Inquiry was made there, in the afternoon the sad discovery ensued, and after the necessary legal formalities, the body was brought home.
And the murderer? The only data on which the police could proceed were soon exhausted.The trunk left by the mysterious stranger, whose name was certainly not Rochdale, was opened.It was full of things bought haphazard, like the trunk itself, from a bric-a-brac seller who was found, but who gave a totally different description of the purchaser from that which had been obtained from the concierge of the Imperial Hotel.The latter declared that Rochdale was a dark, sunburnt man with a long thick beard; the former described him as of fair complexion and beardless.The cab on which the trunk had been placed immediately after the purchase, was traced, and the deposition of the driver coincided exactly with that of the bric-a-brac seller.The assassin had been taken in the cab, first to a shop, where he bought a dressing-bag, next to a linen-draper's where he bought the towels, thence to the Lyons railway station, and there he had deposited the trunk and the dressing-bag at the parcels office.Then the other cab which had taken him, three weeks afterwards, to the Imperial Hotel, was traced, and the description given by the second driver agreed with the deposition of the concierge.From this it was concluded that in the interval formed by these three weeks, the assassin had dyed his skin and his hair, for all the depositions were in agreement with respect to the stature, figure, bearing, and tone of voice of the individual.This hypothesis was confirmed by one Jullien, a hairdresser, who came forward of his own accord to make the following statement:
On the day in the preceding month, a man who answered to the description of Rochdale given by the first driver and the bric-a-brac seller, being fair-haired, pale, tall, and broad-shouldered, came to his shop to order a wig and a beard; these were to be so well constructed that no one could recognize him, and were intended, he said, to be worn at a fancy ball.The unknown person was accordingly furnished with a black wig and a black beard, and he provided himself with all the necessary ingredients for disguising himself as a native of South America, purchasing kohl for blackening his eyebrows, and a composition of Sienna earth and amber for coloring his complexion.He applied these so skilfully, that when he returned to the hairdresser's shop, Jullien did not recognize him.The unusualness of a fancy ball given in the middle of summer, and the perfection to which his customer carried the art of disguise, astonished the hairdresser so much that his attention was immediately attracted by the newspaper articles upon "The Mystery of the Imperial Hotel," as the affair was called.At my father's house two letters were found; both bore the signature of Rochdale, and were dated from London, but without envelopes, and were written in a reversed hand, pronounced by experts to be disguised.He would have had to forward a certain document on receipt of these letters; probably that document was in the letter-case which the assassin carried off after the crime.The firm of Crawford had a real existence at San Francisco, but had never formed the project of making a railroad in Cochin China.The authorities were confronted by one of those criminal problems which set imagination at defiance.It was probably not for the purpose of theft that the assassin had resorted to such numerous and clever devices; he would hardly have led a man of business into so skilfully laid a trap merely to rob him of a few thousand francs and a watch.
Was the murder committed for revenge?
A search into the life of my father revealed nothing whatever that could render such a theory tenable.Every suspicion, every supposition, was routed by the indisputable and inexplicable fact that Rochdale was a reality whose existence could not be contested, that he had been at the Imperial Hotel from seven o'clock in the evening of one day until two o'clock in the afternoon of the next, and that he had then vanished, like a phantom, leaving one only trace behind--ONE ONLY.This man had come there, other men had spoken to him; the manner in which he had passed the night and the morning before the crime was known.He had done his deed of murder, and then--nothing."All Paris" was full of this affair, and when I made a collection, long afterwards, of newspapers which referred to it, I found that for six whole weeks it occupied a place in the chronicle of every day.
At length the fatal heading, "The Mystery of the Imperial Hotel,"disappeared from the columns of the newspapers, as the remembrance of that ghastly enigma faded from the minds of their readers, and solicitude about it ceased to occupy the police.The tide of life, rolling that poor waif amid its waters, had swept on.Yes; but I, the son? How should I ever forget the old woman's story that had filled my childhood with tragic horror? How should I ever cease to see the pale face of the murdered man, with its fixed, open eyes?
How should I not say: "I will avenge thee, thou poor ghost?" Poor ghost! When I read Hamlet for the first time, with that passionate avidity which comes from an analogy between the moral situation depicted in a work of art and some crisis of our own life, Iremember that I regarded the Prince of Denmark with horror.Ah! if the ghost of my father had come to relate the drama of his death to me, with his unbreathing lips, would I have hesitated one instant?
No! I protested to myself; and then? I learned all, and yet Ihesitated, like him, though less than he, to dare the terrible deed.Silence! silence! Let me go back to the facts.
