As this man and two of his assistants filed into the cellar and surrounded the three women, the corner opposite to the door became visible to Mr. Ricardo; and in that corner, as far as possible from the widow Chicholle and her confederates, huddled against the wall, stood Joyce Whipple.
And in such strange guise that Mr. Ricardo was toppled from amazement to amazement. Was he standing on his head or on his heels? Verily, the whole world was upside down. The odd fact, to be sure, that Joyce Whipple had left her glittering frock behind on the night when she had disappeared was now accounted for. But it was only accounted for by a circumstance still more unaccountable. Joyce was dressed now in what seemed to Mr. Ricardo a boy’s Sunday suit of black velvet, knee breeches, black silk stockings and all. Certainly the black satin shoes she was wearing were her own — the imprints in the garden of Suvlac had demonstrated that. But the meaning of her masquerade was quite unintelligible to Mr. Ricardo. To make her attire still more remarkable she wore over the velvet suit a sort of short surcoat of a scarlet hue. It had no sleeves and was cut low at the shoulders, to slip over the head like a jumper, and it reached just to her hips. A surcoat, such as pages wore in mediaeval days — yes, that was it — or a short cassock in scarlet.
“It is all very peculiar,” Mr. Ricardo began to say to himself, but he looked at Joyce Whipple’s face, and a wave of pity and horror swept over him which made him forget everything but the extremity of her distress. Her eyes, wild with terror, blazed out of a white and twitching face. She trembled so that it was a miracle that she could stand, and with her hair and her dress dishevelled and soiled with plaster and dust she gazed from face to face quite distraught. But her eyes lighted upon Ricardo. He was the only one in all that company whom she had ever seen before; and her eyes stayed upon him and recognition struggled with doubt and gradually mastered it.
“It is you! You!” she said from a throat dry and hoarse with thirst, so that though she cried aloud a murmur would have drowned her cry. Suddenly she stretched out her hands to him, and he saw that they were handcuffed together at the wrists.
“Take them off my hands,” she implored, and she shook her arms so that the links of the chain rattled. “Oh, please! Quick! Oh, I shall die of fear.”
But Hanaud was already at her side. “Courage, mademoiselle! See, it is done! You are free!”
“Yes,” she whispered, separating her arms and joining them and separating them again, incredulous of her release. “Yes, I am free.”
Hanaud removed his eyes from her to the handcuffs in his hands. He turned them over and bent his head down to them and nodded to himself.
“Moreau! Look here! And here!” He pointed to some marks upon the steel, and an exclamation broke from Moreau.
“They are the property of the State,” he cried. “Ah! Ah! They are of an insolence, those fine fellows!”
“But it was to be expected, Moreau,” said Hanaud very softly. “Let us not lose our heads! Handcuffs, after all, don’t grow upon the bushes. No, when we want them to keep inquisitive young ladies in order, we must get them the best way we can. It was certainly to be expected, Moreau,” and as he handed them over to his assistant, Joyce Whipple with a sigh slid down in a heap at his side. He stooped over her. “Courage, mademoiselle!” he said chidingly; and Joyce Whipple from the floor laughed weakly and said:
“It is all very well to say ‘Courage, mademoiselle.’ But what is mademoiselle to do, monsieur, my friend, if mademoiselle’s legs give way under her? She can only sit on the floor, poor girl, and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” and her voice trailed away into silence and her shoulders bowed as she crouched upon the floor. She covered her face suddenly with her hands, and in a moment she was shaking from head to foot with great sobs like a child, and the tears were running out between her fingers.
Hanaud had been left completely at a loss by Joyce Whipple’s words, but her distress he did understand. He called for water in a peremptory voice, and when the glass was brought he knelt down by her side and put his great arm about her shoulders, raised her head and held the glass to her lips.
“Oh!” she sighed as she drank, and fearing that he was for handing back the glass before she had finished, she caught his wrist and held it fast with both her hands.
“More?” he asked when she had finished. “Oh, ever so much more,” she cried in a stronger voice, and now she laughed without hysteria and Hanaud laughed in sympathy. Moreau was holding a jug of water in his hands, and he filled the glass again. Hanaud stood up in front of her as she drank it, and with a movement of his hand commanded the removal of the prisoners. They were hustled out whilst she was drinking, but not so quickly but that she uttered a cry and, rising up on her knees, pressed herself against the wall.
“You are safe, mademoiselle,” said Hanaud, but she didn’t hear. Her eyes were fixed on the door through which the women had been taken and the dark cellar beyond. She knelt straight up, bruising her shoulder against the wall by the violence of her pressure. She shivered. She was once more upon the edge of panic.
“No, no, mademoiselle,” said Hanaud. It was an order that he gave her. “There is nothing to fear. It must not be!” And to Moreau he added: “See that they lock those women up in one of the rooms until we go, and send someone into the square to fetch Mr. Ricardo’s car.” He turned again to Joyce Whipple. “I tell you what we shall do. We shall take you in Mr. Ricardo’s fine car to Mr. Ricardo’s fine hotel, where a friend is waiting for you—”
“A friend?” Joyce asked with a frown of perplexity; then with a cry of alarm: “Not from—”
“No, no, no, not from the Chateau Suvlac at all. Will you please to listen to me?” Hanaud interrupted with an accent of the utmost testiness. “I dispose of you tonight. I am your goat.”
“Your nanny, he means, Joyce,” Mr. Ricardo explained, and they all fell to laughing foolishly and yet wisely. Joyce Whipple from an instinct that she must grapple herself fast to the light and trifling things if she were ever to repair the hurt and horror of this day; Hanaud because laughter would be the saving of her if it was kept on this side of hysteria. He was not very sure indeed of the occasion for laughter. Nothing that he had said could have provoked it. At an appropriate moment he had used an admirable idiom — that was all. But he was very content to laugh, with an ear alert to catch the first waverings of hysteria; and he kept the broad bulwark of his shoulders solidly between the girl upon the floor in the tattered masquerade and the horrid apparatus of her death. The noose with its short foot of rope promising slow torture and dreadful disfigurement dangled from the hook. But they laughed beneath it so that the walls of that deep-sunk, sinister chamber rang with a joyous sound which they could hardly have heard before. To Mr. Ricardo it seemed that their laughter was laying the ghosts of many crimes and exorcizing the cellar of its horrors.
“Come,” said Hanaud to the girl. “I carry you since the legs won’t walk.”
He lifted her up on her feet and thence into his arms with no more effort than if she had been in very truth a baby. There were only the three of them now in the cellar. “You will take the lantern, yes? — and you will leave this cellar just as it is for Monsieur Le Commissaire, and you will light me very carefully so that I do not bump this young lady’s head too often against the wall.”
Mr. Ricardo went forward with the lamp into the outer cellar. He saw clearly now the hole on the edge of which he had tottered. Some boards had been removed, a shallow trench had been dug in the clay — a grave. And the thought that if Hanaud had yielded to his appeals in the restaurant of the “Golden Pheasant”; or if he had yielded to his own doubts; or if Moreau had been late in coming to summon them; or if that shrill cry of death by terror had not risen up from beneath their feet, the grave would already hold its occupant, set his heart sinking in his breast and filled him with an unforgettable dismay. He would himself have had his share in that crime. Remorse would have stalked him for the rest of his days, and his soul went out in
gratitude towards his friend. Even now, he noticed with a smile, Hanaud so held Joyce Whipple in his arms that her back was towards that open trench. She never saw it as she passed. The big porte-cochère was now wide open; there were gendarmes in uniform now at the door and in the street; the car, with its lights burning, stood beneath the archway. Hanaud carried Joyce Whipple out to it and set her feet upon the footboard and helped her in. He beckoned to one of the men in the vestibule to mount beside the chauffeur.
“So!” he said as he closed the door. “We keep you one moment. You are no longer afraid?”
“No,” she answered, smiling at him from the window and drawing in a long breath. “But—”
“Yes? Do not hesitate, mademoiselle. Our little world is yours to command tonight.”
“Very well, then! I ask something. I would like to breathe the fresh air, to feel it on my face, my neck. In a word, will you please have the car opened?”
Slowly there dawned upon Hanaud’s face a look of real delight. “Mademoiselle, the car does not open. It is my friend Ricardo’s car, and it does not open. No. I tell you. Only the better class of cars are made to open. Tomorrow I take you in my Ford and it will all be different,”
He turned back towards the vestibule with an impish grin at Mr. Ricardo. But he atoned for the grin the next moment.
“I have a little remark to make to the widow Chicholle. You shall hear. It will be interesting to see how she takes it.”
Hanaud was spacing out his words, savouring them with a grim smile which only once or twice Mr. Ricardo had seen upon his face. In a fanciful flight, he had called it the coup de grace. He hurried back on Hanaud’s heels. Hanaud would want him at his side if only to show him how wonderfully well he shot. Already orders were being given, and a key grated in a lock. A gendarme threw open the door of the sitting-room.
“Here, you! The widow Chicholle. Out with you here!” and the old woman with her white hair and the black hollows in her face came out into the light and blinked.
“You wanted me, monsieur? Yes? I am at your service. You will remember that no harm was done. A little fear — yes! That was all that we intended. Yes! No doubt it was not right and we must suffer a little — yes.”
“I invite you to be silent,” Hanaud cut in — oh, very softly. “Your excuses — you shall make them to the President of Assize — and no doubt he will listen. For me, I have a little warning to give you — just for what it is worth. You have visited no doubt upon some Sunday or other that very beautiful ornament of this town — the Cave of the Mummies.”
“Yes, m’sieu. I have been there,” said the widow Chicholle, with her eyes fixed in a desperate anxiety upon Hanaud’s face.
“Good! I have in the course of my researches in Bordeaux today come upon a startling fact which cannot but interest you. This house is, Chicholle” — and his voice rang out a trifle louder, a trifle less soft— “this house is built upon that ancient cemetery from which the mummies were removed.”
The widow Chicholle blinked at him, seeking for the meaning of his words. He did not keep her in suspense.
“Is she there?” he cried aloud, pointing downwards to the floor. “Is she there — Jeanne Corisot? And the others who have vanished from the earth? Tomorrow we shall see.” And as he turned and strode towards the door the widow Chicholle screeched and dropped like a stone.
CHAPTER 20
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
AT THE DOOR of the hotel in the Cours de L’Intendance, Hanaud jumped out.
“Wait!” he said to Joyce Whipple. “I borrow a cloak”; and in a minute he was back again. Joyce wrapped it about her and was led up to Ricardo’s sitting- room. Hanaud had entered the hotel with her and Ricardo had ascended the stairs with them, and yet he had conjured into his hands by some magic, on the way, a plate of biscuits.
“Now, mademoiselle, you will sit here,” he ordered, arranging a chair for her at the table, and setting down the biscuits in front of her, “and you will eat perhaps a couple of biscuits, whilst I make the arrangements.”
He whisked out of the room, and was back again as swiftly as if his energy had annihilated time. Joyce Whipple was still at her second biscuit, and Hanaud calmly lifted the plate from before her.
“That will do,” he said.
“No!” cried Joyce, and she clung with both hands to the plate. “I am hungry.”
“It certainly is not much of a dinner,” Mr. Ricardo observed reproachfully.
“It is not a dinner at all,” said Hanaud. “But it will spoil a dinner. Will you let the plate go, if you please, mademoiselle?”
But Joyce Whipple shook her head with determination and clung still more to her plate. She looked so like a mutinous little boy that Hanaud began to laugh; but still with one great hand he drew the plate of biscuits away, and still with both her small ones she clutched it back again.
“I am starving,” she said with a whimper in her voice, and the tears in her eyes.
“I know, my little friend,” he replied gently. “I know that very well,” and his free arm went round her shoulders. “Now you shall listen to me and say how wise I am. Look! I engage a room for you — so, No.18 — here is the ticket — a room with a bath — ah, ha, you do not know, you are the chimney- sweep’s boy. Also I order a dinner for you with a little bottle of champagne, for all of which Mr. Ricardo shall pay. And I borrow a nightdress from the manageress. The pyjamas of burnt orange — no! She lost them on the Lido. So you meet your friend for a minute — here. Then you get all white again in your bath. Then you lose yourself in the manageress’s nightgown and get into bed. Then your dinner is brought to you, and perhaps whilst you eat it you talk to your friend. Then you go to sleep — oh, quite free from any fear, because I put a gendarme at your door. There is no need, you understand, for any gendarme. I only post him there because I am very kind and very efficient. If you wake up in the night and suddenly imagine you are in a less pleasant place, you have only to cry out, ‘Are you there, Alphonse?’ and he will answer, ‘Yes, mademoiselle, armed to the teeth,’ and if you say instead, ‘Are you there, Hyacinthe?’ he will answer just the same.”
So Hanaud rattled on, striving to bring back some laughter to that wan face; and suddenly she did laugh and laid a small hand upon his big paw.
“Very well,” she said, and she got up unsteadily on to her feet. “But you talk of a friend and again of a friend. Except you two I have no friends in Bordeaux.”
“We shall see.”
Hanaud went to the door and opened it and beckoned, and Bryce Carter entered the room. At the sight of him Joyce uttered a cry of astonishment.
“You?” She plumped down in her chair again and stared at him. “But when did you come?”
“This evening,” said Bryce Carter. “There was a word about you last night in a London paper.”
“And you left at once?”
“Of course. I came at once.”
“Oh!” Joyce ran a grimy finger backwards and forwards along the tablecloth and her lips twitched and melted into a slow smile.
“That was terribly nice of you,” she said. Hanaud glanced at Mr. Ricardo and threw up his hands in despair. There was no need for him to blow upon his fingers now. He of the burning letters — there he stood as unmoved as a pillar in a desert, with his “Of course,” and his “I came at once,” like a doctor. And there she sat looking at her little dirty finger and saying politely, “How terribly nice of you!” What a people — Goddam!
“Well, we go, Mr. Ricardo and I,” he said, making his announcement as dramatic as possible. But it fell just as flat as his introduction of Bryce Carter. Neither of the young people asked whither he and Ricardo were going, or took the most fleeting interest in their movements. Bryce Carter stared at Joyce; Joyce stared at the tablecloth. Hanaud tried again. He smiled confidently at Ricardo as one who knew an infallible magic to attract a girl’s attention.
“We go to bring back your clothes to you, mademoiselle,” he said.
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br /> Certainly the remark had an effect, but not the effect which he expected. He awaited enthusiasm, and a show of gratitude. All that happened was that Joyce raised her eyes shyly to Bryce Carter’s face and said with a little bubble of laughter: “He says that I look like a chimney-sweep’s boy.”
Bryce Carter looked at as much as he could see of her very seriously. Then he replied:
“I have never seen a chimney-sweep’s boy, but I should think that he’s right.”
Hanaud was defeated. He rushed from the room, and Mr. Ricardo found him leaning against the wall of the passage, incredulity upon his face, his arms helplessly gesticulating.
“What a people!” he exclaimed.
Mr. Ricardo on the other hand had a different view. Discretion and self- control never failed to touch a responsive chord in his heart.
“It is not our habit to make a public exhibition of our emotions even under the most seductive circumstances,” he said primly.
“I was wrong about that young man,” Hanaud declared gloomily. “He has not the temperament. He will not make money in the City.”
But a little cry rang out behind the closed door. Bryce Carter’s voice, passionate and low, followed swift upon it. “Joyce! Joyce!”
Hanaud turned in a flash and opened the door. For the fraction of a second he stood, he in his turn like a pillar of stone. He saw Bryce Carter standing by the table and in his clasp the chimneysweep’s boy, her arms tightly locked about his neck, her face buried in his coat. Hanaud softly closed the door.
“He has. He will,” he said, sublimely admitting an error of judgment. “Let us go!”
This time the car slipped along the Rue Fondaudege and out by the route du Medoc. The clocks of the town were striking ten whilst it still ran between the houses. Immediately afterwards the interminable street fell away behind with an abruptness which was startling, and the car shot into the darkness of the open country. But in front of the strong headlights the road lay brilliant as a riband of snow, and the trees which bordered it continually met to make an impenetrable forest and continually opened to let the travellers through. Every now and then they jolted over cobbles between ghostly white houses, and left another village behind them; every now and then, too, the lighted windows of a bar fought with their lights for the illumination of the road, and vanished behind them. Hanaud sat very silent in the darkness of the limousine, and Mr. Ricardo was at pains not to interrupt his reflections. No doubt the great man was planning and planning and planning. Already a rare light or two showed that they were approaching Pauillac. The adventures of the night were nearing their climax. Suddenly Hanaud spoke. “I have been thinking, my friend.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 107