Prince Zaleski | Page 7

darkness: on the floor
under the window is found the insensible body of the woman Cibras.
She is alive, but has fainted. Her right fingers are closed round the
handle of a large bowie-knife, which is covered with blood; parts of the
left are missing. All the jewelry has been stolen from the room. Lord
Pharanx lies on the bed, stabbed through the bedclothes to the heart.
Later on a bullet is also found imbedded in his brain. I should explain
that a trenchant edge, running along the bottom of the sash, was the
obvious means by which the fingers of Cibras had been cut off. This
had been placed there a few days before by the workman I spoke of.

Several secret springs had been placed on the inner side of the lower
horizontal piece of the window-frame, by pressing any one of which
the sash was lowered; so that no one, ignorant of the secret, could pass
out from within, without resting the hand on one of these springs, and
so bringing down the armed sash suddenly on the underlying hand.
'There was, of course, a trial. The poor culprit, in mortal terror of death,
shrieked out a confession of the murder just as the jury had returned
from their brief consultation, and before they had time to pronounce
their verdict of "guilty." But she denied shooting Lord Pharanx, and she
denied stealing the jewels; and indeed no pistol and no jewels were
found on her, or anywhere in the room. So that many points remain
mysterious. What part did the burglars play in the tragedy? Were they
in collusion with Cibras? Had the strange behaviour of at least one of
the inmates of Orven Hall no hidden significance? The wildest guesses
were made throughout the country; theories propounded. But no theory
explained all the points. The ferment, however, has now subsided.
To-morrow morning Maude Cibras ends her life on the gallows.'
Thus I ended my narrative.
Without a word Zaleski rose from the couch, and walked to the organ.
Assisted from behind by Ham, who foreknew his master's every whim,
he proceeded to render with infinite feeling an air from the _Lakmé_ of
Delibes; long he sat, dreamily uttering the melody, his head sunken on
his breast. When at last he rose, his great expanse of brow was clear,
and a smile all but solemn in its serenity was on his lips. He walked up
to an ivory escritoire, scribbled a few words on a sheet of paper, and
handed it to the negro with the order to take my trap and drive with the
message in all haste to the nearest telegraph office.
'That message,' he said, resuming his place on the couch, 'is a last word
on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification in the
final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together and confer
on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressed yourself,
it is evident that there are points which puzzle you--you do not get a
clean _coup d'oeil_ of the whole regiment of facts, and their causes,
and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out of that

confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrong
is done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task of
making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of punishing it.
But what happens? The society fails to rise to the occasion; on the
whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque, does not see the
crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Now this, you will
admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful I mean, not very in
itself, but very in its significance: and there must be a precise cause for
it. That cause is the lack of something not merely, or specially, in the
investigators of the wrong, but in the world at large--shall we not
boldly call it the lack of culture? Do not, however, misunderstand me:
by the term I mean not so much attainment in general, as mood in
particular. Whether or when such mood may become universal may be
to you a matter of doubt. As for me, I often think that when the era of
civilisation begins--as assuredly it shall some day begin--when the
races of the world cease to be credulous, ovine mobs and become
critical, human nations, then will be the ushering in of the ten thousand
years of a clairvoyant culture. But nowhere, and at no time during the
very few hundreds of years that man has occupied the earth, has there
been one single sign of its presence. In individuals, yes--in the Greek
Plato, and I