Chapter XVII: Some Amazing Facts

The announcement electrified them.

“What can have happened?” gasped the doctor, staring at his friend, who, standing rigid, could utter no word. “We must go at once to her.”

Dick Jervoise hesitated. He was trembling like a leaf. He tried to articulate some words, but his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth.

“The matter is already in the hands of the police,” exclaimed the thin-faced Norwegian, who explained that he was manager of the hotel. “The poor lady is distracted. For nearly two hours she remained unconscious. Then she only sat moaning her dead husband’s name—Paul—Paul! Afterwards she asked me to find Mr. Jervoise, and to inform him of the terrible tragedy. Ah! gentlemen,” the man added, “it is most unfortunate for my brother’s hotel. Business is bad enough just now, without this damaging occurrence.”

“Is it an entire mystery?” asked Jervoise. “Is nobody suspected?” he managed to inquire.

“Nobody,” was the reply. “But, gentlemen, we are wasting time,” added the man. “I have a fiacre; let us go to her.”

Outside it had been raining for the past three hours. Christiania was drowned in mire and gloom. As the rickety fly rumbled over the stones up the broad Karl-Johans-Gaden, the principal street of the city, to where the great arc lamps of the station shed their cold white brilliance, Dick Jervoise sat as a man in a dream. The announcement had staggered him. Why had she sent for him. Why had she dared to do that? There was a danger, a peril to her and to him. He knew that it would now require all his self-possession, all the cunning he possessed, in order to avert suspicion of the truth.

She had loved that man who was now dead—the man struck down by an unsuspected hand.

His teeth were tightly clenched, and he held his breath. It was fate. In her presence he had felt the burning, the fragrant, the intoxicating whirlwind of life. She was everything his youth, his instinct, his soul had yearned for of maddest and sweetest. How many years had he not travelled and dreamed of that one pale, sweet face—the one woman who would fill the void within his heart! The delicious expectation was already beginning to be shrouded in his cosmopolitan world, weariness was beginning to seem altogether gone when she had appeared in that out-of-the-world place.

And then—and then——

He bit his lip as the vehicle, with the rain pelting against the closed windows, turned from the zone of brilliant light around the station into one of the long, narrow, ill-lit streets on the right, the Dronningens-Gaden, and presently they drew up before the hotel-entrance.

They found the dead man’s bride huddled up in a chair in a small sitting-room on the first floor, a pale, pathetic little figure whose face, turned towards them as they entered, had strangely changed.

Jervoise crossed to her, and, bending, spoke softly, humbly, almost sweetly, but with that sweetness one employs towards a sick and fractious child.

For a moment it seemed that Thyra was unconscious of his presence, but next instant, with a curious haunted look in her fine eyes, she shrank from him.

A grave-faced, elderly man was standing at her side—the doctor who had been summoned to her when she had fallen unconscious beneath the blow. To both Englishmen it was apparent that the unfortunate girl’s mind had become slightly unbalanced by that sudden shattering of all her hopes, of all her love—that love born of dreams and enchantments.

Dick Jervoise still stood before her in silence, his eyes fixed upon hers, as though he read into her very soul. Why, if she had called him, did she now shrink from him?

Owen looked from the sweet, wan face with the dishevelled hair, to that of his friend. The attitude of the pair puzzled him. Why did she, who on board the steamer had been so friendly with Dick, now glance at him with eyes so full of dread and terror?

“Madame,” he exclaimed at last, “we are here to assist you. We have heard the terrible, appalling news. What can we do?”

“Do!” she answered hoarsely, raising her pointed chin from her breast. “Do! Why, find the man who, in my absence, killed my Paul!”

And Owen noticed that, as she spoke, she fixed her eyes upon those of his friend.

The scene was indeed a sadly pathetic one—the slim, white-faced girl-wife, seated in that small, rather shabbily furnished room to which she had been moved after the tragedy, the man who loved her so intensely standing before her, bowed and undecided.

Owen Odd saw that, for some unaccountable reason, Dick feared her just as much as she feared him. What, he wondered, had really occurred? In a flash the recollection of his friend’s long absence that afternoon crossed his mind. She, too, had been absent from her husband—out making a call upon one of her old schoolfellows, it was said. Had Thyra and Dick met—and spoken?

Suspicions—dark, grave suspicions—arose within him, but, being Dick’s friend, he resolutely put them aside. Yet he could not conceal from himself his friend’s bitter hatred of the man now dead; nor could he forget that Dick himself, in a moment of anger, had denounced the murdered man.

“Paul! Paul!” cried the poor girl suddenly in English, lifting her white arms into space, now believing in her delirium that her husband still stood before her. “Ah! you are still sad!” she went on. “You think it a mere passing caprice. If you could only know the truth—how many days, how many weeks, how many months even, I had thought it over, examined it all, tortured my conscience with it! If you knew how many times I have tried to express in words what I want to tell you.... I have never found it possible to speak; some tyrannous force has always prevented me from opening my heart to you. And now you are my husband, dearest, we two, by ourselves, far from every molesting voice, we two alone, shall decide our destiny. Hear me! I will try and explain.... More than ever, at this moment, I love you. I am united to you for my whole life—and for the life beyond. I—I was crying, and I fancied I saw your eyes clouded too; it was at that moment I realised that I loved you above everything in the world, and I decided then to make the sacrifice for you. I—I——”

Her rambling sentences were too painful to the listeners—painful to Dick most of all.

The grey-bearded man standing by her motioned to them, and they left the room, feeling themselves powerless to assist. Even Owen, a medical man himself, recognised that the case was better left in the hands of a doctor of her own people.

In the corridor outside they met the thin-faced Norwegian who had conducted them there, and another rather stout, fair-haired man, whom the other introduced as a commissary of police.

“The whole affair is a complete mystery,” explained the thin-faced hotel manager in English. “Yonder is the room in which the tragedy occurred—if you care to see it.”

And he conducted them along the passage to the farther end, where, on opening a door, they found themselves in a good-sized salon, rather well furnished with two long French windows overlooking the small, tree-lined square and the harbour beyond.

As the electric light was switched on, they saw at one end of the room a high carved sideboard, and on the walls each side long gilt mirrors. Across near the windows was a restful-looking couch with a big yellow silk cushion, in the centre a square table, and in a corner, set cross-wise, a small escritoire.

On the table, in a big vase, was the splendid bouquet of white flowers which Captain Martin had presented to the bride as she had entered the train on the previous night, the odour of them heavy and oppressive, now that they were drooped and fading.

Jervoise tried to blot the scene from his vision. Had he dared, he would have refused to enter there.

Those words of Thyra’s, as in her delirium she believed that her husband still lived, haunted him. His, indeed, was an agony of soul.

Her sacrifice—what had been her sacrifice?

“See!” exclaimed the commissary of police in Norwegian, pointing to the dark green carpet behind the table.

Owen bent, and upon it saw a large brown patch, still damp—the life-blood of Paul Grinevitch. On the yellow silk cushion which the official turned over was another ugly stain, and again upon the couch, to which it was apparent the unfortunate man had crawled after receiving the mortal wound.

“Explain to us all that is known concerning the affair,” urged the young doctor, turning to the hotel proprietor’s brother.

The other shrugged his shoulders, exchanged a few words in Norwegian with the stout police official, and then answered:

“There are several very remarkable features about the case, the commissary says. As far as we in the hotel know, what happened was this: The young gentleman sent a telegram last night from Trondhjem, engaging a suite of rooms for himself and wife. When they arrived we at once saw they were newly-wedded, and gave them this suite, the best in the hotel. They took their _dejeuner_ up here at eleven, after which, according to the waiter who served them, it seemed as though the young lady had been crying bitterly. At two o’clock the chambermaid, who was called to button the young lady’s blouse, heard her say that she was going over to the Hegdehaugen quarter to visit a friend, while he declared that he would remain in and write some important letters. He sat down and wrote three. Then he lounged in a chair in the balcony and smoked for some time. Afterwards he descended to the bureau, bringing his letters, asking me to have them registered, and telling me that if anyone called they were to be shown up to his room directly. At half-past three, or thereabouts, a young lady in deep mourning, wearing a veil and speaking with a distinctly foreign accent, called, and inquired for Monsieur Grinevitch. She held in her hand a letter, as though a letter of introduction, and was at once taken up in the lift and ushered into the salon.”

“A woman!” gasped Dick Jervoise, interrupting. “Was she French?”

“We cannot tell,” the man went on. “All we know is a statement by the waiter who, a few moments afterwards, heard voices raised in anger. The pair were speaking in some foreign tongue—probably Russian. The lady went to the telephone yonder and rang up somebody—whom we don’t know. The communication is direct with the exchange, which, unfortunately, does not keep a note of the numbers inquired for. The waiter heard her speaking for some time—the gentleman prompting her what to say. Then she rang off, and seemed to be persuading the gentleman to act somewhat against his inclination. Eventually he sat down at the table, scribbled a letter, which he sealed with wax, using the gold seal upon his watch-chain. Then, their disagreement having apparently ended, she laughed merrily, wished him adieu, and the gentleman saw her along to the lift.”

“Then there are people who saw this woman!” Dick demanded eagerly. “They could recognise her again, I mean?”

“They say so. I did not see her.”

“She wore a veil,” remarked Owen. “She therefore evidently meant to conceal her identity.”

“No doubt. Is that to be wondered at, with the bride’s absence in view?” remarked the brother of the hotel proprietor, the latter, they understood, being absent in the Telemarken.

“And what occurred afterwards?” demanded Jervoise quickly, now breathless in curiosity.

“His actions afterwards were most mysterious. The lady having left, he called the waiter, and, announcing his departure by the Wilson steamer which sailed at ten to-night for Hull, order his bill to be prepared. He then called the hotel messenger-boy, and, writing a note, told him to take it to an address behind the Royal Park, and there wait for a reply. The note was addressed to a man named Nystrom, who chanced to be out; therefore the boy waited there for hours, until this evening, when he returned, having failed to deliver the note.”

The stout police officer, who evidently understood English, like so many officials in Norway, interrupted the hotel manager with some rapid words.

“These gentlemen,” the other explained, “are intimate friends of the poor young lady.”

“And also of the dead man,” added Doctor Odd. “Therefore we wish to know the most complete details, in order, if possible, to throw some light upon them.”

“The authorities are entirely puzzled,” declared the thin-faced man. “They do not suspect anybody—at present.”

“But what happened after the unfortunate man had sent the boy on the message?” Dick inquired.

“He wrote a telegram addressed to Captain Berentsen, in Trondhjem, announcing his immediate departure for England, and giving his address in London at 108, Keppel Street, Russell Square.”

“Did he give no reason for his sudden departure?” asked Owen.

“None. His wife, remember, was not aware of this decision, which we think must have been arrived at in consequence of the unwelcome visit of the lady in black.”

“But apparently he expected her,” said Dick.

“No. I understood him in the bureau to say that a gentleman would call.”

“Ah!” remarked Owen. “Then the lady called and found him unawares. She, however, knew Madame was absent, or she would scarcely have dared to visit him, I think.”

“But the assassination!” exclaimed Jervoise anxiously. “What led to it?”