Chapter XXXIV: Henry Gastonard tells Paddy O’Connell of his visit to Madame Lea

Hôtel St. Paul, Paris,
October 24th, 1905.

Dear Paddy,--I had called upon Madame Lea before your letter reached me. This was done at Jules Farman’s request, for, be sure, that which you were thinking was not forgotten by a man so able.

I found Madame alone in a handsome apartment in the Avenue Kleber. She is not changed a wit, is the same beautiful languorous creature that we knew of old time.

I told you in my last letter that there is some talk of a reconciliation between her and her husband. This I do not believe, preferring the view that the Captain’s affections are temporarily engaged elsewhere. A man who is kind toward his own failings generally has some charity to spare for those of his wife. Possibly, the man is merely a philosopher--I do not make myself his judge.

It is sufficient to say that Madame received me with great cordiality, impressed upon me the fact that we were alone and bade me open my heart to her. If I did not do this, be sure that my attitude was by no means irresponsive. I had come to her house to learn if Madame Lea had a secret, and, learning that, to obtain it from her if that were possible. A false word would have ruined all. I realised that Mimi’s very life might depend upon success or failure; nor was I unaware that my own happiness might be won or lost in that very room.

We begin with a talk that was commonplace enough--her health and mine, my departure from Paris, the absurdities of our last meeting--and so to Mimi and my marriage by a natural sequence which diplomacy demanded. I found her eloquent immediately when Mimi’s name was mentioned. A woman will discuss a man’s love affair readily enough; there is no surer passport to his confidence, perhaps to his heart. And Lea d’Alençon, you will remember, speaks with little fluency upon any other subject.

Imagine, Paddy, a considerable apartment furnished with all the precarious grace of the Louis XV. period--but flauntingly modern and garish in its tone. Say that the walls are panelled in silk of a deep golden hue; put long mirrors wherever there are niches for them; place clocks of many kinds upon the tables and in the angles--Cupids marking the hour of the day; the Hesperides shouldering the golden apple; “Father Time treading Gaea beneath his giant feet”--all the baubles which are sold in the Rue de la Paix, and others which came God knows whence.

The furniture itself was bought, I believe, at the last Exhibition. It is fine but new, oh, so new!--and Lea’s gown of white and gold brocade is caught up by it as a flower of bizarre magnificence suitable to so bright a bed. As for Madame, her eyes are as black as ever, her hair as splendid--but I think the sun has pencilled that pallid face and that the years have not forgotten her. Not until I spoke of my marriage did she betray her wonted energy--not until that moment did the natural woman reveal itself.

“Why did you not tell me that you were in love with the girl when first I saw you?” she asked. “I would have helped you, Henry--is not a woman always willing to help a man in love?”

“That, my dear lady,” said I, “is an abstruse speculation. And I am in no mood for argument. Do you not know what the papers are saying of my wife?”

She posed languidly and watched me with some cunning.

“I am forgetting how to read English,” she said, “and, Henry, you have forgotten how to teach me.”

This I passed by. Were Lea d’Alençon upon the scaffold, she would open a flirtation with the executioner.

“The news is in your own journals,” I said, “and why not? Does Paris wish to forget one whose picture had no second in last year’s Salon? But I see that she does--and, Lea, you know the story as well as I do. Let us abandon the preliminaries, God knows I have little heart to begin at all.”

She shivered slightly, I knew not why; and for some while her thoughts appeared to be voyaging afar. Presently she recollected herself and addressed me seriously.

“Did you know the Count d’Antoine?”

“Absolutely, no.”

“Never met him while you were in Paris?”

“Never once--but remember my life. The Butte knows little of society--if there is any democracy in this world, it is that of the atelier and the conservatoire. At the Hôtel St. Paul I was merely an English gentleman seeing Paris. Why should I meet the Count d’Antoine----”

“But your wife----”

“Would you say that she knew him?”

She paused and bit her lip. I could imagine that her thoughts were travelling again. From this moment, I cannot tell you why, I began to suspect her. And, Paddy, remember what suspicion meant to me, the hopes and fears of it, the straw upon the stream of a woman’s caprice, the light upon the crest, to lose which were a torture.

“Would you say that Mimi knew the Count, Lea?”

She smiled now--a wan smile, not of jest, but of her own endeavour to deceive.

“There were few pretty women whom the Count did not know----”

“Then you were among the number?”

“I met him twice at the house of the American, Madame Martin, and again at the Austrian Embassy. A very handsome man, one of those who bewitch women with the notion that they have a thousand stories, but would never tell them. Oh, yes, I knew the Count.”

“And you believe it possible that Mimi knew him?”

“Everything is possible in Paris--did she not frequent the gardens?”

“It is a lie--she knows the West as a tourist from my own country. Her home was on the mountain.”

“You say so, Henry--oh, forgive me, I am trying to help you. If she did not know the Count, why did he go to her house?”

“The question I am here to ask you, Lea.”

“To ask me--am I a sorceress, Henry?”

“In so far as a sorceress is usually cleverer than her kind, yes.”

“Then you think--oh, but it is impossible, it is ridiculous.”

She laughed aloud, forcing herself to the mood as an instrument may be forced by cleverness to a note of discord foreign to it. I perceived now that she had brought me to her house for curiosity’s sake--not to tell me what she knew, but to ascertain the extent of my own suspicions. The discovery maddened me. I could have caught her arms, and thrust her down, and compelled her to confess. The torture she put upon me was as deliberate as the insult--and yet I suffered both for Mimi’s sake.

“It is ridiculous,” she repeated, “the same folly which sends a man to a woman when his trouble is a woman. I knew the Count; knew him as I have told you. Would he speak of every chit the atelier or the cabaret discovered for him? It is madness, Monsieur Henry. You know that I cannot help you.”

“And yet you invite me to your house?”

“To offer you my sympathy, my friendship--to hear you tell me why you did this thing; you, who could have a thousand friends among your own people, to seek one out of the great caravanserai of irresponsibles, to prate of her virtue, to fight for her, to marry her--is not a woman’s curiosity justly provoked?”

“And for curiosity’s sake you sent for me to-day--pardon me. I shall answer that question for you. There was something beyond curiosity, Madame d’Alençon, there was fear.”

She opened her eyes in wild alarm at this. I had seen her angry before, but never as she was angry now. There is something of the tigress in every passionate woman--a good deal of it in Lea d’Alençon. For a moment I could almost contemplate a second tragedy--and I do believe, Paddy, had there been a weapon to her hand, she would have struck me.

“Fear!” she cried, raising herself upon a frail arm, and making no attempt to modulate the shrill echo of her alarm. “Of what, then, am I afraid, Monsieur Gastonard?”

“You are afraid of discovery, Madame d’Alençon.”

She laid her head back upon the cushions, and laughed defiantly. I can give you no better account of her speech and actions than to say that they were those of an enraged woman whose breeding has no reserves of self control. A washerwoman complaining at the tub, a virago at the doors of a tavern had not been a spectacle less repulsive.

“Discovery, Monsieur Gastonard; a precious word, discovery! Are you mad? Must I say that you have lost your reason? Discovery of whom, of what--of the fact that all the world knows, that you married a _noctambule_, and have been whining ever since for sympathy; that your Jezebel is as old in her vices as she is young in years; that you were the dupe, the victim of the _canaille_ of the Butte--must I say this?--or shall I order you from my house; call my servants to protect me? Shall I do that, Monsieur Gastonard?”

I kept my temper; the stake was, beyond all belief, momentous to me. A false step would have put me outside her door; and remember how premature I had been, how much the unwise agent of my own unwarranted impulses.

“You are very angry with me,” I said; and added, “perhaps with reason. Of course, I should not have put it in that way, though it is a method which others will not hesitate to adopt----”

She turned at this--quickly, as one alarmed, and called to reason by something which hitherto had escaped her reasoning.

“Others, Monsieur Gastonard?”

“Certainly--others. There is my friend, Jules Farman, of the Secret Police. He knows much that neither of us might wish him to know. And please do not forget that there are circumstances of this crime which have set the whole world by the ears. There is not a policeman in Paris or in London who will not move heaven and earth to get at the truth. So we are all concerned in the matter--and if anyone of us has been foolish, said or done something which might implicate us, now is the time to set it right. I put this to you as a friend. Tell me why you sent for me to-day, and if the confession is to your disadvantage, I will accept your confidence as an atonement.”

There never was, Paddy, such a wild arrow shot in all this world before, and never will be again, I do believe. Nothing but a dogged faith in my own convictions could have bent such a bow. This woman had sent for me; her manner sufficiently declared her embarrassment. Unless she had something to offer me, my visit must end in her discomfiture. Lea d’Alençon is not the woman to bring such an affront upon herself. This I perceived, and in my mad desire for the truth could have knelt at her very feet, and implored her to aid me. She knew--the key was locked in the safe of her intrigues. My God! What a torture to say as much, and to realise my own impotence!

Well, the shot was fired, and the target touched. She had listened to me with her eyes wide open, and her mouth pursed up, as though anger were held at bay a little while by reflection. When she spoke, her voice had lost its shrill timbre of protest, and all its pleasing qualities been regained.

“We are all foolish sometimes, Monsieur Gastonard. I was foolish when I counted you among the number of my friends. Let us not speak of it. You say that I brought you to my house because I know something. Very well; I do know something, and you shall know it--the dead Count was your wife’s lover; that is what I know, Monsieur Gastonard.”

“It is a lie,” said I. And I leaned back in my chair, and watched her critically. “So poor a lie that so clever a woman as Madame Lea should not have told it.”

She turned her eyes away from me, and continued her infamous story, unabashed and unashamed.

“It is a lie,” I repeated--but her words held me to my chair as though an unknown hand caught me by the throat. “Why do you tell me so foolish a lie, Madame Lea?”

She rose and came across to me. The spell of her mendacity was broken.

“I tell it because I loved you,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes, it is the truth, and no lie. I loved you, and you left me for this creature, this _canaille_, this girl of the fêtes and the circus. Shall I keep the truth from you now? She murdered the Count when he had no more money, and his presence was an embarrassment. Do not his friends know it--did not the Marquis de Saint Faur shut his door upon him for that very reason?”

“I will ask the Marquis,” said I. But I could hardly speak the word for trembling.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “ask him--but you will have far to go, for he is at Corfu, upon his yacht.”

“I beg your pardon; he returned to Paris last night.”

It was as though I had struck her in the face. She stood there as some marble figure of distress, motionless, with a fixed and unchanging smile upon her lips.

“The Marquis has returned?”

“As I say--last night. I am going now to his house.”

I turned upon my heel, and left her. She had not moved from the place when I passed out. I could see that a word would have unsealed her lips and cast her, a mendicant for pity, at my feet. But I went straight on to the hall and the street, and calling the first cab which came to my view, I ordered the man to drive me to the house of Monsieur le Marquis de Saint Faur.

He was not within--he is to see me to-night.

Ah, Paddy, If I could but know what he will say--if I could but be sure that this foul lie will pass no human lips again!

The heart has gone out of me--I must watch and wait through the long night--

Your friend,
Harry Gastonard.