Silas was again lucky. He observed a person of rather a full build, strikingly handsome, and of a very stately and courteous demeanour, seated at table with another handsome young man, several years his junior, who addressed him with conspicuous deference. The name of Prince struck gratefully on Silas’s Republican hearing, and the aspect of the person to whom that name was applied exercised its usual charm upon his mind. He left Madame Zéphyrine and her Englishman to take care of each other, and threading his way through the assembly, approached the table which the Prince and his confidant had honoured with their choice.
‘I tell you, Geraldine,’ the former was saying, ‘the action is madness. Yourself (I am glad to remember it) chose your brother for this perilous service, and you are bound in duty to have a guard upon his conduct. He has consented to delay so many days in Paris; that was already an imprudence, considering the character of the man he has to deal with; but now, when he is within eight and forty hours of his departure, when he is within two or three days of the decisive trial, I ask you, is this a place for him to spend his time? He should be in a gallery at practice; he should be sleeping long hours and taking moderate exercise on foot; he should be on a rigorous diet, without white wines or brandy. Does the dog imagine we are all playing comedy? The thing is deadly earnest, Geraldine.’
‘I know the lad too well to interfere,’ replied Colonel Geraldine, ‘and well enough not to be alarmed. He is more cautious than you fancy, and of an indomitable spirit. If it had been a woman I should not say so much, but I trust the President to him and the two valets without an instant’s apprehension.’
‘I am gratified to hear you say so,’ replied the Prince; ‘but my mind is not at rest. These servants are well-trained spies, and already has not this miscreant succeeded three times in eluding their observation and spending several hours on end in private, and most likely dangerous, affairs? An amateur might have lost him by accident, but if Rudolph and Jérome were thrown off the scent, it must have been done on purpose, and by a man who had a cogent reason and exceptional resources.’
‘I believe the question is now one between my brother and myself,’ replied Geraldine, with a shade of offence in his tone.
‘I permit it to be so, Colonel Geraldine,’ returned Prince Florizel. ‘Perhaps, for that very reason, you should be all the more ready to accept my counsels. But enough. That girl in yellow dances well.’
And the talk veered into the ordinary topics of a Paris ballroom in the Carnival.
Silas remembered where he was, and that the hour was already near at hand when he ought to be upon the scene of his assignation. The more he reflected the less he liked the prospect, and as at that moment an eddy in the crowd began to draw him in the direction of the door, he suffered it to carry him away without resistance. The eddy stranded him in a corner under the gallery, where his ear was immediately struck with the voice of Madame Zéphyrine. She was speaking in French with the young man of the blond locks who had been pointed out by the strange Britisher not half an hour before.
‘I have a character at stake,’ she said, ‘or I would put no other condition than my heart recommends. But you have only to say so much to the porter, and he will let you go by without a word.’
‘But why this talk of debt?’ objected her companion.
‘Heavens!’ said she, ‘do you think I do not understand my own hotel?’
And she went by, clinging affectionately to her companion’s arm.
This put Silas in mind of his billet.
‘Ten minutes hence,’ thought he, ‘and I may be walking with as beautiful a woman as that, and even better dressed—perhaps a real lady, possibly a woman of title.’
And then he remembered the spelling, and was a little downcast.
‘But it may have been written by her maid,’ he imagined.
The clock was only a few minutes from the hour, and this immediate proximity set his heart beating at a curious and rather disagreeable speed. He reflected with relief that he was in no way bound to put in an appearance. Virtue and cowardice were together, and he made once more for the door, but this time of his own accord, and battling against the stream of people which was now moving in a contrary direction. Perhaps this prolonged resistance wearied him, or perhaps he was in that frame of mind when merely to continue in the same determination for a certain number of minutes produces a reaction and a different purpose. Certainly, at least, he wheeled about for a third time, and did not stop until he had found a place of concealment within a few yards of the appointed place.
Here he went through an agony of spirit, in which he several times prayed to God for help, for Silas had been devoutly educated. He had now not the least inclination for the meeting; nothing kept him from flight but a silly fear lest he should be thought unmanly; but this was so powerful that it kept head against all other motives; and although it could not decide him to advance, prevented him from definitely running away. At last the clock indicated ten minutes past the hour. Young Scuddamore’s spirit began to rise; he peered round the corner and saw no one at the place of meeting; doubtless his unknown correspondent had wearied and gone away. He became as bold as he had formerly been timid. It seemed to him that if he came at all to the appointment, however late, he was clear from the charge of cowardice. Nay, now he began to suspect a hoax, and actually complimented himself on his shrewdness in having suspected and out-manoeuvred his mystifiers. So very idle a thing is a boy’s mind!
Armed with these reflections, he advanced boldly from his corner; but he had not taken above a couple of steps before a hand was laid upon his arm. He turned and beheld a lady cast in a very large mould and with somewhat stately features, but bearing no mark of severity in her looks.
‘I see that you are a very self-confident lady-killer,’ said she; ‘for you make yourself expected. But I was determined to meet you. When a woman has once so far forgotten herself as to make the first advance, she has long ago left behind her all considerations of petty pride.’
Silas was overwhelmed by the size and attractions of his correspondent and the suddenness with which she had fallen upon him. But she soon set him at his ease. She was very towardly and lenient in her behaviour; she led him on to make pleasantries, and then applauded him to the echo; and in a very short time, between blandishments and a liberal imbibition of warm brandy, she had not only induced him to fancy himself in love, but to declare his passion with the greatest vehemence.
‘Alas!’ she said; ‘I do not know whether I ought not to deplore this moment, great as is the pleasure you give me by your words. Hitherto I was alone to suffer; now, poor boy, there will be two. I am not my own mistress. I dare not ask you to visit me at my own house, for I am watched by jealous eyes. Let me see,’ she added; ‘I am older than you, although so much weaker; and while I trust in your courage and determination, I must employ my own knowledge of the world for our mutual benefit. Where do you live?’
He told her that he lodged in a furnished hotel, and named the street and number.
She seemed to reflect for some minutes, with an effort of mind.
‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘You will be faithful and obedient, will you not?’
Silas assured her eagerly of his fidelity.
‘Tomorrow night, then,’ she continued, with an encouraging smile, ‘you must remain at home all the evening; and if any friends should visit you, dismiss them at once on any pretext that most readily presents itself. Your door is probably shut by ten?’ she asked.
‘By eleven,’ answered Silas.
‘At a quarter past eleven,’ pursued the lady, ‘leave the house. Merely cry for the door to be opened, and be sure you fall into no talk with the porter, as that might ruin everything. Go straight to the corner where the Luxembourg Gardens join the Boulevard; there you will find me waiting you. I trust you to follow my advice from point to point: and remember, if you fail me in only one particular, you will bring the sharpest trouble on a woman whose only fault is to have seen and
loved you.’
‘I cannot see the use of all these instructions,’ said Silas.
‘I believe you are already beginning to treat me as a master,’ she cried, tapping him with her fan upon the arm. ‘Patience, patience! that should come in time. A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying. Do as I ask you, for heaven’s sake, or I will answer for nothing. Indeed, now I think of it,’ she added, with the manner of one who had just seen further into a difficulty, ‘I find a better plan of keeping importunate visitors away. Tell the porter to admit no one for you, except a person who may come that night to claim a debt; and speak with some feeling, as though you feared the interview, so that he may take your words in earnest.’
‘I think you may trust me to protect myself against intruders,’ he said, not without a little pique.
‘That is how I should prefer the thing arranged,’ she answered, coldly. ‘I know you men; you think nothing of a woman’s reputation.’
Silas blushed and somewhat hung his head; for the scheme he had in view had involved a little vain-glorying before his acquaintances.
‘Above all,’ she added, ‘do not speak to the porter as you come out.’
‘And why?’ said he. ‘Of all your instructions, that seems to me the least important.’
‘You at first doubted the wisdom of some of the others, which you now see to be very necessary,’ she replied. ‘Believe me, this also has its uses; in time you will see them; and what am I to think of your affection, if you refuse me such trifles at our first interview?’
Silas confounded himself in explanations and apologies; in the middle of these she looked up at the clock and clapped her hands together with a suppressed scream.
‘Heavens!’ she cried, ‘is it so late? I have not an instant to lose. Alas, we poor women, what slaves we are! What have I not risked for you already?’
And after repeating her directions, which she artfully combined with caresses and the most abandoned looks, she bade him farewell and disappeared among the crowd.
The whole of the next day Silas was filled with a sense of great importance; he was now sure she was a countess; and when evening came he minutely obeyed her orders and was at the corner of the Luxembourg Gardens by the hour appointed. No one was there. He waited nearly half an hour, looking in the face of everyone who passed or loitered near the spot; he even visited the neighbouring corners of the Boulevard and made a complete circuit of the garden railings; but there was no beautiful countess to throw herself into his arms. At last, and most reluctantly, he began to retrace his steps towards his hotel. On the way he remembered the words he had heard pass between Madame Zéphyrine and the blond young man, and they gave him an indefinite uneasiness.
‘It appears,’ he reflected, ‘that everyone has to tell lies to our porter.’
He rang the bell, the door opened before him, and the porter in his bed-clothes came to offer him a light.
‘Has he gone?’ inquired the porter.
‘He? Whom do you mean?’ asked Silas, somewhat sharply, for he was irritated by his disappointment.
‘I did not notice him go out,’ continued the porter, ‘but I trust you paid him. We do not care, in this house, to have lodgers who cannot meet their liabilities.’
‘What the devil do you mean?’ demanded Silas, rudely. ‘I cannot understand a word of this farrago.’
‘The short blond young man who came for his debt,’ returned the other. ‘Him it is I mean. Who else should it be, when I had your orders to admit no one else?’
‘Why, good God, of course he never came,’ retorted Silas.
‘I believe what I believe,’ retorted the porter, putting his tongue into his cheek with a most roguish air.
‘You are an insolent scoundrel,’ cried Silas, and, feeling that he had made a ridiculous exhibition of asperity, and at the same time bewildered by a dozen alarms, he turned and began to run upstairs.
‘Do you not want a light then?’ cried the porter.
But Silas only hurried the faster, and did not pause until he had reached the seventh landing and stood in front of his own door. There he waited a moment to recover his breath, assailed by the worst forebodings and almost dreading to enter the room.
When at last he did so he was relieved to find it dark, and to all appearance untenanted. He drew a long breath. Here he was, home again in safety, and this should be his last folly as certainly as it had been his first. The matches stood on a little table by the bed, and he began to grope his way in that direction. As he moved, his apprehensions grew upon him once more, and he was pleased, when his foot encountered an obstacle, to find it nothing more alarming than a chair. At last he touched curtains. From the position of the window, which was faintly visible, he knew he must be at the foot of the bed, and had only to feel his way along it in order to reach the table in question.
He lowered his hand, but what he touched was not simply a counterpane—it was a counterpane with something underneath it like the outline of a human leg. Silas withdrew his arm and stood a moment petrified.
‘What, what,’ he thought, ‘can this betoken?’
He listened intently, but there was no sound of breathing. Once more, with a great effort, he reached out the end of his finger to the spot he had already touched; but this time he leaped back half a yard, and stood shivering and fixed with terror. There was something in his bed. What it was he knew not, but there was something there.
It was some seconds before he could move. Then, guided by an instinct, he fell straight upon the matches, and keeping his back toward the bed, lighted a candle. As soon as the flame had kindled, he turned slowly round and looked for what he feared to see. Sure enough, there was the worst of his imaginations realised. The coverlid was drawn carefully up over the pillow, but it moulded the outline of a human body lying motionless; and when he dashed forward and flung aside the sheets, he beheld the blond young man whom he had seen in the Bullier Ball the night before, his eyes open and without speculation, his face swollen and blackened, and a thin stream of blood trickling from his nostrils.
Silas uttered a long tremulous wail, dropped the candle, and fell on his knees beside the bed.
Silas was awakened from the stupor into which his terrible discovery had plunged him, by a prolonged but discreet tapping at the door. It took him some seconds to remember his position; and when he hastened to prevent anyone from entering it was already too late. Dr Noel, in a tall night-cap, carrying a lamp which lighted up his long white countenance, sidling in his gait, and peering and cocking his head like some sort of bird, pushed the door slowly open, and advanced into the middle of the room.
‘I thought I heard a cry,’ began the Doctor, ‘and fearing you might be unwell, I did not hesitate to offer this intrusion.’
Silas, with a flushed face and a fearful beating heart, kept between the Doctor and the bed; but he found no voice to answer.
‘You are in the dark,’ pursued the Doctor; ‘and yet you have not even begun to prepare for rest. You will not easily persuade me against my own eyesight; and your face declares most eloquently that you require either a friend or a physician—which is it to be? Let me feel your pulse, for that is often a just reporter of the heart.’
He advanced to Silas, who still retreated before him backwards, and sought to take him by the wrist; but the strain on the young American’s nerves had become too great for endurance. He avoided the Doctor with a febrile movement, and, throwing himself upon the floor, burst into a flood of weeping.
As soon as Dr Noel perceived the dead man in the bed his face darkened; and hurrying back to the door which he had left ajar, he hastily closed and double-locked it.
‘Up!’ he cried, addressing Silas in strident tones. ‘This is no time for weeping. What have you done? How came this body in your room? Speak freely to one who may be helpful. Do you imagine I would ruin you? Do you think this piece of dead flesh on your pillow can alter in any degree the sympathy with w
hich you have inspired me? Credulous youth, the horror with which blind and unjust law regards an action never attaches to the doer in the eyes of those who love him; and if I saw the friend of my heart return to me out of seas of blood he would be in no way changed in my affection. Raise yourself,’ he said; ‘good and ill are a chimera; there is naught in life except destiny, and however you may be circumstanced there is one at your side who will help you to the last.’
Thus encouraged, Silas gathered himself together, and in a broken voice, and helped out by the Doctor’s interrogations, contrived at last to put him in possession of the facts. But the conversation between the Prince and Geraldine he altogether omitted, as he had understood little of its purport, and had no idea that it was in any way related to his own misadventure.
‘Alas!’ cried Dr Noel, ‘I am much abused, or you have fallen innocently into the most dangerous hands in Europe. Poor boy, what a pit has been dug for your simplicity! into what a deadly peril have your unwary feet been conducted! This man,’ he said, ‘this Englishman, whom you twice saw, and whom I suspect to be the soul of the contrivance, can you describe him? Was he young or old? tall or short?’
But Silas, who, for all his curiosity, had not a seeing eye in his head, was able to supply nothing but meagre generalities, which it was impossible to recognise.
‘I would have it a piece of education in all schools!’ cried the Doctor angrily. ‘Where is the use of eyesight and articulate speech if a man cannot observe and recollect the features of his enemy? I, who know all the gangs of Europe, might have identified him, and gained new weapons for your defence. Cultivate this art in future, my poor boy; you may find it of momentous service.’
‘The future!’ repeated Silas. ‘What future is there left for me except the gallows?’
‘Youth is but a cowardly season,’ returned the Doctor; ‘and a man’s own troubles look blacker than they are. I am old, and yet I never despair.’
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