“It’s terrible.  It verges on the supernatural.  The truth will never be known.”

The judge turned to her: 

“True, madame, it is likely that the actual facts will never be discovered.  As for the word ‘supernatural’ which you have just used, it has nothing to do with the matter.  We are in the presence of a very cleverly conceived and executed crime, so well enshrouded in mystery that we cannot disentangle it from the involved circumstances which surround it.  But once I had to take charge of an affair in which the uncanny seemed to play a part.  In fact, the case became so confused that it had to be given up.”

Several women exclaimed at once: 

“Oh!  Tell us about it!”

M. Bermutier smiled in a dignified manner, as a judge should, and went on: 

“Do not think, however, that I, for one minute, ascribed anything in the case to supernatural influences.  I believe only in normal causes.  But if, instead of using the word ‘supernatural’ to express what we do not understand, we were simply to make use of the word ‘inexplicable,’ it would be much better.  At any rate, in the affair of which I am about to tell you, it is especially the surrounding, preliminary circumstances which impressed me.  Here are the facts: 

“I was, at that time, a judge at Ajaccio, a little white city on the edge of a bay which is surrounded by high mountains.

“The majority of the cases which came up before me concerned vendettas.  There are some that are superb, dramatic, ferocious, heroic.  We find there the most beautiful causes for revenge of which one could dream, enmities hundreds of years old, quieted for a time but never extinguished; abominable stratagems, murders becoming massacres and almost deeds of glory.  For two years I heard of nothing but the price of blood, of this terrible Corsican prejudice which compels revenge for insults meted out to the offending person and all his descendants and relatives.  I had seen old men, children, cousins murdered; my head was full of these stories.

“One day I learned that an Englishman had just hired a little villa at the end of the bay for several years.  He had brought with him a French servant, whom he had engaged on the way at Marseilles.

“Soon this peculiar person, living alone, only going out to hunt and fish, aroused a widespread interest.  He never spoke to any one, never went to the town, and every morning he would practice for an hour or so with his revolver and rifle.

“Legends were built up around him.  It was said that he was some high personage, fleeing from his fatherland for political reasons; then it was affirmed that he was in hiding after having committed some abominable crime.  Some particularly horrible circumstances were even mentioned.

“In my judicial position I thought it necessary to get some information about this man, but it was impossible to learn anything.  He called himself Sir John Rowell.