The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (34 page)

They might meet at Madrid one year, in St. Petersburg the next; one of them might be His Majesty’s envoy at Bangkok and be met on the steamer by another family going out to represent His Very Christian Majesty of Portugal at the Court of Tokyo. But Bad-Drieselheim as a rule was so enormously expensive that the mere diplomatic service would not ordinarily have been able to get their pockets to run to it. They wouldn’t have been there at all, they would have been scattered over Switzerland from Interlaken to Salso-Maggiore, if it had not been that the Grand Duke of Treves had lost his favourite son in Pekin too. Ordinarily, Bad-Drieselheim was a place where princes of foreign houses retired to get cured of their megrims. Now Philip Hands’ mother and the von Drostes and the Rodes and the Kesselheims and the Lussacs were there because the bereaved Grand Duke had extended to them an invitation that made them practically his guests.

And for the life of him, Philip Hands could not see what attractions Drieselheim could offer to royal and Imperial Princes. The Bath itself was an old and abandoned convent, set down on an embankment that was like a dam across a solitary valley, an immense steep valley covered to the very tips of the ranges with melancholy and weeping firs. Up the valley they were never allowed to go. Upon coming there they were made to give their words that they would not. The official reason given by Dr. von Salzer was that the valley contained quarries where blasting was very frequent, and that in consequence his patients might be crushed by falls of rock. For himself, Philip Hands cared very little for this mystery, though he did not in the least believe Dr. von Salzer’s explanation. He was inclined to believe with everyone in Bad-Drieselheim that the Grand Duke’s Government had there a secret depot for testing new patterns of field guns and high explosives. At any rate, it was none of Philip Hands’ business, as a gentleman, who had passed his word, to attempt to interfere with the quarries or the secret, whatever it was.

Annette von Droste, however, took it differently. She was convinced that the mad uncle and predecessor of the Grand Duke of Treves was hidden somewhere in that deep valley, and the thought of this mysterious and eminent person with his romantic career and his absolute disappearance twelve years before, filled Annette with an enthusiastic curiosity, that was the only one of her enthusiasms that Mr. Hands had not been able to share. He had shared almost all her other fancies for as long as he could remember, from the time when he had been fourteen and she eleven in St. Petersburg, or when he had been eighteen and she fifteen in Paris or during the season before last in London—till half-past nine of the night before when she had, with an unaccountable strangeness in her manner, very definitely refused to marry him. That had been the night before.

He had proposed to her about four o’clock. They had been drinking coffee and eating sweet chocolate biscuits made to resemble true-love knots, while all the invalids were taking their afternoon sleeps. She had not said no; she had not said yes; she had been quite gay. She had gone away into the woods as she said, laughing, to talk it over with the mad ex-Duke in the forbidden valley. And Philip Hands had remained to drink more coffee and eat more chocolate biscuits in the autumn sunshine at the little table in the Platz near the bandstand. The band did not play till five o’clock because till that hour all the invalids rested. But upon the stroke, it struck up the solemn Chorale with which it habitually got all the patients out of bed. Philip Hands had gone to his mother’s room to fetch her for her slow promenade along the gravel walk, in the sunshine of the lower valley. Here they had been joined by old von Droste who, having heard from Philip that his daughter had gone for a walk in the woods, proceeded to tell them the true story of what the Crown Prince of Wallachia had actually done at Tiplitz. The sun had shone; Philip’s mother had seemed much better; the eminent and venerable diplomat had been so more than usually cordial that Philip had thought he was beginning to understand something of what was attractive in a place even as dull as Drieselheim.

They dined, as the custom of the place was, each patient in his own room, accompanied by his attendant. Afterwards, for an hour, the attendant was supposed to read the daily papers to his invalid. There there came the night assembly round the bandstand, which was illuminated with small strings of lamps, whilst those who cared for dancing were provided with a small orchestra of their own in the large and ghostly hall that had formerly served the nuns as a refectory.

Philip Hands had not found Annette among the dancers, so he went to look for her on the terrace which was erected, as it were, on a high rampart before the frowning round archway of the old white convent. The moon was high in the South, the valley opened out wide and far below his feet. The black woodlands, all of stiff pines, came down on each side of the terrace. It was very still; it was a warm autumn evening and Philip Hands felt confident that very soon Annette would come to find him. He leant upon the parapet and gazed into the spaces of the moonlight. He was twenty-seven—he was second attaché at a first class embassy; he knew he could have the governorship of the Leeward Islands for the asking and he hadn’t the least doubt that Annette loved him.

It was very still for a time, and then they began blasting again in the forbidden valley. Philip Hands could hear the familiar but mysterious screams, like human voices of enormous power, heard at a great distance. That, of course, he thought, must be the high explosive. That sort of thing gave off the most extraordinary noises. He remembered to have heard that the explosion of Gelsonite gave an overtone thirteen eighths above its first note, very like the sort of screaming sound that fills the air when great bells are played. They must therefore be using some very high explosive indeed in the forbidden valley. That did away with any idea of quarrying, if they quarried with a high explosive in at all the quantity in which they must obviously be using it to-night, they would blow all the mountains from Drieselheim into the Mosel within two or three hours. So that it was pretty obvious what
was
going on there. It could not be anything else but the most intensely secret of military operations.

The noises died away again; it became all of a deathly stillness in the valley; only the thin sound of the violins thrilled through the thick wall from the nuns’ refectory where they were dancing, and suddenly Philip Hands heard a crackling in the deep woods—footsteps and the splitting of the small dry lateral twigs of the high firs. In the deep blackness his eyes perceived the bluish and as if phosphorescent gleam of a white dress. It came down in the darkness, it reached the terrace; it was Annette coming to him out of the woods.

“Have you been there all this time?” he asked.

She came towards him silently, her hands were stretched out, not as if it were towards him, but as though she were in the darkness feeling her way towards the light.

***

She had refused him! She had refused him then and there on the terrace in the moonlight. She had not given him any reason, she had said that there was absolutely no reason to give. None at all. She said only that she could not marry; that she was not fit to marry. That had been the night before!

Philip Hands had been possibly rather complacent, sure of an easy conquest. But he had an amount of emotion during the night that was sufficient to denote a very violent passion. He passed the dark hours in pacing up and down his small room, swearing violently. The whole thing was inexplicable and it was insulting. The girl, gay, high spirited, raven-haired and flushed, had listened to his proposals and had gone off into the woods to meditate on them. Philip Hands hadn’t had the slightest doubt that she had gone into those deep woods to sing the song whose first line runs,
“Er der herrlichste von allen”
—words which mean “He the most noble of all!” and a song which the correct German maiden is supposed to sing upon being proposed to by a man who is the noblest work of God. Young Mr. Hands was not German enough exactly to put these thoughts into words. Indeed he was too Anglo-Saxon to put any thoughts into words at all. He had just waited, happy in the sunlight. A pleasant young man, with a pleasant career opening before him, the only danger which his parents or friends could have imagined would overhang him would be that he was so obviously going to marry a dark, passionate, romantically unreasonable young girl who might give him the very deuce of a time.

So that Annette’s inexplicable refusal struck Mr. Hands as being not only unreasonable but sharply insulting. She had gone into the wood tidy, with a swinging step, her black hair carefully braided round her head, in a flimsy white dress. She had come out beneath the moon tottering, pallid, her dress torn, and green with the green of tree-trunks, whilst her hair was disordered and furry, a pine twig caught in it falling across her temples, and wetted so that it gleamed in the moonlight. And she had refused Mr. Hands!

Mr. Hands could not imagine that during her several hours of reflection she had discovered that he was unworthy of her. She had known him for too long, and he was not unworthy of her. Similarly, she was not unworthy of him. Their families and fortunes were remarkably well matched! Then it must have been some damned thing that had happened in the damned woods of this ridiculous and damned Grand Duchy. That was all Philip Hands could make of it, in his outraged pride.

He supposed Annette must have gone up the forbidden valley and had seen or heard—what the devil had she seen or heard? What the devil had happened to her? Mr. Hands’ mind being distinctly concrete, he could think of nothing but the precautions that the Government of the Grand Duchy would take to conceal its secret armaments, its newly invented firearms or its high explosives. But what silly precautions could the rotten Government of an absurd Grand Duchy take? that, supposing she had poked her inquisitive nose into their secrets, could prevent a young lady of good family and excellent prospects from marrying a gentleman of the Diplomatic Corps in every way her equal?

Towards morning, while he paced and fumed, absurd ideas began to get into his mind. Perhaps his Annette, in the forbidden valley, had come upon the mad Grand Duke, that legendary figure of Treves, who had disappeared twenty years before. She must have come upon the mad Grand Duke and have been married to him by force. God knows what! And with his mind fatigued and full of grotesque images, Mr. Philip Hands thought he must be going mad. Annette von Droste must have gone mad. They were in that place, a great old convent building that was full of mad people. For there was no denying that the patients were all mad. They heard voices; they saw shapes; they were troubled by unseen hands, brushed by invisible wings, and in those ghostly cells and corridors, the pressure was too much for the sane people that were with them. This whole place represented a horrible and ghostly manufactory of lunatics, with Dr. von Salzer a spider-like lunatic at the head of them all. And in the darkness the whole ghastly conventual building, of which he occupied an old nun’s cell in the far east corner of the inner courtyard, seemed to whisper and gibber with the brushings of the dresses of long dead nuns. Annette must have gone mad. He himself must be going mad. . . .

In the grey of the morning, Philip Hands heard the hoofs of horses strike hard and clattering on the cobbles of that small inner courtyard. He strode to the window and fell back with an oath of horror that seemed to be shaken out of the very pit of his stomach. He grasped at both his eyes with the palms of his hands. In the dim white small courtyard stood two grotesque shapes, two indescribable, ghostly, black simulacra of horses. Black trappings covered them from their heads right down to the ground, so that they resembled the sable ghosts of chargers upon which medieval knights must have ridden, whilst from socketless eyeholes they appeared to shed hollow, forbidding, and unspeakably mournful glances. They seemed to be the apparitions of horses that had been dead five hundred years, and for the moment Philip Hands’ whole brain seemed to be turning round inside his head. What was he looking at? There was no knowing what didn’t survive, what mightn’t survive in this extraordinary, oldfashioned Grand Duchy. It was one half modern quick-firing guns of deadly precision and the other half peasants in three cornered hats, short jackets, knee-breeches and stockings with ribands at the knee, practising the most old-fashioned ceremonials, gifted as they were said to be, all of them, with second sight, and perceiving daily in their thick and fantastic woods all the hob-goblins of Grimm, the spectres of the Brocken and the ghostly charcoal burners of the Harz mountains. There was no knowing what old, forgotten horrors, what dim fragments of the spectral past might not here survive along with the high explosives of the forbidden valley. In Central Africa, as he had read that morning, in a deep lake, they had discovered, still surviving, a monstrous prehistoric lizard that was said to be a survival of the first slime of the world—a monstrous scaled animal like a winged tortoise, as large as a town hall, and with jaws as deep as a cathedral portal. And this absurd forgotten country was as little explored as Central Africa. Why, the peasants still sacrificed mares and buried them beneath the corner posts of their houses, as they had done in the pagan days of Odin, thousands of years before the birth of Christ.

***

Altogether, Mr. Philip Hands passed a very bad night of it—a night of which not even his morning bath could altogether wash out the traces. Of course, upon taking a second view of the horses, he had perceived behind them an elaborate, ebony, gilded and glazed structure, and shortly afterwards four men in their shirtsleeves carrying down a coffin of polished brass, with bright steel handles. And he had realised that they were merely carrying away to an early train, for trans-shipment to Berlin, where the funeral was to take place in the Hedwigskirche, the body of Hofrath von Kellermann who had died, according to the official bulletin, of lesion of the brain the day before. But even that, though it was commonplace, was disagreeable. For, in spite of the discreet official silence and the removal of the body in early hours of the morning, the rumour ran among the assistants and servants of the place that the body of the Hofrath had been horribly mangled and crushed out of all human semblance. He was supposed, in fact, to have escaped from his attendants and, wandering into the forbidden valley, to have been crushed by one of the huge rocks that hurtled through space from the blastings in the forgotten fir woods.