Grown-up people are much too ready to think it is equally easy to tell lies to all children.
Now, I was a child who pondered long in my thoughts over things that were said to me, and by dint1 of putting a number of small facts together, I came to the conviction that I did not know the whole truth. If my father's death had occurred in the manner stated to me, why should the man-servant have asked me, one day when he took me out to walk, what had been said to me about it? And when I answered him, why did he say no more, and, being a very talkative person, why had he kept silence ever since? Why, too, did I feel the same silence all around me, in the air, sitting on every lip, hidden in every look? Why was the subject of conversation constantly changed whenever I drew near? I guessed this by many trifling2 signs. Why was not a single newspaper left lying about, whereas, during my father's lifetime, the three journals to which we subscribed3 were always to be found on a table in the salon4? Above all, why did both the masters and my schoolfellows look at me so curiously5, when I went back to school early in October, four months after our great misfortune? Alas6! it was their curiosity which revealed the full extent of the catastrophe7 to me.
It was only a fortnight after the reopening of the school, when I happened to be playing one morning with two new boys; I remember their names, Rastonaix and Servoin, now, and I can see the big fat cheeks of Rastonaix and the ferret-like face of Servoin. Although we were day pupils, we were allowed a quarter of an hour's recreation at school, between the Latin and English lessons. The two boys had engaged me on the previous day for a game of ninepins, and when it was over, they came close to me, and looking at each other to keep up their courage, they put to me the following questions, point-blank:
"Is it true that the murderer of your father has been arrested?"
"And that he is to be guillotined?"
This occurred sixteen years ago, but I cannot now recall the beating of my heart at those words without horror. I must have turned frightfully pale, for the two boys, who had struck me this blow with the carelessness of their age—of our age—stood there disconcerted. A blind fury seized upon me, urging me to command them to be silent, and to hit them with my fists if they spoke9 again; but at the same time I felt a wild impulse of curiosity— what if this were the explanation of the silence by which I felt myself surrounded?—and also a pang10 of fear, the fear of the unknown. The blood rushed into my face, and I stammered11 out:
"I do not know."
The drum-tap, summoning us back to the schoolroom, separated us. What a day I passed, bewildered by my trouble, turning the two terrible sentences over and over again.
It would have been natural for me to question my mother; but the truth is, I felt quite unable to repeat to her what my unconscious tormentors had said. It was strange but true, that thenceforth my mother, whom nevertheless I loved with all my heart, exercised a paralyzing influence over me. She was so beautiful in her pallor, so royally beautiful and proud.
No, I should never have ventured to reveal to her that an irresistible13 doubt of the story she had told me was implanted in my mind merely by the two questions of my schoolfellows; but, as I could not keep silence entirely14 and live, I resolved to have recourse to Julie, my former nurse. She was a little woman, fifty years of age, an old maid too, with a flat, wrinkled face, like an over-ripe apple; but her eyes were full of kindness, and indeed so was her whole face, although her lips were drawn15 in by the loss of her front teeth, and this gave her a witch-like mouth. She had deeply mourned my father in my company, for she had been in his service before his marriage. Julie was retained specially16 on my account, and in addition to her the household consisted of the cook, the man-servant, and the femme de chambre. Julie put me to bed and tucked me in, heard me say my prayers, and listened to my little troubles.
"Oh! the wretches17!" she exclaimed, when I opened my heart to her and repeated the words that had agitated18 me so terribly. "And yet it could not have been hidden from you forever." Then it was that she told me all the truth, there in my little room, speaking very low and bending over me, while I lay sobbing19 in my narrow bed. She suffered in the telling of that truth as much as I in the hearing of it, and the touch of her dry old hand, with fingers scarred by the needle, fell softly on my curly head as she stroked it.
That ghastly story, which bore down my youth with the weight of an impenetrable mystery, I have found written in the newspapers of the day, but not more clearly than it was narrated20 by my dear old Julie. Here it is, plainly set forth12, as I have turned and re- turned it over and over again in my thoughts, day after day, with the vain hope of penetrating21 it.
My father, who was a distinguished22 advocate, had resigned his practice in court some years previously23, and set up as a financial agent, hoping by that means to make a fortune more rapidly than by the law. His good official connection, his scrupulous24 probity25, his extensive knowledge of the most important questions, and his great capacity for work, had speedily secured him an exceptional position. He employed ten secretaries, and the million and a half francs which my mother and I inherited formed only the beginnings of the wealth to which he aspired26, partly for his own sake, much more for his son's but, above all, for his wife's—he was passionately27 attached to her. Notes and letters found among his papers proved that at the time of his death, he had been for a month previously in correspondence with a certain person named, or calling himself, William Henry Rochdale, who was commissioned by the firm of Crawford, in San Francisco, to obtain a railway concession29 in Cochin China, then recently conquered, from the French Government. It was with Rochdale that my father had the appointment of which he spoke before he left my mother, M. Termonde, and myself, after breakfast, on the last fatal morning. The Instruction had no difficulty in establishing this fact. The appointed place of meeting was the Imperial Hotel, a large building, with a long facade30, in the Rue8 de Rivoli, not far from the Ministere de la Marine31. The entire block of houses was destroyed by fire in the Commune; but during my childhood I frequently begged Julie to take me to the spot, that I might gaze, with an aching heart, upon the handsome courtyard adorned32 with green shrubs33, the wide, carpeted staircase, and the slab34 of black marble, encrusted with gold, that marked the entrance to the place whither my father wended his way, while my mother was talking with M. Termonde, and I was playing in the room with them. My father had left us at a quarter-past twelve, and he must have taken a quarter of an hour to walk to the Imperial Hotel, for the concierge35, having seen the corpse36, recognized it, and remembered that it was just about half-past twelve when my father inquired of him what was the number of Mr. Rochdale's rooms. This gentleman, a foreigner, had arrived on the previous day, and had fixed37, after some hesitation38, upon an apartment situated39 on the second floor, and composed of a salon and a bedroom, with a small ante-room, which separated the apartment from the landing outside. From that moment he had not gone out and he dined the same evening and breakfasted the next morning in his salon. The concierge also remembered that Rochdale came down alone, at about two o'clock on the second day; but he was too much accustomed to the continual coming and going to notice whether the visitor who arrived at half- past twelve had or had not gone away again. Rochdale handed the key of his apartment to the concierge, with directions that anybody who came, wanting to see him, should be asked to wait in his salon. After this he walked away in a leisurely40 manner, with a business- like portfolio41 under his arm, smoking a cigar, and he did not reappear.
The day passed on, and towards night two housemaids entered the apartment of the foreign gentlemen to prepare his bed. They passed through the salon without observing anything unusual. The traveler's luggage, composed of a large and much-used trunk and a quite new dressing-bag, were there. His dressing-things were arranged on the top of a cabinet. The next day, towards noon, the same housemaids entered the apartment, and finding that the traveler had slept out, they merely replaced the day-covering upon the bed, and paid no attention to the salon. Precisely42 the same thing occurred in the evening; but on the following day, one of the women having come into the apartment early, and again finding everything intact, began to wonder what this meant. She searched about, and speedily discovered a body, lying at full length underneath43 the sofa, with the head wrapped in towels. She uttered a scream which brought other servants to the spot, and the corpse of my father—alas! it was he—was removed from the hiding-place in which the assassin had cunningly concealed44 it. It was not difficult to reconstruct the scene of the murder. A wound in the back of the neck indicated that the unfortunate man had been shot from behind, while seated at the table examining papers, by a person standing45 close beside him. The report had not been heard, on account of the proximity46 of the weapon, and also because of the constant noise in the street, and the position of the salon at the back of the ante-room. Besides, the precautions taken by the murderer rendered it reasonable to believe that he had carefully chosen a weapon which would produce but little sound. The ball had penetrated47 the spinal48 marrow49 and death had been instantaneous. The assassin had placed new unmarked towels in readiness, and in these he wrapped up the head and neck of his victim, so that there were no traces of blood. He had dried his hands on a similar towel, after rinsing50 them with water taken from the carafe51; this water he had poured back into the same bottle, which was found concealed behind the drapery of the mantel-piece. Was the robbery real or pretended? My father's watch was gone, and neither his letter-case nor any paper by which his identity could be proved was found upon his body. An accidental indication led, however, to his immediate52 recognition. Inside the pocket of his waistcoat was a little band of tape, bearing the address of the tailor's establishment. Inquiry53 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 exhausted54. The trunk left by the mysterious stranger, whose name was certainly not Rochdale, was opened. It was full of things bought haphazard55, 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 complexion56 and beardless. The cab on which the trunk had been placed immediately after the purchase, was traced, and the deposition57 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 interval58 formed by these three weeks, the assassin had dyed his skin and his hair, for all the depositions59 were in agreement with respect to the stature60, 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 wig61 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 eyebrows62, and a composition of Sienna earth and amber63 for coloring his complexion. He applied64 these so skilfully65, 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 defiance66. 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 inexplicable67 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 phantom68, 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 enigma69 faded from the minds of their readers, and solicitude70 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 tragic71 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 avenge72 thee, thou poor ghost?" Poor ghost! When I read Hamlet for the first time, with that passionate28 avidity which comes from an analogy between the moral situation depicted73 in a work of art and some crisis of our own life, I remember 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 I hesitated, like him, though less than he, to dare the terrible deed. Silence! silence! Let me go back to the facts.
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1
dint
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| n.由于，靠；凹坑 | |
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2
trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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subscribed
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| v.捐助( subscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；签署，题词；订阅；同意 | |
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4
salon
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| n.[法]沙龙；客厅；营业性的高级服务室 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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7
catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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stammered
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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13
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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wretches
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| n.不幸的人( wretch的名词复数 )；可怜的人；恶棍；坏蛋 | |
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agitated
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| adj.被鼓动的，不安的 | |
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sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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narrated
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| v.故事( narrate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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22
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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scrupulous
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| adj.审慎的，小心翼翼的，完全的，纯粹的 | |
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probity
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| n.刚直；廉洁，正直 | |
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aspired
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| v.渴望，追求( aspire的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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29
concession
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| n.让步，妥协；特许(权) | |
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30
facade
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| n.(建筑物的)正面，临街正面；外表 | |
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marine
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| adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵 | |
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adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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slab
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| n.平板，厚的切片；v.切成厚板，以平板盖上 | |
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concierge
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| n.管理员；门房 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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situated
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| adj.坐落在...的，处于某种境地的 | |
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leisurely
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| adj.悠闲的；从容的，慢慢的 | |
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portfolio
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| n.公事包；文件夹；大臣及部长职位 | |
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42
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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45
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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46
proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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47
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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48
spinal
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| adj.针的，尖刺的，尖刺状突起的；adj.脊骨的，脊髓的 | |
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49
marrow
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| n.骨髓；精华；活力 | |
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50
rinsing
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| n.清水，残渣v.漂洗( rinse的现在分词 )；冲洗；用清水漂洗掉（肥皂泡等）；（用清水）冲掉 | |
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51
carafe
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| n.玻璃水瓶 | |
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52
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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53
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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54
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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55
haphazard
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| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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56
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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57
deposition
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| n.免职，罢官；作证；沉淀；沉淀物 | |
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58
interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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59
depositions
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| 沉积（物）( deposition的名词复数 )； （在法庭上的）宣誓作证； 处置； 罢免 | |
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60
stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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61
wig
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| n.假发 | |
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62
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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63
amber
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| n.琥珀；琥珀色；adj.琥珀制的 | |
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64
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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65
skilfully
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| adv. (美skillfully)熟练地 | |
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66
defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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67
inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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68
phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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69
enigma
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| n.谜，谜一样的人或事 | |
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70
solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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71
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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72
avenge
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| v.为...复仇，为...报仇 | |
参考例句： |
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depicted
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| 描绘，描画( depict的过去式和过去分词 )； 描述 | |
参考例句： |
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