“I saw something pale at the end of this room.”
“My frock,” said Ariadne. “You were looking straight at me. I thought you were one of that pair. I made myself small. But you watched me for hours and hours — oh!” and she shivered and pressed closer to him.
He had dropped down again into the ditch, and running along with his body bent until he had reached the shrubberies, he had climbed on to the terrace and rubbing against the house wall had crept to the open window.
“I listened at the side of it; I could hear nothing. I am armed. I kept my hand in my jacket pocket on the butt of the pistol, and I slipped over the threshold into the shadow of the room.”
“You stood in the shadow for a century,” Ariadne said, dragging upon the words so that he heard in them all the anguish which she had endured as she sat so still making herself small upon the couch, and all the fine courage which had enabled her to endure it.
“You wonder!” he whispered. He raised her face. He saw her great eyes gleaming softly and seriously, her lips parted, her pale face mysterious and tender. “Ariadne!” He bent his head and kissed her mouth and her hands clasped themselves about his neck.
“Do you know why I stood so still, beloved?”
“No! Tell me!”
“I was repeating one by one the sensations which had enthralled me during that night in the jungle behind Mogok. It was, I don’t know why, a shock to me to realise it. So different were the circumstances, yet so precise was the actual repetition. I passed through the same emotional crisis. I heard the darkness throb about me with the regular beat of a ship at sea, and tiny voices whispering inaudible threats in my ears, and I was aware all the time that there was no real sound at all. I had the same abnormal acuteness of my senses. I knew there was someone in the room — the same tremendous expectancy.”
His voice died away, and they sat for a while in silence, she pressed against him and cradled within the hollow of his arm.
“We shall wait here then till Corinne comes?” she asked at length.
“I think so. It was your plan, and the best. If we run for the lodge a shot might put you in their hands.” She clutched him close at the thought of it. “We are better off here. Besides — I have that terrific expectancy still. That open window opposite to us is to me just that gap in the jungle with the white stump. I shall see him there — my tiger — and this time I shall not let him go.”
He spoke quite without arrogance and quite, too, without hesitation. He was fortified in a manner outside his experience by the enchantment of this girl who lay in his arms so mysteriously still. He had all at once an enormous pride in himself and a good deal of disdain and pity for his less fortunate fellow-men. Her grace and her loveliness and her brave, joyous spirit were, after all, to walk the world side by side with him for the rest of life — if he could keep her safe through the gloom of this one night. The something exquisite which was the mark of her physically, of her slender body, her length of limb and the turn of her wrists and ankles, which shone no less noticeably in the delicate reticence of her mind, must be preserved for its fulfilment — or he himself failed altogether, failed as man. He kept his eyes upon the window. From time to time he loosed his hold of her and dropped a hand into the side pocket of his jacket to make sure that his automatic pistol needed only the release of its safety catch to defend this wondrous treasure which had floated to his feet.
After a little while, even at that time “under death’s spread hand,” they began, as lovers will, to trace back the wonderful hour when the barriers had gone down, and heart beat at last against heart, to its first origin. Was it then? Was it this or that thing I did? This sudden glance of understanding? That revelation of a thought in common?
“The morning when you came to me with your ruby, Strickland,” said Ariadne, “I hurt you horribly, through my stupidity. I was ashamed of myself afterwards, terribly ashamed, and sorry, too, But was I more than merely sorry? More than merely ashamed at my want of insight? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there was another morning when I wanted to drive with you to the sea — oh, how I wanted it! Fairyland with all the colours of the dawn. Oh, then — yes, my dear — I ached for that drive down through the green of the south country on a silent road — with you. I couldn’t hide my longing from myself. To tell the truth,” and she broke into a low full-throated laugh of happiness, “I didn’t try very hard.”
“You did try, Ariadne. For later on that morning we were both as awkward and constrained as if we hated one another and were doing our very best to be polite.”
“Yes, that was a difficult day,” she agreed, and then she laughed again. “Oh, John Strickland, if Julian hadn’t found out that I was a misfit and sent me back to the shop, we should have had to behave very badly. You don’t mind a misfit, do you, so long as it fits you?
“Ariadne, I put you amongst the stars.”
Ariadne drew herself up rather abruptly. The tone of her voice changed.
“Yes — now — talking of stars—”
Strickland, in his turn, laughed.
“I shall occupy the best box on the first night.”
Ariadne’s arms crept round his neck and drew down his head until their lips met and clung. They were swept out of that dark room on a wave of passion to the sunlit beaches of lovers’ dreams. Their voices, which had never risen above a whisper, ceased altogether.
Ariadne, looking out through the window, saw that the stars had changed. Those constellations which she had seen low above the trees of the far bank of the river, were now climbing high towards the centre of the heavens.
“It must be near to midnight,” she murmured.
“Not yet, beloved,” and as he spoke she felt his shoulders stiffen. He leaned forward and so remained. She could see the thrust of his head; she imagined the tension of his attitude. She did a small thing which he recognised at once as the true proof of her. She drew away from him without a word so that he might have the full freedom of his arms. But no one moved outside upon the terrace.
“I can see no one,” she breathed.
“Nor I,” he answered in the same tone. “But I heard.”
“What?”
“Someone move.”
Ariadne shuddered. It was one swift spasm of terror, and mastered in the fraction of a second.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as that we are sitting side by side”; and suddenly the barrel of his pistol gleamed darkly in his hand.
The lovers were back in the dark room again, waiting for their enemy. They had made their expedition up to the high lands of the troubadours and come back again, though in a shorter time than it had taken Ariadne to drive up to Les Baux and return. They listened, straining their ears. Neither of them whispered a word or stirred a limb — until the sound was made again. This time both of them heard it, slight and secret though it was. A man very near at hand was treading with a light and stealthy foot. As Ariadne’s mind seized upon the meaning of that sound, and located it, a new and unimagined horror shook her soul. For those light footsteps sounded overhead.
“John,” she whispered, catching her breath, “did you hear?”
“Yes.”
“They are not outside in the park. They are in this house!”
“Yes.”
“They have been upstairs there all the evening, whilst I sat here alone!”
“Yes.”
He answered her in the most commonplace of tones, the more surely to steady her. He asked:
“Who sleeps overhead?”
“I do.”
Ariadne’s heart fainted within her breast. They were waiting, hidden, in that private set of rooms until she and Corinne should go upstairs and lock the door which shut them off from the rest of the house. If she had gone up to her room on her return, instead of washing in the cloak-room on the ground floor...! She shivered as she imagined the giant figure of Clutter outlined behind a curtain and suddenly seen, suddenly known for what it was.
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br /> Strickland’s head turned swiftly. The big mahogany double doors which led from the room into the hall were set in the same back wall against which they were sitting. It was towards those doors that Strickland’s head was turned. In spite of the darkness the panels glistened faintly. He leaned back towards Ariadne, never removing his eyes from the dimly-shining doors.
“They are on the stairs. It must be later than we thought. At midnight the moon rises. They can wait no longer.”
Indeed it was growing lighter in the room, and outside the window the stars were paling, the sky fading to the colour of an opal. He lifted her up as outside the doors the stairs creaked badly.
“Yes, they are tired of waiting.”
Ariadne’s courage did not fail her. The moment to be brave, to quote Archie Clutter’s choice phrase, had struck for her.
“Like me, my dear,” she whispered, and her lips smiled. But Strickland was remembering with what speed and what noiselessness Clutter could move. He whispered:
“Down on the floor at the head of the couch.”
Ariadne sank on her knees silently and crouched under the shelter of the couch, between it and the side wall in a corner. Her light-coloured dress might reveal her to anyone entering by the window, but she was completely hidden from the door. Strickland himself moved nearer to the doors out of the range of that twilight which was now pouring from the terrace into the room. For both of them time and the world stood still. Then, without a warning of any kind, the great doors flew open and with noiseless little steps Archie Clutter tripped like a ballet dancer into the room. It was to Ariadne, crouched in her corner, the most bizarre and terrifying thing of all the things which had happened to her. This colossal figure of a man, with murder and revenge and violence in his thoughts, tripping daintily and with amazing swiftness on the tips of his toes. He was making for the window, to shut off all possibility of escape — and that was his undoing. For he reached it and turned with his arms outspread. His huge bulk was outlined against the grey light.
“My lady,” he said, bowing and mumming to Ariadne in her corner, “two gentlemen from Cayenne desire your better acquaintance.”
A streak of fire split the darkness, an explosion like the roar of a ship’s big gun filled the room with a deafening noise. Ariadne’s eyes were fixed upon Archie Clutter. The bullet had missed him, then. For he stood in the window like a man thinking deeply on some unexpected occurrence.
“What will he do?” Ariadne asked herself, clasping her hands together in a panic, and Archie Clutter answered her. He pitched forward with a crash and lay in a mountainous crumpled heap upon the floor.
Ariadne took her cue from her lover. She did not move from her shelter, because he still stood erect against the wall, the muzzle of his pistol pointing at Clutter’s body. The jungle knows a thousand tricks. But Archie Clutter never stirred, and in the terrific silence which followed upon the explosion of the pistol, Strickland heard someone else breathing hard in the doorway of the room. A little man advanced, turning his head to this side and that. He saw his big friend prone upon the floor.
“Oh!” he cried in a gasp, and ran forward.
Strickland’s voice rang out authoritative and clear on a note of command which took Ariadne by storm.
“Roussencq, en haut les pattes!”
Roussencq turned in a flash. Some bright thing shone in his hand, but he never raised the hand. Strickland’s pistol talked again. The bright thing dropped and rang on the floor like iron. Hospel Roussencq uttered a scream and, clutching his right arm with his left hand, he leapt over Clutter’s body and vanished through the window.
“We shall find him later. He’ll do no more harm,” said Strickland. “Where do I turn on the light?”
He received no answer and he looked towards the couch.
“Ariadne!” he cried in a voice in which fear struggled with reproach. “Where? Tell me!”
And since again he got no answer, he felt frantically up and down the wall until he found the switch. He turned it down and the room was flooded with light. He ran to the corner where Ariadne had crouched. She was lying now much as Clutter was lying, in a fumbled heap upon the floor.
“My dear!” he said. “Oh, forgive me!”
He gathered her up in his arms and laid her upon the couch. She was breathing, and such a relief swept over him as he had never known.
“I’ll make up to you, beloved, for this night,” he said softly. He picked up the revolver which Hospel Roussencq had dropped and slipped it into his pocket, and snatching up a cover from a table he spread it over the dead body of Archie Clutter. Then he chanced to look at the clock. It was close upon one of the morning. It seemed that Corinne had missed her train.
XXVI. THE TELEGRAM
“WHAT YOU WANT, my dear, is a glass of champagne. I do, too,” said Strickland. “Culalla is certain to have got a stock somewhere. Otherwise he couldn’t set us any examination papers. No champagne, no answers to conundrums!”
He had carried Ariadne into the dining-room and turned on all the lights. She was sitting up now in an arm-chair, a wan and deeply-shaken girl. There was a disconsolate look in the abandonment of her attitude which Strickland thought to exorcise by jesting words and a deal of bustling about. He discovered some bottles of champagne in the wine drawer of the sideboard, and opening one of them filled up a couple of glasses. Ariadne drank and a little colour returned to her face. Strickland filled the glasses again.
“No!” Ariadne protested.
“Yes. Two glasses each are the minimum. The first does us good. The second gives us pleasure. Drink it and I’ll drive you along to the lodge. I would like to get you out of this villa.”
The girl looked at him gratefully and with a trembling glimmer of a smile upon her lips. For he understood without a hint the horror of that house of death which kept her heart shuddering within her. He helped her to her feet, led her out by the front door to the little garage, put a coat about her shoulders which he found hanging there on a nail, and drove her through the park. The Bochon family made some tea, and Ariadne went fast asleep upon a couch under one of madame’s enormous eiderdowns to protect her from a courant d’air which would have been extremely malsain. In that same room Strickland wrote out in his best French the story of that night, and as soon as it was light went in search of the small car he had borrowed the night before. He drove into the prefecture, and a sleepy commissaire of police who had been roused from his bed grew wider and wider awake as he read the report.
“We had a message late last night about those two rascals,” he said when he had finished. “I will go at once to Monsieur Dauguignon, our examining magistrate, and we will afterwards drive out together to the Villa Laure. Meanwhile you will take your coffee here.”
By eight o’clock the examining magistrate, a tall, thin, dry man, the commissaire, the police surgeon, Strickland, and a posse of police were at the lodge.
“Mademoiselle,” said Monsieur Dauguignon to Ariadne, “I shall spare you as much as I can. For it is easy to see, by looking at you, through how great an ordeal you have passed.”
It was also easy to see, Strickland reflected, that Monsieur Dauguignon was a bachelor. Else he must have known that that particular expression of sympathy was certain to be received with marked coldness; as, indeed, it was.
“But it is of course necessary that you should come back to the house with us.”
“I am ready,” said Ariadne.
The commissary selected three of his police to search the park for Hospel Roussencq and made a parcel of the two pistols which Strickland had left in the lodge.
“The second young lady, Mademoiselle Corinne, if she returns from Marseilles before we have finished, she can wait here for us,” said the magistrate to Madame Bochon. “Now, let us go!”
They entered the Villa by the front door which Strickland had left wide open, and in the hall Monsieur Dauguignon turned with politeness to Ariadne.
“Mademoiselle, I shall
not ask you to come into the room where you spent so many unhappy hours last night, Colonel Strickland will be sufficient. But afterwards, when we have finished there, you will guide us to your room upstairs where these rogues were waiting.”
“Certainly, monsieur,” said Ariadne, and a little stiffly. For the allusion to her worn appearance still rankled. But Monsieur Dauguignon was to put that celibate foot of his still deeper.
“And you will wait for us. It is obvious, of course, that mademoiselle should wish at the earliest moment to repair the disarray of her costume, which no doubt yesterday was most charming. But I must beg of you to wait.”
Certainly Monsieur Dauguignon was a bachelor. Ariadne’s knowledge of the French language was happily limited. Irony and sarcasm were not within her competence. She would have liked to have said the bitterest things, but alas! she could only feebly splutter; and that sign of her indignation had no effect. For the whole party, Monsieur Dauguignon at its head, had passed into the drawing-room and closed the door behind it.
Ariadne set to work making up cold and biting rejoinders, such as — very politely— “I know, Monsieur le juge, I look like a dirty old bag of rags, but is it usual for gentlemen in France to tell women so?” or — sweetly— “I have no doubt that I am as revolting as you say, but only a man milliner should have noticed it.”
In the invention of these crushing replies she passed the time quickly enough until the party emerged from the room.
“Now, mademoiselle, that unpleasant business is ended. Will you show us the way to your room?”
Ariadne bowed in a stately fashion and walked upstairs. On the first landing a door confronted them, the front door, as it were, of the suite. Inside there was a tiny hall from which other doors led off. Ariadne opened one of them upon her right.
“This is my room.”
It was a fine, high room, with windows upon the river and walls hung with silk. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed but Ariadne’s dressing-case, which stood open upon a table with a few emptied jewel-cases scattered about it.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 85