The Greatest Works of Cleveland Moffett. Cleveland Moffett
warned the magistrate, "there is no use keeping up this denial, you have betrayed yourself already."
"No," cried the prisoner with a supreme rally of his will power, "I have betrayed nothing—nothing," and, once more, while the doctor marveled, his pulse steadied and strengthened and grew normal.
"What a man!" muttered Coquenil.
"We know the facts," went on Hauteville sternly, "we know why you killed Martinez and why you disguised yourself as a wood carver."
The prisoner's face lighted with a mocking smile. "If you know all that, why waste time questioning me?"
"You're a good actor, sir, but we shall strip off your mask and quiet your impudence. Look at the girl in this false picture which you had cunningly made in Brussels. Look at her! Who is she? There is the key to the mystery! There is the reason for your killing Martinez! He knew the truth about this girl."
Now the prisoner's pulse was running wild, faster and faster, but with no more violent spurtings and leapings; the red column throbbed swiftly and faintly at the bottom of the tube as if the heart were weakening.
"A hundred and sixty to the minute," whispered Duprat to the magistrate. "It is dangerous to go on."
Hauteville shrugged his shoulders.
"Martinez knew the truth," he went on, "Martinez held your secret. How had Martinez come upon it? Who was Martinez? A billiard player, a shallow fellow, vain of his conquests over silly women. The last man in Paris, one would say, to interfere with your high purposes or penetrate the barriers of wealth and power that surrounded you."
"You—you flatter me! What am I, pray, a marquis or a duke?" chaffed the other, but the trembling dial belied his gayety, and even from the side Coquenil could see that the man's face was as tense and pallid as the sheet before him.
"As I said, the key to this murder," pursued the magistrate, "is the secret that Martinez held. Without that nothing can be understood and no justice can be done. The whole aim of this investigation has been to get the secret and we have got it! Groener, you have delivered yourself into our hands, you have written this secret for us in words of terror and we have read them, we know what Martinez knew when you took his life, we know the story of the medal that he wore on his breast. Do you know the story?"
"I tell you I know nothing about this man or his medal," flung back the prisoner.
"No? Then you will be glad to hear the story. It was a medal of solid gold, awarded Martinez by the city of Paris for conspicuous bravery in saving lives at the terrible Charity Bazaar fire. You have heard of the Charity Bazaar fire, Groener?"
"Yes, I—I have heard of it."
"But perhaps you never heard the details or, if you did, you may have forgotten them. Have you forgotten the details of the Charity Bazaar fire?"
Charity Bazaar fire! Three times, with increasing emphasis, the magistrate had spoken those sinister words, yet the dial gave no sign, the red column throbbed on steadily.
"I am not interested in the subject," answered the accused.
"Ah, but you are, or you ought to be. It was such a shocking affair. Hundreds burned to death, think of that! Cowardly men trampling women and children! Our noblest families plunged into grief and bereavement! Princesses burned to death! Duchesses burned to death! Beautiful women burned to death! Rich women burned to death! Think of it, Groener, and—" he signaled the operator, "and look at it!"
As he spoke the awful tragedy began in one of those extraordinary moving pictures that the French make after a catastrophe, giving to the imitation even greater terrors than were in the genuine happening. Here before them now leaped redder and fiercer flames than ever crackled through the real Charity Bazaar; here were women and children perishing in more savage torture than the actual victims endured; here were horrors piled on horrors, exaggerated horrors, manufactured horrors, until the spectacle became unendurable, until one all but heard the screams and breathed the sickening odor of burning human flesh.
Coquenil had seen this picture in one of the boulevard theaters and, straightway, after the precious nine-second clew of the word test, he had sent Papa Tignol off for it posthaste, during the supper intermission. If the mere word "Charity Bazaar" had struck this man dumb with fear what would the thing itself do, the revolting, ghastly thing?
That was the question now, what would this hideous moving picture do to a fire-fearing assassin already on the verge of collapse? Would it break the last resistance of his overwrought nerves or would he still hold out?
Silently, intently the three men waited, bending over the dial as the test proceeded, as the fiends of torture and death swept past in lurid triumph.
The picture machine whirled on with droning buzz, the accused sat still, eyes on the sheet, the red column pulsed steadily, up and down, up and down, now a little higher, now a little quicker, but—for a minute, for two minutes—nothing decisive happened, nothing that they had hoped for; yet Coquenil felt, he knew that something was going to happen, he knew it by the agonized tension of the room, by the atmosphere of pain about them. If Groener had not spoken, he himself, in the poignancy of his own distress, must have cried out or stamped on the floor or broken something, just to end the silence.
Then, suddenly, the tension snapped, the prisoner sprang to his feet and, tearing his arm from the leather sleeve, he faced his tormentors desperately, eyes blazing, features convulsed:
"No, no, no!" he shrieked. "You dogs! You cowards!"
"Lights up," ordered Hauteville. Then to the guard: "Put the handcuffs on him."
But the prisoner would not be silenced. "What does all this prove?" he screamed in rage. "Nothing! Nothing! You make me look at disgusting, abominable pictures and—why shouldn't my heart beat? Anybody's heart would beat—if he had a heart."
The judge paid no attention to this outburst, but went on in a tone as keen and cold as a knife: "Before you go to your cell, Groener, you shall hear what we charge against you. Your wife perished in the Charity Bazaar fire. She was a very rich woman, probably an American, who had been married before and who had a daughter by her previous marriage. That daughter is the girl you call Alice. Her true name is Mary. She was in the fire with her mother and was rescued by Martinez, but the shock of seeing her mother burned to death and, perhaps, the shock of seeing you refuse to save her mother——"
"It's a lie!" yelled the prisoner.
"All this terror and anguish caused a violent mental disturbance in the girl and resulted in a failure of her memory. When she came out of the fire it was as if a curtain had fallen over her past life, she had lost the sense of her own personality, she did not know her own name, she was helpless, you could do as you pleased with her. And she was a great heiress! If she lived, she inherited her mother's fortune; if she died, this fortune reverted to you. So shrinking, perhaps, from the actual killing of this girl, you destroyed her identity; you gave it out that she, too, had perished in the flames and you proceeded to enjoy her stolen fortune while she sold candles in Notre-Dame church."
"You have no proof of it!" shouted Groener.
"No? What is this?" and he signaled the operator, whereupon the lights went down and the picture of Alice and the widow appeared again. "There is the girl whom you have wronged and defrauded. Now watch the woman, your Brussels accomplice, watch her carefully—carefully," he motioned to the operator and the smooth young widow faded gradually, while the face and form of another woman took her place beside the girl. "Now we have the picture as it was before you falsified it. Do you recognize this face?"
"No," answered the prisoner, but his heart was pounding.
"It is your wife. Look!"
Under the picture came the inscription: "To my dear husband Raoul with the love of Margaret and her little