The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Tomorrow the detectives commissioned by Madame de Montalais’s bankers would arrive. Tomorrow Eve would set out on her journey to Paris. Tomorrow André Duchemin must walk forth from the Château de Montalais and turn his back on all that was most dear to him in life.

  On that last day he saw even less of Eve than usual. She was naturally busy with preparations for her trip, a trifle excited, too; it would be only the third time she had left the château for as long as overnight since returning to it after her husband’s death. When Duchemin did see her, she seemed at once exhilarated and subdued, and he thought to detect in her attitude toward him a trace of apprehensiveness.

  She knew, of course; Duchemin at thirty-eight was too well versed in lore of women to dream he had succeeded in keeping his secret from the fine intuition of one of thirty. But—he told himself a bit bitterly—she ought to know him well enough by this time to know more, that she need not fear he would ever speak his heart to her. The social gulf that set their lives apart was all too wide to be spanned but by a miracle of love requited; and he had too much humility and naivété of soul to presume that such a thing could ever come to pass. And even if it should, there remained the insuperable barrier of her fortune, in the face of which the pretensions of a penniless adventurer could only seem silly.…

  He was permitted to be about the house in the afternoon and to dine with Eve and Louise in the draughty, shadow-haunted dining hall. Madame de Sévénié was indisposed and kept to her room; she suffered from time to time from an affection of the heart, nothing remarkable in one of her advanced age and so no excuse for unusual misgivings. But the presence of the young girl in some measure, and the emotions of the others in greater, lent the conversation a constraint against which Duchemin’s attempts at levity could not prevail. The talk languished and revived fitfully only when some indifferent, impersonal topic offered itself. The weather, for example, enjoyed unwonted vogue. It happened to be drizzling; Eve was afraid of a rainy morrow. She confessed to a minor superstition, she did not really like to start a journey in the rain…

  She smoked only one cigarette with Duchemin in the drawing-room after dinner, then excused herself to wait on Madame de Sévénié and finish her packing. It was time, too, for Duchemin to remember he was still an invalid and subject to a régime prescribed by his surgeon: he must go early to his bed.

  “I am sorry, mon ami,” the woman said, hesitating after she had left her chair before the fire; whose play of broken light was, perhaps, responsible for some of the softness of her eyes as she faced Duchemin and gave him her hand—“sorry our last evening together must be so brief. I am in the mood to sit and talk with you for hours tonight…”

  “If you could only manage even one, madame!” She shook her head gently, with a wistful smile. “There will never be another night…”

  “I know, I know; and the knowledge makes me very sad. I have enjoyed knowing you, monsieur, even under such distressing circumstances…”

  “My wound? You tempt me to seek another!”

  “Don’t be absurd.” He was still holding her hand, and she made no move to free it, but seeming forgetful of it altogether, lingered on. “I shall miss you, monsieur. The château will seem lonely when I return, I shall feel its loneliness more than I have ever felt it.”

  “And the world, madame,” said Duchemin—“the world into which I must go—it, too, will seem a lonely place,—a desert, haunted…”

  “You will soon forget…Château de Montalais.”

  “Forget! when all I shall have will be my memories—!”

  “Yes,” she said, “we shall both have memories…” And suddenly the rich, deep voice quoted in English: “‘Memories like almighty wine.’”

  She offered to disengage her hand, but Duchemin tightened gently the pressure of his fingers, bowing over it and, as he looked up for her answer, murmuring: “With permission?” She gave the slightest inclination of her head. His lips touched her hand for a moment; then he released it. She went swiftly to the door, faltered, turned.

  “We shall see each other in the morning—to say au revoir. With us, monsieur, it must never be adieu.”

  She was gone; but she had left Duchemin with a singing heart that would not let him sleep when he had gone to bed, stared blankly at the last chapter of Bragelonne for an hour, and put out his candle.

  Till long after midnight he tossed restlessly, bedevilled alternately by melancholy and exhilaration, or lay staring blindly into the darkness, striving to focus his thoughts upon the abstract, a hopeless effort; trying to think where to go tomorrow, whither to turn his feet when the gates of Paradise had closed behind him, and knowing it did not matter, he did not care, that hereafter one place and another would be the same to him, so that they were not the place of her abode.

  The château was as still as any castle of enchantment; only an old clock in the drawing room, two floors below, tolled the slow hours; and through the open windows came the mournful murmur of the river, a voice of utter desolation in the night.

  He heard the clock strike two, and shortly after, in a fit of exasperation, thinking to discipline his mind with reading, lighted the candle on the bedside stand, found his book, and fumbled vainly in the little silver casket beside the candlestick for a cigarette.

  Now a sincere smoker can do without smoking for hours on end, as long as the deprivation is voluntary. But let him be without the wherewithal to smoke if he have the mind to, and he must procure it instantly though the heavens fall. It was so then with Duchemin. And what greater folly could there be than to want a cigarette and do without one when there were plenty in the drawing-room, to be had for the taking?

  He rose, girdled about him his dressing-gown, took up the candlestick, opened his door. The hallway was as empty and silent as he had expected to find it. He had no fear of disturbing the household, for his slippers were of felt and silent and the stairs were of stone and creakless.

  Shielding the candle flame with his hand, and somewhat dazzled by the light thus cast into his face, he passed the floor on which the three ladies of the château had each her separate suite of rooms, and gained the drawing-room as noiselessly as any ghost.

  The fire had died down till only embers glowed, faint under films of ash, like an old anger growing cold with age.

  The cigarettes were not where he had expected to find them, near one end of a certain table. Duchemin put down the candlestick and moved toward the other end, discovering the box he sought as soon as his back was turned to the light. In the same breath this last went out.

  He stood for a moment transfixed in astonishment. There were no windows open, no draughts that he could feel, nothing to account for the flame expiring as it had, suddenly, without one flicker of warning. An insane thing to happen to one, at such an hour, in such a place…

  Involuntarily memory harked back to the night of his first dinner in the château, when the shadows had danced so weirdly, and the strange notion had come to him that they were like famished spectres, greedy of the lights, yearning to spring and snatch and feed upon them, as wolves might snatch at chops.

  A mad fancy…

  When he turned hack to relight the candle, it was gone.

  At least he must have been mistaken as to the exact spot where he had placed it. Perplexed, he pawed over all that end of the table. But no candlestick was there.

  He straightened up sharply, and stood quite still, listening. No sound…

  His vision spent itself fruitlessly against the blackness, which the closed window draperies rendered absolute but for those dull, sardonic eyes of dying embers.

  In spite of himself he knew a moment when flesh crawled and the hair seemed to stir upon the scalp; for Duchemin knew he was not alone; there was something else in the room with him, something nameless, stealthy, silent, sinister; having knowledge of him, where he
stood and what he was, while he knew nothing of it, only that it was there, keeping surveillance over him, itself unseen in its cloak of darkness.

  Then with a resolute effort of will he mastered his imagination, reminding himself that spirits gifted in the matter of moving material objects such as candlesticks, frequent only the booths of seance mediums.

  Without a sound he stepped back one pace, then two to one side, away from the table. They were long strides; when he paused he was well away from the spot where he had stood when the light was extinguished and where, consequently, a hostile move might be expected to develop. Otherwise his plight was little bettered; he did not quite know where he was in relation to the doors and the pieces which furnished the room. That old-time habit of memorising the arrangement of furniture in a room immediately on entering it had failed through disuse in course of years. He was acquainted with the plot of this drawing-room in a general way but by no means with such accuracy as was needed to serve him now.

  So he waited, straining to cheat that opaque pall of night of one little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light. Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes. But perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger detected nothing. And his hearing was so keen, he told himself, no breath could have been drawn in that time without his having knowledge of it. Still, he knew he was not alone. Somewhere in that encompassing murk an alien and inimical intelligence skulked.

  Baffled by powers of patience and immobility that mocked his own, he moved again, edging toward the entrance-hall, a progress so gradual he could have sworn it must be imperceptible. Yet he had a feeling, a suspicion, perhaps merely a fear, that he did not stir a finger without the other’s knowledge.

  A hand extended about a foot encountered the back of an upholstered chair, which he identified by touch. Assuming the chair to be occupying its usual position, he need only continue in a line parallel with the line of its back to find the entrance-hall in about six paces.

  Within three he stopped dead, as if paralysed by sudden instinctive perception of that other presence close by.

  Whether he had drawn near to it, inch by inch, or whether it, seeing him about to make good his escape, had crept up on him, he could not say. He only knew that it was there, within arm’s-length, waiting, tense, prepared, and somehow deadly in its animosity.

  Digging the nails deep into the palms of his hands, until the pain relieved his nervous tension, he waited once more, one minute, two, three.

  But nothing…

  Then very slowly he lifted an arm, and swept it before him right and left. At one point of the arc, a trifle to his left, his finger-tips brushed something. He thought he detected a stir in the darkness, a stifled sound, stepped forward quickly, clawing the air, and caught between his fingers a wisp of some material, like silk, sheer and glacé, a portion of some garment.

  Simultaneously he heard a smothered cry, of anger or alarm, and the night seemed to split and be rent into fragments by a thousand shooting needles of coloured flame.

  Smitten brutally on the point of the jaw, his head jerked back, he reeled and fell against a chair, which went to the floor with a muffled crash.

  CHAPTER X

  BUT AS A MUSTARD SEED…

  Duchemin woke up in his bed, glare of sunlight in his eyes.

  From the latter circumstance he reckoned, rather groggily, it must be about the middle of the forenoon; for not till about that time did the sun work round to the windows.

  Still heavy with lees of slumber, his wits occupied themselves sluggishly with questions concerning the enervation that oppressed him, the reason for his oversleeping, why he had not been called. Then, reminded that noon was the hour set for Eve’s departure, fear lest she get away without his bon voyage brought him sharply up in a sitting position.

  He groaned aloud and with both hands clutched temples that promised to split with pain that crashed between them, stroke upon stroke, like blows of a mighty hammer.

  A neatly fastened bandage held in place, above one ear, a wad of cotton once saturated with arnica, now dry. Duchemin removed these and with gingerly fingers explored, discovering a noble swelling on the side of his head, where the cotton had been placed.

  Also, his jaw was stiff, and developed a protesting ache whenever he opened his mouth.

  Then Duchemin remembered… That is to say, he recalled clearly all that had led up to that vicious blow from out of the darkness which had found his jaw with such surprising accuracy; and he was visited by one or two rather indefinite memories of subsequent events.

  He remembered labouring up the stairs, half walking, half supported by the strong arms of the footman, Jean, who was in shirt, trousers and slippers only, while in front of them moved the shape of Madame de Montalais en négligée, carrying a lighted candle and constantly looking back.

  Then he had an impression of being lifted into his bed by Jean, and of having his head and shoulders raised by the same arms some time later, so that he might drink a draught of some concoction with a pleasant aromatic taste and odour, in a glass held to his lips by Eve de Montalais.

  And then (Duchemin had a faint smile of appreciation for a mental parallel to the technique of the cinema) a singularly vivid and disturbing memory of her face of loveliness, exquisitely tender and compassionate, bended so near to his, faded away into a dense blank of sleep…

  Somewhat to his surprise he found the watch on his wrist ticking away as callously as though its owner had not experienced a prolonged lapse of consciousness. It told him that Eve would leave the château within another hour.

  He got up hastily, grunting a bit—though his headache was no longer so acute; or else he was growing accustomed to it—and ringing for the valet-de-chambre ordered his petit déjeuner. Before this was served he spent several thrilling minutes under an icy shower and emerged feeling more on terms with himself and the world.

  The valet-de-chambre brought with his tray the announcement that Madame de Montalais presented her compliments and would be glad to see monsieur at his convenience in the grand salon. So Duchemin made short work of his dressing, his café-au-lait and half a roll, and hurried down to the drawing-room.

  Seated in an easy chair, in the tempered light of an awninged window which stood open on the terrasse, nothing in her pose—she was waiting quietly, hands folded in her lap—and nothing in her countenance, in the un-lined brow, the grave, serene eyes, lent any colour to his apprehensions. And yet in his heart he had known that he would find her thus, and alone, no matter what had happened.…

  Her profound reverie disturbed by his approach, she rose quickly, advancing to meet Duchemin with both hands offered in sympathy.

  “My dear friend! You are suffering—?”

  He met this with a smiling denial. “Not now; at first, yes; but since my bath and coffee, I’m as right as a trivet. And you, madame?”

  “A little weary, monsieur, otherwise quite well.”

  She resumed her chair, signing to Duchemin to take one nearby. He drew it closer before sitting down.

  “But madame is not dressed for her journey!”

  “No, monsieur. I have postponed it—” a slight pause prefaced one more word—“indefinitely.”

  At this confirmation of the fears which had been haunting him, Duchemin nodded slightly.

  “But the men sent here by your bankers—?”

  “They have not yet arrived; we may expect them at any moment now.”

  “I see,” said Duchemin thoughtfully; and then—“May I suggest that we continue our conversation in English. One never knows who may overhear…”

  Her eyebrows lifted a little, but she adopted the suggestion without other demur.

  “The servants?”

&
nbsp; He nodded: “Or anybody.”

  “Then you have guessed—?”

  “Broadly speaking, everything, I fancy. Not in any detail, naturally. But one puts two and two together… I may as well tell you to begin with: I was wakeful last night, and finding no cigarettes in my room, came down here to get some. I left my candle on the table—there. As soon as my back was turned, somebody took it away and put it out. A few minutes later, while I was trying to steal out of the room, I ran into a fist…”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully; and with some hesitation added: “I, too, found it not easy to sleep. But I heard nothing till that chair crashed. Then I got up to investigate…and found you lying there, senseless. In falling your head must have struck the leg of the table.”

  “You came down here—alone?”

  “I listened first, heard no sound, saw no light; but I had to know what the noise meant…”

  “Still, you came downstairs alone!”

  “But naturally, monsieur.”

  “I don’t believe,” said Duchemin sincerely, “the world holds a woman your peer for courage.”

  “Or curiosity?” she laughed. “At all events, I found you, but could do nothing to rouse you. So I called Jean, and he helped me get you upstairs again.”

  “Where does Jean sleep?”

  “In the servants’ quarters, on the third floor, in the rear of the house.”

  “It must have taken you some time…”

  “Several minutes, I fancy. Jean sleeps soundly.”

  “When you came back with him—or at any time—did you see or hear—?”

  “Nothing out of the normal—nobody. Indeed, I at first believed you had somehow managed to overexert yourself and had fainted—or had tripped on something and, falling, hurt your head.”

  “Later, then, you found reason to revise that theory?”

  “Not till early this morning.”