Chapter XXXV: We meet the Marquis de Saint Faur and another old friend

Hôtel St. Paul, Paris,
October 25th, 1905.

Dear Paddy,--I am keeping my promise, and, at much inconvenience, hastening to let you know, both what was done last night, and what is proposed to be done to-day. That you have no news I gather from your silence. Had there been but a single ray of light, I know with what speed your kindness would have winged it on to Paris. An empty letter-bag chills my hope with its intimation of despair and hopelessness.

Oh, I cannot get away from it, Paddy--asleep or awake, the question rolls in my ears with a sound of drums. She is alive--she is dead. A thousand arguments push reason and patience aside, now bidding me accuse, now reproach her--anon chanting an office of black conspiracy, again deluding me with fair promises. For would not Mimi, of all people in the world, have found a way, if any door were open to her cleverness? What trick, I ask, what mendacity keeps her silent? Has an unknown assassin dared a second crime, that the first may be covered? And why, and why--why did this come to me in the springtime of my happiness? What mockery of my destiny sent it to my door at such a time?

I have seen the Marquis de Saint Faur, and he has told me that Lea’s story is a black lie. The arrows of a base calumny rarely stick, Paddy, but they prick and bruise, and often leave a scar. I am ashamed of having gone to his house, and yet not ashamed. His manner perplexed me utterly--we make nothing of him, and yet we may not dismiss him. Is it not becoming a mystery beyond all hope, all thought?

I am convinced of one thing, and it is this, that Lea d’Alençon never intended me to hear the Marquis’s name. It escaped her lips by accident, at a moment of stress, when the lie meant all to her, and the man who would deny it was, as she believed, beyond the confines of appeal. An accident of speech, a chance word uttered by Jules Farman, informed me of St. Faur’s unexpected return to Paris, and last night I called upon him at his hotel.

This was at nine o’clock. Despite the season, the famous corridor of the Ritz Hôtel showed me many familiar faces. I heard the American tongue, with its shrill suggestion of dominance; passed by notorious “affairs” and discovered the Marquis at last, one of four at a little table, and two of them as well dressed and elegant women as I have ever seen in this famous place.

The Marquis himself is all that his ancestors might have been before the “grand manner” perished in France. Tall and stately, with a bearing dignified beyond words, his bow is not to be matched off the boards of the Theatre Français; while his reception of me was that of a great nobleman who has been unwelcomely disturbed but would utter no complaint. In his hand he held the card upon which I had scribbled the words--“concerning Monsieur le Comte d’Antoine.” But I had looked to see him in a private room, and my apologies were expressed with all the earnestness I could command.

“Mr. Gastonard,” he asked me, “must this be urgent?”

“It shall be when Monsieur le Marquis may please--but no words will express my gratitude if it may be soon.”

“I have an apartment here,” he went on, “will you do me the honour to come at eleven o’clock to-night?”

I said that I would do so, and turned away. He had named me aloud, however, and one of the women--of singular beauty and much sweetness of manner--uttered an audible exclamation, and stared, I thought, more directly than good manners permitted. At the door the porter, who knows me well, told me that the Marquis was staying in the house.

“And the ladies with him?” I asked.

“They are the Princess Hélène of Ilidze and her cousin, Monsieur.”

There was nothing to call for remark here, and I went out and paced the boulevards until the appointed hour arrived. In the old days, Paddy, nothing gave me more delight than to walk alone in Paris when the lights were blazing and the cafés black with people and all the boulevards alive with the hum of leisure and frivolity. What a scene unmatched, I used to think it; what drolleries one witnessed; comedies fed upon sugar and water; tragedies brooding upon black coffee and a twopenny cigar--everywhere the fiddlers thrashing unoffending catgut; women talking against time--men against their sweet persuasiveness--waiters playing the acrobat--fat proprietors of restaurants perspiring and beaming at their doors--what a scene and what a people!

And the Jehu on his box and the turbulent sea of crashing traffic coming whence God alone knew--the ferocious cries of peaceable men--the glittering pavements--the spreading aureoles of monstrous lights--theatre flares as triumphal arches of shimmering fire--great wide windows to bewitch you with their merry revelations--the throat of Paris grown hoarse but weary--ah, I say, what scenes and what a people! And yet I could pass them by to-night without a thought, believe that they mocked me, cry upon the happiness and the laughter of others, say that the music was discordant, the women so many Jezebels, the men a company of chattering fools, the whole city a pandemonium whence I would willingly escape. So does trouble war upon us, so is this land fair or a wilderness, as fortune shall dictate.

The Marquis was in his room when I returned at eleven o’clock. He wore a black smoking-cap and had lighted a cigar. You know the rooms upon the first floor of the Ritz, little arbours, as it were, cut out of those vast walls, but arbours furnished as the old châteaux were, and often borrowing the treasures of châteaux for their ornaments. The apartment was lighted by a single reading-lamp, placed upon a table at the Marquis’s side. Whisky and soda and tumblers stood to hand. He was alone and I perceived at once that he received me not unwillingly and with some curiosity.

“You are here to speak of my poor friend the Count d’Antoine,” he said. “I know your name, Mr. Gastonard, and the story of these recent days. Be good enough to sit down. I regret that I should have been compelled to defer the hour of our meeting, but the reasons were self-evident. There are the cigarettes, if you will smoke.”

He lighted one himself, standing with his back towards me, but scanning my face, as I could see, in the mirror above the chimney-piece. Fear of my own quick tongue bade me imitate him and smoke--for there is no weapon of discreet speech so sure as a cigarette in the mouth. When he had seated himself, I stated my purpose very frankly.

“Yes,” I said, “it would be about the Count d’Antoine. He was very well known to you, Marquis--I may say that he was your friend.”

“Most willingly--one of the oldest of my friends and one of the most esteemed.”

“Then my second question needs no apology. I have been told that my wife was his mistress. Is that story true or is it false?”

He did not answer me immediately. Perhaps my own pitiful state alarmed him, for I could not master my distress. It was there for all the world to spy upon--a man’s heart stripped for others to revile.

“Is the story true or false, Monsieur le Marquis? Pardon my insistence--your answer means more to me than I can tell you.”

Again a little spell of silence, and that impenetrable mask upon an immobile face to defy me. Oh, my God, why did he not speak? Did honour forbid, or the truth?

“I understand you very well, Mr. Gastonard,” he said at last, “and I think that I may reply as you would wish--”

“You think, Monsieur?”

He waved the objection aside a little masterfully.

“Who can answer for a man’s secrets--much less for a woman’s? I believe that my friend the Count had never seen Madame Gastonard until he visited her in London.”

“Thank God for that--thank God!”

“He had never mentioned her name to me--so much I remember perfectly. And I think he would have done so if the facts were as you suppose.”

“I suppose nothing, Marquis. A woman sent me here--Madame Lea d’Alençon.”

“Madame d’Alençon--ha!”

He smiled quietly, but a phase of anger succeeded the smile, and upon that a glance of mistrust.

“Madame d’Alençon--what does she know of my poor friend?”

“She met him at the house of Madame Martin, the American. This story of an intrigue reached me first from her lips--she sent me to you believing that you were at Corfu upon your yacht. I had learned by accident of your altered plans--and so I came to you.”

He nodded his head, staring down into the blazing fire of logs which had been kindled upon my entry.

“You did very well,” he exclaimed, “very well to come to me. The Count was more than my friend--he was almost a brother to me.”

“Then you know why he went to England?”

He did not look up, but his very attitude revealed something to me. This was a question he would willingly have been spared.

“I--what should I know of it?”

“Pardon me--you were intimate friends, and the supposition is not illogical. Then you knew nothing, Monsieur?”

“Of what happened, nothing. Had it been otherwise, the police would have heard from me the same day.”

“And you hazard nothing, Monsieur le Marquis?”

He smoked quietly for a little while--but answered me eventually by an evasion.

“You are asking me many questions--may I put one or two to you?”

“I shall answer everything, Marquis.”

“They will be embarrassing questions, but they are not put without a purpose.”

“That is understood.”

“You first met Madame Gastonard at one of the Fêtes about Paris, I think?”

“At the Fête de Neuilly.”

“And were attracted by something in her appearance or manner? Would it be very difficult to tell me a little intimately of that, Mr. Gastonard?”

“By no means. I was attracted firstly by her originality, and then by my belief that she was not born amongst these people. A Louis Quinze clock is beautiful at Fontainebleau, but you pass it quickly where there are hundreds like it. In the Rue de Pigalle one would remark it immediately. I saw that she had not been born to such an environment. Her voice had the timbre of birth. There were gestures, phrases, a manner which cried loudly for a truer story. I stayed to talk to her, as one might rest to pick a rose in a swamp. That was the oddest thing, Marquis--the advantage remained with her. No one to my knowledge has ever patronised Mimi the Simpleton.”

“Why did they give her that name?”

“I can but surmise. She lived in her dreams apart from them. Their world was not her world. She walked through it with skirts lifted, upon the tiptoe of her birthright. To me it always seemed that her mind strove ceaselessly to recall something which illness or terror had blotted from its recollection. She was a born leader of the people--she ruled by right of blood--the most ignorant were conscious of it.”

“And she could give you no account of her past?”

“So meagre an account that its pursuit were hopeless. She remembered an old woman named Marie, the great white road from Blois to Orleans, voices in a wood--and then the Showman’s booth. The ‘beforetime’ lay in the golden mists of childhood. She believes that it was a happy time--this memory of a burden as of happiness has come through the mists and has never been laid down. Oh, yes, Mimi was happy in her childhood, I have no doubt of it.”

“You pursued your inquiries none the less, Mr. Gastonard?”

“I have spent thousands of pounds in the quest----”

“And nothing further has been learned?”

“Nothing has been learned.”

He nodded his head, and for quite a long while said no word. He was standing up when next he spoke and he looked me fairly in the face.

“Mr. Gastonard,” he exclaimed, “I sent the Comte d’Antoine to England.”

“You, Monsieur!”

“As I say, I sent him to England, to see Madame Gastonard, and, if possible, to persuade her to pay a brief visit to Paris.”

“Monsieur--Monsieur!”

“For a purpose of an honourable, I will say, in fact, of a noble character; but one I cannot reveal even to you.”

“Then you know her story, Marquis?”

“I believe that I know it--but as belief which is not certainty might work an inconceivable mischief, my lips are sealed.”

“But--but----”

My astonishment did not move him. He continued in an inflexible tone.

“I sent the Comte d’Antoine to England to verify certain facts which had come to my knowledge. He was murdered in your house; but how or why he was murdered you have my word that I do not know.”

“You can imagine no reason--think of no possible agent?”

“Of none, or his name would have been known to the police these many days.”

“Then I am not to say that the Count’s errand concerned others?”

“By no means could it possibly have concerned any human being other than the person who prompted it.”

“Not an errand where money was the issue?”

“Absolutely not--I can tell you no more; I am not permitted to tell you more.”

“Having told me sufficient to make me the most miserable man in Paris! Are we not now become conspirators in this, Marquis? Are not our interests common interests?”

“In a measure, yes--I see that you suffer much.”

“Marquis,” I said quietly, “I would give half the years of my life to see my wife to-night.”

“A sentiment most honourable. Should it be possible for me to further it, count upon my warm endeavour.”

“Meanwhile, you are unable to help me?”

“I am quite unable, Mr. Gastonard.”

I did not press the point. Here was a man of honour of the old type; my knowledge of such men told me that I might question him for a century and learn nothing if honour sealed his lips. Perhaps some shadow of a wonderful truth already crossed my path, but made it the blacker because of these events. Of one fact I had no doubt. He was as ignorant as I of the story of the Count’s death and of Mimi’s abduction from my house.

“I am quite unable to help you at present,” he repeated, “and it is very probable that I shall be leaving Paris to-morrow upon the voyage of which you have heard. Before I go, let me say that you have my good wishes, my warmest wishes for your success. Good night, Mr. Gastonard; do not hesitate to write to me--or to come to me, if that be advisable. And be sure of my interest whatever happens.”

I thanked him, plainly perceiving that he wished to terminate the interview and that any further question would be unwelcome to him. It was after midnight when I went out to meet a chill night, with a drizzle of hostile rain which drove the people from the boulevards and sent the loafers to the baser cafés. For my part, although there were cabs at the doors of the Ritz, I determined to walk to my hotel. So many strange thoughts came to me, so many hopes, so many fears have been my portion, that I have learned to dread the constraint of rooms and turn to the liberty of streets and the darkness. Here, under God’s sky, be there a heaven of stars or a veil of cloud, I may still believe that my little wife is looking upward, that her eyes are cleaving the night as mine, and that the same prayer which I breathe is also upon her lips.

Ah, Paddy, will it ever be that I shall wake again to find her pillowed head upon my arm, to know that I have won her love and will keep it to the end? If Paris would but answer me that--the mocking crowds, the darkened canopy of night, the unknown voices which torment me! Shall to-morrow be as yesterday and all the morrows after? Oh, God forbid!--I cannot lose her; I will not cease to hope that even as she came to me in this city of my youth, so shall Paris surrender her now in the hour of my need.--Your friend,

Harry Gastonard.

I had closed this letter, but must open it again. Jules Farman brings me a strange piece of news. It may mean much or little. He followed me, it seems, to the Ritz last night believing that I also had been followed now for some days in Paris. He had waited some twenty minutes in the Place Vendome, when a man passed whom he recognised. It was our old friend the famous ruffian Jean-le-Mont, from the old Café of the Assassins. The man lingered a little while outside the Ritz, and then went on toward the Boulevards.

Now, what does this mean--what does your wisdom make of it? Jules Farman will say nothing. He has been very silent these last few days. Is it possible that our first ideas are to be justified? I begin to believe so, even if the light be dim and the path uncertain. Tell me what you think and do not fail to write to me. I am very lonely, Paddy. There is not a man in all the world so wistful of sympathy as your friend Harry to-night.