The Strand Magazine/Volume 22/Issue 131/The Friends' Trysting-Place

by Ella D'Arcy

Layout 2

The Friends' Trysting-Place.

By G. H. Page.

RAYMOND, the young English tourist, sat on the terrace of the only hotel of Etréport overlooking the sea, which, immeasurable, very calm, and of the positive blue which is never seen from our own shores, flowed in foamless and silent to press insatiable kisses upon a silver strand.

He had drive over from Bellefonds, which he had reached by the afternoon boat, and while he drank a glass of lager beer old Dupont, the landlord, who remembered him from his previous visit of two years since, stood and chatted to him with French cordiality and ease.

Dupont expected a very good season, in anticipation of which he begged Raymond to observe he had built an additional wing. But so far the season had not begun. Monsieur was the first English tourist to arrive. At present he had only French visitors—a family from Bellefonds and two or three people from Paris.

As he spoke the hotel omnibus—which goes when needed to meet the trains at Petit Charmettes—appeared round the corner of the house, and with tremendous whip-cracking, sharp and resonant as pistol-shots, drew up at the inn door.

Arthur, the cook's underling, climbed down from his seat behind the driver, who handed him from the roof two big baskets of foodstuff, while Dupont rushed over to open the omnibus door for the inside passengers. A gentleman and two ladies got out, and from their casual, unobservant manner, and the fact that they had no luggage, Raymond concluded these were some of the hotel guests, who had been away on a day's excursion.

After a few words with Dupont the new arrivals went indoors, and Dupont returned to Raymond.

"Your visitors?" inquired the young man.

"Yes, my Parisians," said the landlord. "They have been to-day into Gex on business, and terrible business, too. Ah, a sad tale!"

He took a chair opposite Raymond and leaned his arms confidentially upon the table, while his puckered old face blossomed out with the pleasure of finding a fresh ear into which to pour an oft-told story.

"You saw those two ladies in deep mourning, did you not? That is Mme. Maréchal and Mlle. Léonie, her daughter, a very beautiful girl, let me tell you, although at the present moment overwhelmed with crape and a natural grief. Why? For a very good reason. The only son of the elder lady, the only brother of the young one, disappeared six months ago—oh! but disappeared so utterly and so incomprehensibly that his death is morally certain. Nothing but his death could have prevented him during all these months from communicating with his family; and, as you see, his mother and sister have given up all hope and have put on mourning for him.

"YOU SAW THOSE TWO LADIES IN DEEP MOURNING, DID YOU NOT?

"YOU SAW THOSE TWO LADIES IN DEEP MOURNING, DID YOU NOT?

"Now," continued Dupont, moistening his lips to better relish that luxury of woe which the outsider enjoys in the tragedy which does not touch him personally, "the worst of it is that I—I who speak to you—am in some degree responsible for the death of that young man!"

Raymond took care to look suitably astonished and impressed, and the other proceeded with his tale.

"Six months ago Mr. Victor Maréchal was staying in this house, and I had given him No. 7, which is the room next to the one I have to-day given you. He was a charming young fellow, very gay and friendly, and just as fond of roaming in the forest as you are yourself, which ought to be a warning to you, if you'll excuse my saying so. He would be off at ten in the morning and not return till six at night, having had nothing but just a bar of chocolate and a hunch of bread taken with him in his pocket. And if it vexed me that he should miss his midday meal, it was certainly only for his own sake, since he paid me weekly full board at eight francs a day, wine included. But he would come home at six at night, as I have said, hungry as a wolf, and having dined, sipped a liqueur, and smoked a couple of cigarettes, would go to bed and sleep like one of God's blessed saints until the short hand of the clock got round to six again. Then up to sort, and prepare, and classify the plants and insects he had brought in the day before—for he was an entomologist and botanist, was poor Mr. Victor—and so off again.

"Now one night he didn't return, and the rain having come on heavily in the afternoon—it was on the second Friday in October last year that this happened, and the thirteenth of the month too, as my wife afterwards pointed out to me—we supposed he had found himself weather-bound some miles away, and had sought shelter elsewhere. We didn't begin to get uneasy until next day, but when another night passed, and we got no word of him, we naturally set inquiries on foot. All, however, to no purpose. Not a trace of him could be found. Finally, although the authorities took the matter up, nothing definite has been discovered concerning his fate from that day to this.

"To be sure, very strong suspicions are entertained against a certain Leroy and his wife. Young Maréchal was last seen alive by a waggoner, going in at their door. In consequence the couple are this moment in prison at Gex, awaiting their interrogations by the Public Prosecutor. And it is on this account that Mme. Maréchal and her daughter are here, while the gentleman whom you may have observed with them is Maitre Puivert, their advocate, and a nephew by marriage of the old lady's."

"But who are these Leroys?" Raymond wanted to know. "And for what reasons are they suspected of murdering an inoffensive young entomologist?"

Dupont was only too pleased to explain.

"During your wanderings in the forest," said he—"wanderings which, for the future, I should hope, you will not have the temerity to repeat, did you ever happen to come across a miserable little hovel of a dilapidated inn called by the sign of The Friends' Trysting-Place? A singularly inappropriate name surely, for the lair of such bandits as the Leroys! But although they have enjoyed a bad reputation for years, nothing so far has been proved against them. Ha! You do know them, I see?"

For Raymond, with his glass at his lips, suddenly placed it down upon the table, and was leaning forward with animation in his eyes. Yet he answered with assumed indifference.

"I seem to remember such an inn. About five miles to the north-west of this, is it not, a whitewashed house, of two stories, standing back from the road in a sort of little clearing?"

"That's it," Dupont assented, and went on to give details of Leroy's appearance, off the the appearance of his wife, of the stories already current to their discredit, and of the probably motives for the rime, if crime it was.

"Mr. Victor carried his money always about his person in bank-notes. Inadvertently he may have allowed these to be seen. Anyhow, he has been traced to the door of the inn. A wood-cutter has come forward to depose that he observed a young man answering to Maréchal's description enter the house on the night of October the 13th. The Leroys admit that a young man had on that evening dined there. But they insist that he left them, after dinner, in spite of the rain, because the house was fill, and they have produced two persons, waggoners, who have been able to prove that they actually occupied the only two guest-rooms which the inn contained on the night in question."

And Dupont divagated down this channel of surmise and that of suspicion, while Raymond appeared to be giving him his whole attention. But in reality he was listening to another voice, an infinitely more engrossing voice, the voice of memory, which, bit by bit, was bringing back to him every detail of a strange adventure, and of a still stranger dream, which he had experienced while staying in that part of the country, over two years ago.

Two years ago he was tramping through the forest of La Lande, and wheeling before him his bicycle, which had come to grief. He had already ridden thirty miles out, and seventeen back towards Etréport, when the accident happened. He had walked another seven, and he was so utterly fagged out that had the night promised dryness he would have lain down there where he stood and slept till morning. But the evening was misty and cold; the early spring foliage was not sufficiently thick to afford any protection overhead; and the ground owing to rain on the previous day, was too damp for comfort underfoot. Besides, he was extremely hungry. The only thing to do was to plod on until he came to some human habitation where he could obtain food and at least a shake-down.

The dusk deepened, the road seemed to stretch out to eternity, his leaden feet held him to earth, but he walked on determinately, nevertheless.

All the same he was counting how many more steps he could take before giving in, when suddenly the forest trees seemed to draw together, to disclose a vacant space in which huddled some vague buildings, from one of which came a blessed gleam of light.

As he approached this light he saw that it shone from the unshuttered window of a low house, which, if he did not mistake the signs, was a wayside inn.

The discovery made him knock at the door with assurance, although he would have knocked with the resolution of having it opened to him in any case, for, with the rain beginning to fall again as the night advanced, it was no moment for standing on ceremony.

When, therefore, the door was partially opened by a burly, swart-faced man, Raymond pushed in without waiting for the welcoming word which did not come.

He leaned his cycle against the wall and looked round an apartment—half eating-room, half kitchen, and wholly unattractive.

"HE LEANED HIS CYCLE AGAINST THE WALL AND LOOKED ROUND."

"HE LEANED HIS CYCLE AGAINST THE WALL AND LOOKED ROUND."

Some stained tables and wooden benches, a floor covered with grey dirt which once might have been clean sand, and a large number of spittoons comprised the entire furniture and decoration. A couple of logs smouldered on the hearth, and an evil-smelling kerosene lamp, with an opaline shade, hung from the ceiling.

Two persons occupied the room, the man who had opened the door—evidently the innkeeper—and a stout, dark, squat little woman of repellent visage.

Raymond wondered what sort of a living these two could make, since surely direful necessity alone such as his was could ever keep them a customer. Even so, he hesitated a moment as to whether he would not merely ask for something to eat and take leave again.

But a rain-gust flinging itself against the windows made him dismiss the fastidious idea.

At his request the woman brought him food—of a sort—hesitated when he asked for a bed, and consulted her husband with furtive eyes. The couple had a most disquieting habit of speaking to each other in silence. Most of the time they kept their gaze suspiciously fixed upon their guest, but every now and then they turned to interlock glances, and it was impossible not to suspect that some unspoken communication passed between them.

Now, after her pause, the woman, instructed evidently by her husband, replied that if the gentleman could put up with a very poor bedroom they had one at his disposal, but that they did not lay themselves out to accommodate visitors for the night, and the only decent room the house contained they occupied themselves. The one which they could give monsieur had a bed in it certainly, but it was over the stable, it was very bare, it was——

Raymond cut short her litany of its deficiencies by his cheerful assurance that it would do perfectly well, and having finished his supper announced his desire to go to bed at once.

Taking the lamp out of its swinging ring and leaving the room and her husband in more than semi-darkness, the woman led the way upstairs, then through a long and narrow passage, which now mounted a step or two, now descended again, to a small room at the farthest end of it; a lonely and dilapidated little room with a dormer window and a slanting roof.

There was no curtain to the window, no carpet on the floor, no furniture but one rickety, rush-bottomed chair, a pedestal table, a washstand holding a chipped basin and a handleless ewer, and a pallet bed. But Raymond noticed that the sheet were exquisitely white and clean, while the room was rain-proof at least. So, well disposed to make the best of the curcumstances, he bade the woman a pleasant "good-night."

It was not until her retreating footsteps were no longer heard along the passage that he realized she had left him neither matches nor a candle, but had set the lamp down upon the table and gone away in the dark. However, it did not signify, since matches he had in his own pocket, and should he need the lamp again after extinguishing it, it would not be an affair of much difficulty to re-light it.

But first, by an instinct of prudence which surprised himself, he began by carefully examining the room and turning the key in the door.

The examination of the room led to the finding of a cupboard in which hung some frouzy garments, and on pushing these aside Raymond was startled to discover that in the back of the cupboard there was a second door. To this door there was a lock, but no key or any other means of fastening it, and it opened inwards, though with difficulty, on account of the heavy winter clothes hanging over it.

Where it led to he felt too tired to investigate, almost too tired to care; yet he carried the washstand inside the cupboard and set it against the inner door, arranging the crockery in such a manner that the door could not be opened without causing clatter sufficient to awaken him, and then, satisfied with his precautions, he turned the lamp-flame down, let it flicker out, and in two minutes was very fast asleep.

He awoke very suddenly.

For how long he had slept he could form no idea. The room was completely dark and the silence was profound.

Yet he had a conviction that he had been awakened by a noise within the cupboard. He listened attentively, and surely heard someone gently trying the handle of the inner door.

"Who's there?" he shouted, and struck a match.

All was still.

With some difficulty he removed the lamp's chimney, re-lighted the wick, and when it burned steady took it over to the cupboard. Everything remained as he had arranged it—not a sound broke the silence, not a mouse stirred.

He came to the conclusion that he had dreamed the noise of the turned handle, and with sufficient vividness to wake himself up.

Nevertheless, he now added the table and chair to the barricade within the cupboard, put the lamp down on the floor by the window to burn itself out, and went back to bed, to again fall asleep.

But now he dreamed a dream which was so consequent in its happenings, and which remained so clearly impressed upon his mind next morning, that he could call it up with absolute accuracy of detail across the intervening years.

In this dream he stood in the sordid attic, and a man, either himself or another, lay sleeping in the bed. And while he looked curiously at the sleeper, trying to make out his identity, there came again the noise at the cupboard's inner door.

Raymond fixed his eyes upon the door and saw it begin to move slowly inwards, until it stood wide open. Now a flash of yellow light showed the top rungs of a ladder leading up to the threshold, and a black abyss beyond. The innkeeper's head appeared, then his shoulders; then he stepped through the aperture and, treading softly on list slippers and carrying a stable-lantern in his hand, came out into the room. Following him, equally soft-footed, came his sinister-looking wife.

The two went over and stood together by the bed, and the woman, taking the lantern from her husband's hand, held it so that its light streamed down upon the sleeper, and the man, drawing a knife from his belt, leaned over the unconscious victim and drove it into his heart.

"THE TWO WENT OVER AND STOOD TOGETHER BY THE BED."

"THE TWO WENT OVER AND STOOD TOGETHER BY THE BED."

Now the man and woman, taking up the corpse by the head and feet, prepared to carry it down the way they had come up; but because they needed light, yet neither had a hand free, the man took the slender ring of the lantern between his teeth, and thus the two murderers lighted themselves down the ladder.

Next, Raymond heard the sound of a pick, pick, pick, picking on the stones in the stable below preparatory to digging the victim's grave, and he awoke in cold sweats of terror to find the sun streaming in through the curtainless window, and the innkeeper's wife at the door with his morning coffee. And he had no doubt that it was the sunlight upon his eyelids which had caused him to dream of the lantern, while the woman's preliminary rap upon the door had been the stimulating cause of the entire dream.

However, she was as repulsive-looking in the gay light of morning as she had been the night before. The coffee was vile and the appointments dirty.

Raymond hurried through his dressing, paid his bill without comment on its extortionate items, and gave a prolonged whistle of relief when he got away into the road.

Turning back to give a last look at the horrible inn, he now read its name, which he had not been able to do in the obscurity of the previous evening. And this name, painted in great brown letters from end to end of the whitewashed front, was "The Friends' Trysting-Place."

"But monsieur is not listening to me?" complained old Dupont, somewhat piqued.

"On the contrary," Raymond replied, courteously, "I have listened with the deepest attention, since I have reason to be extremely interested in what you have told me. But there comes Maitre Puivert from the house. You would do me a service in introducing me to him."

It was not difficult to get the young barrister to talk of the case which was engrossing his whole attention and that of the entire countryside, and Raymond listened so intelligently, and showed so much genuine sympathy with the bereaved relatives, that Puivert insisted on making him known to Mme. Maréchal and her daughter.

The elder lady was gentle, faded, and broken with grief. The young girl was beautiful, poignantly sad, yet at the same time full of energy and fire.

The mother had resigned herself to the mystery which shrouded her son's fate. The daughter rebelled against it.

"The Leroys are suspected by the police," Mme. Maréchal explained as she talked the affair over with Raymond and her nephew on the terrace after dinner. "But after all, it is a mere suspicion. And, indeed, how is it possible to believe that that man and his wife could have been guilty of so cold-blooded a crime?"

"I shall never have a moment's happiness again," said the girl, "until we have proved that Victor has neither deserted us nor committed suicide. These suggestions have been made. They are horrible. Victor adored us. He would never voluntarily have given those he loved one moment's anxiety. Why should he abandon us? And he was happy, honourable, prosperous. Why should he take his own life?"

"This gentleman," remarked Puivert, indicating Raymond, "has been telling me that he knows the inn, and that he fancies he knows the Leroys. It seems that he passed a night there himself a few years ago."

"Ah, monsieur!" cried Léonie, clasping her hands, "if you could help us!"

"My testimony, such as it is, only tells in the inn's favour, since I slept there, had money in my pocket, yet came away next morning unscathed."

He related the adventure over again as he had already told it to Puivert, but neither then nor now did he touch upon the dream.

"I think I should like to see these Leroys," he said, aside, to Puivert, before parting that night. "If I were to come into Gex with you to-morrow, would it be possible to manage it for me?"

Not only possible, but easy." And it was arranged that he should accompany the advocate into the examining judge's room, and be present at the interrogation of the Leroys.

Mlle. Léonie spoke to Raymond as the two men set off next morning. She and her mother, not being wanted in Gex, were going to spend a quiet day at Etréport.

"If you can help us in any way to solve this dreadful mystery," she told him with swimming eyes, "you may reckon on our eternal gratitude."

"You may believe that I would do everything a man can," Raymond assured her, "merely to win from you one kindly thought."

"YOU MAY BELIEVE THAT I WOULD DO EVERYTHING A MAN CAN," RAYMOND ASSURED HER."

"YOU MAY BELIEVE THAT I WOULD DO EVERYTHING A MAN CAN," RAYMOND ASSURED HER."

He spoke so earnestly that she was surprised into a blush.

He referred enthusiastically to Mlle. Léonie when he and Puivert were in the train together on the way to Gex.

"A very beautiful creature!" he said. "But for a young girl her face is too sad."

"Ah! You should have known her before this affair," answered the other. "Full of vivacity, blooming and smiling as Hebe. Well, we can do little for her but trust to time."

Raymond told himself he should like to aid time in winning her back to lightheartedness.

Arrived at Gex he was enabled, through the influence of Puivert, to slip into the judge's room, amongst the reporters and other minor officials, whence he might assist at the interrogations, himself unobserved.

How well he remembered the man who was now brought in between two prison warders! The burly, swart-faced man with the bull's throat, the small, suspicious pig's eyes, the muscular, hairy hands, every detail of whose appearance struck Raymond familiarly, as if not two years but two hours only lay between then and now. The rough voice in which Leroy answered the questions put him seemed never to have ceased snarling at Raymond's ear.

But the judge extracted nothing from these answers beyond a repetition of the already admitted facts.

Yes. A gentleman had visited the inn on the night in question, had asked for a bed, and had been refused it, as the only two rooms available were already occupied by two waggoners (whose separate testimony had confirmed the statement's truth). The gentleman, therefore, having eaten his supper, had paid and gone away, and that was all Leroy knew, so help him God.

He was removed that his wife might be introduced, and, brute-beast as was the man, about the woman there was something still more sinister. This stout, squat, dark little woman with the eyes set too close together, and the loose, cruel mouth, might well have served as the evil spirit of even such a ruffian as Leroy. If his was the hand to carry out their crimes, hers was the turpitude to suggest them.

But the story concocted to save their necks from those crimes' consequence had evidently been well rehearsed. Point for point, word for word, the woman repeated the asseverations of the man. The couple had been separated over two weeks, but not the discrepancy of a pin's head could be found between the two tales.

"No, my good monsieur," she whined, "we had no bed to give the gentleman. Besides our own room we have but two others, which were occupied on that night by two waggoners, Hugues and Rebelle. This is God's truth, and they will tell you so themselves."

At this moment there was a movement among the reporters on the judge's left. Raymond had pushed back his chair, risen, and now came forward.

"Pardon me, monsieur," he said, bowing to the judge, "will you allow me to ask a question?"

Then, turning to the woman, "But your third room, the attic over the stable? Did you not put Victor Maréchal to sleep there?"

Her mouth fell open as she stared at the speaker, but no word came.

Raymond, however, answered for her, emphatically and fluently, as though he were become the mouthpiece of some superior force.

"Yes!" he cried, "you put the unfortunate young man to sleep in that little lonely attic room, separated from the rest of the house by a long passage, with nothing below him but the disused stable, so that his cries, if he should cry out, would not be heard.

"But you gave him no opportunity of crying out. You waited until he slept profoundly, and then you and your husband came up through the stable by the ladder leading to the cupboard's secret door, and while you held the lantern to guide the blow, Leroy stabbed the victim in his sleep.

"After which the two of you carried the body down the way you had come to bury it beneath the flags of the stable floor; but because you needed light on the way down, and neither of you had a hand to spare, Leroy carried the lantern by holding the ring between his teeth."

The woman's face had changed to the colour of ashes during this denunciation, while her eyes, globular and ringed with white, seemed to move forward from their sockets.

"What! You were there, then?" she exclaimed. "You saw everything? But how is that possible?"

A thrill ran through the room as these incriminating words were uttered and written down.

Recognising the next instant her fatal blunder, the woman now took refuge in a savage silence, except when refusing in violent language to sign her deposition presently read over to her.

But when it was read over to Leroy, brought back to hear it after his wife's removal to the cells, he, believing that she had betrayed him, fell into such red fury, and swore such horrible oaths that he would do for her when he got out, that he had to be gagged and manacled.

He never, however, got out, for the charge was proved convincingly. The stable floor was taken up and the body of the victim discovered, as well as the bones of another unknown previous victim which had lain there for apparently four or five years. Leroy finished his career on the scaffold. His wife, the more guilty of the two, has also the harder doom, for she still lives in the convict prison for women at Noirlieu.

These events, of course, followed later.

The rest of the day on which Raymond had brought home the crime to its perpetrators was spent in animated discussion of the extraordinary means by which he had been enabled to do so. As he and Puivert were on their way back to Etréport the barrister could talk of nothing but the dream which he had heard for the first time narrated by Raymond before they left the court-house.

"Do you suppose that they intended to murder you too?" he queried.

"I have never been able to decide. Did I frustrate their plans by my barricade at the cupboard-door, or did I merely dream the attempted entrance, as I certainly dreamed the accomplished crime?"

"Then, again, was it a dream of premonition?" debated Puivert. "Was it my poor cousin whom you foresaw in the bed? Or was it the spirit of the earlier victim still haunting the place, and communicating itself to your spirit?"

"Or mightn't it simply be that the evil intentions brooding in the Leroys' own minds, their mental rehearsal of the already familiar procedure, radiated out and entered my mind," Raymond suggested, "as the wireless message enters the receiver? In these days of wireless telegraphy, of the Röntgen rays, and of the still more wonderful Becquerel rays, I don't see how we are going to deny the possibility of telepathy too."

"Oh, we live in a world of marvellous possibilities," Puivert conceded. "And no one can say what hitherto undiscovered powers and properties are not lying close at hand. Indeed, the sum total of what we know, compared to all that is knowable, about equals, I suppose, the chicken's knowledge of the poultry-yard before he has chipped his way out of the shell!"

Raymond sat wrapped in thought, and Puivert confidently expected something stimulating and abstruse to be contributed to the subject. But when he did speak it was with surprising irrelevancy.

"RAYMOND SAT WRAPPED IN THOUGHT."

"RAYMOND SAT WRAPPED IN THOUGHT."

"Do you think," said he, "that Mlle. Léonie will ever recover her good spirits?"

Puivert was intensely disappointed, yet bore up gallantly.

"You and I will help my cousin to recover them," said he; and it would appear that Raymond's thought did here radiate out into the other's mind, for Maitre Puivert received at that moment a clear mental picture of the not distant day when this pleasant-faced young Englishman would be able to claim him as cousin too.