Volume Iii Part 3 (1/2)
A search was, of course, inst.i.tuted. Graves were opened in Pere la Chaise. The bodies exhumed had lain there too long, and were too much decomposed to be recognized. One only was identified. The notice for the burial, in this particular case, had been signed, the order given, and the fees paid, by Gabriel Gaillarde, who was known to the official clerk, who had to transact with him this little funereal business. The very trick, that had been arranged for me, had been successfully practised in his case. The person for whom the grave had been ordered, was purely fict.i.tious; and Gabriel Gaillarde himself filled the coffin, on the cover of which that false name was inscribed as well as upon a tomb-stone over the grave. Possibly, the same honour, under my pseudonym, may have been intended for me.
The identification was curious. This Gabriel Gaillarde had had a bad fall from a run-away horse, about five years before his mysterious disappearance. He had lost an eye and some teeth, in this accident, besides sustaining a fracture of the right leg, immediately above the ankle. He had kept the injuries to his face as profound a secret as he could. The result was, that the gla.s.s eye which had done duty for the one he had lost, remained in the socket, slightly displaced, of course, but recognizable by the ”artist” who had supplied it.
More pointedly recognizable were the teeth, peculiar in workmans.h.i.+p, which one of the ablest dentists in Paris had himself adapted to the chasms, the cast of which, owing to peculiarities in the accident, he happened to have preserved. This cast precisely fitted the gold plate found in the mouth of the skull. The mark, also, above the ankle, in the bone, where it had re-united, corresponded exactly with the place where the fracture had knit in the limb of Gabriel Gaillarde.
The Colonel, his younger brother, had been furious about the disappearance of Gabriel, and still more so about that of his money, which he had long regarded as his proper keepsake, whenever death should remove his brother from the vexations of living. He had suspected for a long time, for certain adroitly discovered reasons, that the Count de St. Alyre and the beautiful lady, his companion, countess, or whatever else she was, had pigeoned him. To this suspicion were added some others of a still darker kind; but in their first shape, rather the exaggerated reflections of his fury, ready to believe anything, than well-defined conjectures.
At length an accident had placed the Colonel very nearly upon the right scent; a chance, possibly lucky for himself, had apprized the scoundrel Planard that the conspirators--himself among the number--were in danger.
The result was that he made terms for himself, became an informer, and concerted with the police this visit made to the Chateau de la Carque, at the critical moment when every measure had been completed that was necessary to construct a perfect case against his guilty accomplices.
I need not describe the minute industry or forethought with which the police agents collected all the details necessary to support the case.
They had brought an able physician, who, even had Planard failed, would have supplied the necessary medical evidence.
My trip to Paris, you will believe, had not turned out quite so agreeably as I had antic.i.p.ated. I was the princ.i.p.al witness for the prosecution in this _cause celebre_, with all the _agremens_ that attend that enviable position. Having had an escape, as my friend Whistlewick said, ”with a squeak” for my life, I innocently fancied that I should have been an object of considerable interest to Parisian society; but, a good deal to my mortification, I discovered that I was the object of a good-natured but contemptuous merriment. I was a _balourd_, a _benet_, _un ane_, and figured even in caricatures. I became a sort of public character, a dignity,
”Unto which I was not born,”
and from which I fled as soon as I conveniently could, without even paying my friend the Marquis d'Harmonville a visit at his hospitable chateau.
The Marquis escaped scot-free. His accomplice, the Count, was executed.
The fair Eugenie, under extenuating circ.u.mstances--consisting, so far as I could discover of her good looks--got off for six years' imprisonment.
Colonel Gaillarde recovered some of his brother's money, out of the not very affluent estate of the Count and _soi-disant_ Countess. This, and the execution of the Count, put him in high good humour. So far from insisting on a hostile meeting, he shook me very graciously by the hand, told me that he looked upon the wound on his head, inflicted by the k.n.o.b of my stick, as having been received in an honourable, though irregular duel, in which he had no disadvantage or unfairness to complain of.
I think I have only two additional details to mention. The bricks discovered in the room with the coffin, had been packed in it, in straw, to supply the weight of a dead body, and to prevent the suspicions and contradictions that might have been excited by the arrival of an empty coffin at the chateau.
Secondly, the Countess's magnificent brilliants were examined by a lapidary, and p.r.o.nounced to be worth about five pounds to a tragedy-queen, who happened to be in want of a suite of paste.
The Countess had figured some years before as one of the cleverest actresses on the minor stage of Paris, where she had been picked up by the Count and used as his princ.i.p.al accomplice.
She it was who, admirably disguised, had rifled my papers in the carriage on my memorable night-journey to Paris. She also had figured as the interpreting magician of the palanquin at the ball at Versailles. So far as I was affected by that elaborate mystification it was intended to re-animate my interest, which, they feared, might flag in the beautiful Countess. It had its design and action upon other intended victims also; but of them there is, at present, no need to speak. The introduction of a real corpse--procured from a person who supplied the Parisian anatomists--involved no real danger, while it heightened the mystery and kept the prophet alive in the gossip of the town and in the thoughts of the noodles with whom he had conferred.
I divided the remainder of the summer and autumn between Switzerland and Italy.
As the well-worn phrase goes, I was a sadder if not a wiser man. A great deal of the horrible impression left upon my mind was due, of course, to the mere action of nerves and brain. But serious feelings of another and deeper kind remained. My after life was ultimately formed by the shock I had then received. Those impressions led me--but not till after many years--to happier though not less serious thoughts; and I have deep reason to be thankful to the all-merciful Ruler of events, for an early and terrible lesson in the ways of sin.
CARMILLA.
PROLOGUE.
Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.
This mysterious subject, he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning and ac.u.men, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man's collected papers.
As I publish the case, in these volumes, simply to interest the ”laity,”