第51章

Rarely did any case occur without some peculiarity more or less interesting.In that which happened on the following night, making the fifth in the series, an impressive incident varied the monotony of horrors.In this case the parties aimed at were two elderly ladies, who conducted a female boarding school.None of the pupils had as yet returned to school from their vacation; but two sisters, young girls of thirteen and sixteen, coming from a distance, had stayed at school throughout the Christmas holidays.It was the youngest of these who gave the only evidence of any value, and one which added a new feature of alarm to the existing panic.Thus it was that her testimony was given: On the day before the murder, she and her sister were sitting with the old ladies in a room fronting to the street; the elder ladies were reading, the younger ones drawing.Louisa, the youngest, never had her ear inattentive to the slightest sound, and once it struck her that she heard the creaking of a foot upon the stairs.She said nothing, but, slipping out of the room, she ascertained that the two female servants were in the kitchen, and could not have been absent; that all the doors and windows, by which ingress was possible, were not only locked, but bolted and barred--a fact which excluded all possibility of invasion by means of false keys.Still she felt persuaded that she had heard the sound of a heavy foot upon the stairs.It was, however, daylight, and this gave her confidence;so that, without communicating her alarm to anybody, she found courage to traverse the house in every direction; and, as nothing was either seen or heard, she concluded that her ears had been too sensitively awake.Yet that night, as she lay in bed, dim terrors assailed her, especially because she considered that, in so large a house, some closet or other might have been overlooked, and, in particular, she did not remember to have examined one or two chests, in which a man could have lain concealed.Through the greater part of the night she lay awake; but as one of the town clocks struck four, she dismissed her anxieties, and fell asleep.

The next day, wearied with this unusual watching, she proposed to her sister that they should go to bed earlier than usual.This they did; and, on their way upstairs, Louisa happened to think suddenly of a heavy cloak, which would improve the coverings of her bed against the severity of the night.The cloak was hanging up in a closet within a closet, both leading off from a large room used as the young ladies' dancing school.These closets she had examined on the previous day, and therefore she felt no particular alarm at this moment.The cloak was the first article which met her sight; it was suspended from a hook in the wall, and close to the door.She took it down, but, in doing so, exposed part of the wall and of the floor, which its folds had previously concealed.

Turning away hastily, the chances were that she had gone without making any discovery.In the act of turning, however, her light fell brightly on a man's foot and leg.Matchless was her presence of mind; having previously been humming an air, she continued to do so.But now came the trial; her sister was bending her steps to the same closet.If she suffered her to do so, Lottchen would stumble on the same discovery, and expire of fright.On the other hand, if she gave her a hint, Lottchen would either fail to understand her, or, gaining but a glimpse of her meaning, would shriek aloud, or by some equally decisive expression convey the fatal news to the assassin that he had been discovered.In this torturing dilemma fear prompted an expedient, which to Lottchen appeared madness, and to Louisa herself the act of a sibyl instinct with blind inspiration."Here," said she, "is our dancing room.

When shall we all meet and dance again together?" Saying which, she commenced a wild dance, whirling her candle round her head until the motion extinguished it; then, eddying round her sister in narrowing circles, she seized Lottchen's candle also, blew it out, and then interrupted her own singing to attempt a laugh.But the laugh was hysterical.The darkness, however, favored her; and, seizing her sister's arm, she forced her along, whispering, "Come, come, come!" Lottchen could not be so dull as entirely to misunderstand her.She suffered herself to be led up the first flight of stairs, at the head of which was a room looking into the street.In this they would have gained an asylum, for the door had a strong bolt.But, as they were on the last steps of the landing, they could hear the hard breathing and long strides of the murderer ascending behind them.He had watched them through a crevice, and had been satisfied by the hysterical laugh of Louisa that she had seen him.In the darkness he could not follow fast, from ignorance of the localities, until he found himself upon the stairs.Louisa, dragging her sister along, felt strong as with the strength of lunacy, but Lottchen hung like a weight of lead upon her.She rushed into the room, but at the very entrance Lottchen fell.At that moment the assassin exchanged his stealthy pace for a loud clattering ascent.Already he was on the topmost stair; already he was throwing himself at a bound against the door, when Louisa, having dragged her sister into the room, closed the door and sent the bolt home in the very instant that the murderer's hand came into contact with the handle.Then, from the violence of her emotions, she fell down in a fit, with her arm around the sister whom she had saved.