to the right, along the edge of the ridge, till presently we come to a small gully, the bed of a dried-up stream, gravel now and hard to walk on. We must follow it.”

Before long they found the little gully, evidently, as Père Trouché had said, the bed of a small, dried-up stream. For a distance they followed it, and Bobby noticed that Père Trouché was counting his steps. Presently he said:

“Soon the gully we are following will take a turn to the right. Tell me when you notice that.”

In another few minutes Bobby was able to say that a sharp turn in the direction indicated was just ahead.

“Because before us is a wall of high rock changing the course of the stream?” asked Père Trouché. “The rocks go on a long way without any sign of a break, do they not? That is how my grandfather described it.”

“There doesn't seem to be any break,” Bobby agreed. “It is like one long wall with no opening.”

“Hé, but my grandfather, he was to be trusted,” said the old beggar proudly. “Now, my friend, for once your eyes may be useful. Tell me, can you see a grove of trees and just beyond them a tall rock standing by itself in the shape of a sugar loaf? I think you can, for I feel there is an excitement in your arm where I hold it. The blood runs fast, hein?”

“It is all there,” Bobby said. “The rock you speak of is like the one in Shields's sketch, only he altered its position. That's what bothered me so.”

“It is there,” Père Trouché said, “that the wall of rock goes back to form a kind of bay. One cannot see that till one is near and at the right angle. It is why my grandfather chose it for a hiding-place he thought secure. Monsieur Shields also if he found it, as he might well, since so often he was here and hereabouts looking for subjects for his pictures, he too may have thought it a good place for hiding what he wished to hide. Yet it is not a place of good fortune, as my grandfather found when he was so shamefully robbed. For it is said that once murder was done there.”

“What murder?” Bobby asked, a little startled.

“That I do not know for it is not told,” the old beggar answered. “But also it is said that when the day of judgment comes to the Auvergne, after, it is understood, all other peoples have been dealt with—here it will be delayed because we are the oldest, descended as we are from the men of Troy who were old when the Greeks were young—then it is there that ‘Le Vilain' will sit and wait for his own.”

“Nice reputation to have,” Bobby said smilingly, “but I think we must risk ‘Le Vilain'.”

“It is still day, the sun is still warm,” Père Trouché said and Bobby was surprised to notice that there seemed a real fear in his voice, “so perhaps there is no danger. Yet I remember my grandfather said it, too—to enter there is like entering the tomb.”

They had by now left behind them on the one hand the tall, sugar-loaf-like, isolated rock, and on the other a grove of low, wind-driven trees that between them guarded this indentation in the wall of rock they were approaching and that, grove and rock together, hid its entrance so well that only from one or two points was that entrance visible; or indeed any sign to be perceived to show that such a break existed anywhere in that long line of almost perpendicular cliff.

When they had passed between the two jutting points of rock that approached each other so closely and yet allowed passage, they found themselves within a kind of bay or enclave, still surrounded by the same high wall of cliff. Some far-off contortion of the young earth struggling to assume a settled shape must have been responsible for this odd and as it were secret formation, one that seemed as if it had been prepared from the beginning for dark and hidden deeds. Here the fresh winds of heaven penetrated never, here the rays of the sun came only at high noon. Now it lay in gloom, heavy and desolate and sullen, the air damp and stagnant. A few struggling, sickly bushes, the one stunted oak tree Shields had shown in his sketch, grew here, but little other vegetation save in one corner where a slimy and unpleasant growth of some sort sprawled beneath a portion of the rock down which water trickled to form a small shallow puddle that never got any bigger but seeped away continually into some underground reservoir.

On one of these stones that lay half in and half out of this puddle, a small toad perched and watched them from its small and beady eyes. It was the only sign of life visible. It vanished suddenly. Bobby thought that never had he seen a more forbidding spot and his glance went towards that cavity beneath overhanging rock at the further end which Shields had shown so clearly in his sketch. In that darkness Bobby felt monstrous things might lurk and yet he remembered that the line of fire from the pistols of the two duellists in the sketch had seemed to meet behind the stunted oak tree, between it and the cavity or cave whereof the mouth gaped at him with so dark and menacing a threat. Possibly, he thought, Shields had avoided the cavity beneath the rock as being too obvious a hiding-place and had chosen instead to bury his booty, assuming he in fact possessed it, behind the oak as being a spot less likely to attract attention.

Swift, eager, and attentive had been the gaze whereby he had noted all these things, and now he noticed, too, that the old blind beggar at his side showed just the same attitude of tense and eager attention, his face a little raised and turning quickly from side to side, his lips parted, his nostrils twitching as he sniffed in the dank and heavy air, his whole being and existence as it were concentrated into the single act of listening.

Yet there was no sound that Bobby could hear in that heavy, muffling atmosphere. Even the water trickling down the side of the rock ran not freshly and brightly as spring water should but in a furtive, silent manner as though it had some errand it dared not let be known. The darkness, silence, stillness, of the spot filled him with a curious dislike and mistrust, though he did not understand why his blind companion should be affected in the same way. That he was so, seemed plain, and Bobby was hardly surprised when almost to himself the old man muttered:

“Here there is a smell of death.” After a time when Bobby made no answer, he said again: “I do not like it. It is as though one entered in a tomb.”

“It is a bit like that,” Bobby said and found himself shivering. “It's the damp, mouldy atmosphere,” he said.

He went forward a little. His companion followed, feeling his way carefully with his staff. Bobby noticed that his walk was more hesitating and uncertain than ever it had seemed to be before. He was muttering some-thing to himself but Bobby could not hear what he said. Bobby's eyes were growing more accustomed to the sort of perpetual twilight that reigned here. He said:

“It's the place all right that Shields made his sketch of. Everything agrees except that rock outside. He moved it right round, some idea of further concealment most likely. He didn't show that grove of trees either. Same idea, I expect, to make identification more difficult. If he really hid Miss Polthwaite's diamonds here, it ought to be behind that tree according to the sketch.”

“It was under a great rock, in a sort of cave beneath it, where my grandfather kept his wine he was so treacherously robbed of,” Père Trouché said. “There is such a rock here?”

“Right in front,” Bobby said. “There's a tree between us and it. Come along.”

He took the old man's arm and guided him, for the ground exactly before them was rough and stony, round by the cliff wall and on behind the tree.

“I can smell fresh turned earth,” Père Trouché muttered. “I have smelt it like that before—in the Citry cemetery when there was soon to be a burial. Or when there had just been one.”

“Oh, shut up,” growled Bobby, who, too, was beginning to feel an odd strain and nervous tension.

But he saw now freshly disturbed ground, between tree and rock, where evidently digging had taken place only a short time before and he did not like what he saw and somehow he liked it still less when he noticed a spade lying on the ground at a little distance. He went across to it and picked it up. When he came back, he said:

“Well, some one's got ahead of us and that's that.”

Père Trouché had been feeling carefully with his staff the extent and texture of the disturbed soil. He pushed his staff through the loose earth and drew it back quickly. He was muttering to himself again but still inaudibly.

“Looks as if the diamonds had been there all right but now they'll have gone,” Bobby said, though in his mind there was another thought.

“Some one has been digging and then has been filling it in again,” the old beggar said. “If it was only the diamonds, why, when they had taken them, did they fill in the earth again?”

“I suppose we must make sure,” Bobby said, “but it looks to me as if Shields had been before us.”

Père Trouché was still busy with his staff. He said:

“It is two metres long where they have dug. It is less than one metre wide. That is much for the concealment of a packet of diamonds, but not too much for another purpose.”