“I was careful not to break in upon your thoughts.”
“I have been looking back upon all that was said and done this evening.”
“It is very natural that you should.”
“And one thing puzzles me.”
“Only one thing?” Mr. Ricardo asked enviously.
“Only one thing, my friend,” Hanaud returned. “But it is one which you shall explain to me.”
A series of little movements in the other corner of the carriage suggested that Mr. Ricardo was settling his collar, squaring his shoulders, pulling down his cuffs and generally trimming himself up to fit the occasion.
“I shall do my best. Speak, Hanaud!”
Hanaud accordingly delivered himself of his perplexity.
“To sit on the floor and tell sad stories of dead kings — that is an English custom, eh?”
“No, my friend, but it is an English quotation, when it is right.”
Hanaud turned in the darkness eagerly. “Aha! The charming Miss Whipple — she makes a phrase in the cellar, eh? She use an idiom?”
“You may call it so.”
“Good,” said Hanaud with contentment. “I too use him.”
Mr. Ricardo was never able quite to comprehend the professional mind which having made its careful plan and set it irrevocably in motion can turn to trifles whilst awaiting the result.
“Do you mean to say,” he cried, “that all this while in the corner of my car you have been considering the preposterous question whether or no you will sometime be able to drag into your conversation an unusual phrase which you have just heard for the first time? You are approaching Mirandol. Dreadful duties lie before you — and you are trifling with an idiom. I don’t wish to be censorious, but levity is levity.”
Hanaud was altogether unmoved by this rebuke.
“A field-marshal, my friend,” he replied, “once he has prepared his battle, and given the order to begin, may go and fish with his little rod for a trout. He can do no more. He cannot alter his strategy that day. So with Hanaud. His scheme is complete. His subordinates are carrying it out. Himself he learns an idiom.”
He had hardly delivered himself of this immodest comparison when a lantern swung to and fro ahead of them, and with all its brakes clamped fast the car came to a stop. The headlights showed a stout wire rope fixed across the road at the level of the bonnet, and three gendarmes in uniform with a local inspector of police dressed in plain clothes. The inspector opened the door of the car and, seeing now who was within it, saluted.
“The Chateau Mirandol is surrounded. You will only have to blow your whistle and there will be assistance at once,” he said.
“The Vicomte is alone?” asked Hanaud.
“No, the Juge d’Instruction has returned to him. Oh — Monsieur Tidon — he is ambitious. It is known that he aspires to Paris and here is the case to lift him up the ladder. He has not let the Vicomte de Mirandol for long out of his sight today, I can tell you,” the inspector observed with a quiet laugh.
“And what of Suvlac?”
“No one has moved beyond the grounds all day.”
“Good!” Hanaud leaned out of the window and spoke in a whisper. Ricardo heard the inspector answer “Yes,” and again “Yes,” and then Hanaud turned his head towards Moreau on the seat beside the driver. “We will go in by the gate that was painted”; and as the gendarmes removed the barrier from across the road, he turned again to the inspector.
“There is no need for that wire rope any longer. Anyone from the Chateau Suvlac or Mirandol — yes, you shall stop him. But the travellers — now they can pass without inconvenience.”
The car, purring like a great cat, slid along past the high iron gates of Mirandol on the left hand, and the plantations of Suvlac upon the right. It reached the arch and the house of Suvlac, the pink walls glimmering under the stars and not a light in any window. It turned down the slope by the farm buildings and the garage, crossed the pasture-land and ascended the hill. Fifty yards from the gate, Hanaud tapped upon the front glass and the car stopped. From that point the three men proceeded quietly on foot. The hill-side fell away upon their right, the hedge of the Mirandol property rose high upon their left, and they walked by the faint gleam of the white road. At a corner they came to a gap in the hedge. Mr. Ricardo stepped forward busily and reached out a hand to the gate. But Hanaud snatched him back violently.
“Don’t touch it!” he whispered.
“A little wet paint — what does that matter?” Mr. Ricardo returned in the same tone.
“There may be more than a little wet paint. Let us take care!”
He drew a glove over his right hand. But noiselessly though the party had moved, he had not touched the latch before a thread of light shot out, nickered over their faces and was gone. ;A man moved forward from the shrubs within the garden and opened the gate for them.
“That is very good watching,” Hanaud murmured. “I thank you.”
They slid between the high bushes to the lawn in front of the low house. At the edges of the thick dark curtains which were drawn across the library window there was a trickle of light. But nowhere else. In that room there, thought Ricardo, sat the ambitious Juge d’Instruction keeping watch over the rogue whose conviction was to waft him away to Paris. He crept forward across the drive in the hope that at one of those edges where the light shone he might catch a glimpse of the interior of the room. What were those two doing? Chatting over a bottle of wine like two good friends? Not a sign that on one side of the hearth sat a criminal and on the other a judge with a knowledge of the crime? Or did they sit in a dreadful silence, one with eyes shifting from chair to table, from book to ornament, from picture to bright fire-iron — anywhere, so that they did not meet another pair of eyes; the other watching steadily, unblinkingly out of a face of steel. Mr. Ricardo had got to know. He crept close to the window and peered in; and then with a low cry rattling in his throat he leaped suddenly back. Hanaud caught him by the elbow.
“Hush!” he whispered. “What do you see?” But Ricardo had suffered from an unexpected shock, so strange a thrust of terror that he could not answer. His blood seemed to him to stand still and his belly to turn over.
“Look! Look!” he gasped at length, and pointed to the window. Hanaud, in his turn, approached and saw. And he too was startled. Standing between the curtain and the window, with his face pressed against the glass, and his hands curved about his eyes to shut out any glimmer from the room, the Vicomte de Mirandol stared out into the darkness, motionless like some old Indian idol. He was watching them as some late student, disturbed by the cracking of a twig in a lonely garden, might watch from his curtained study and, discerning robbers, stand rooted to the spot. There had been only the thickness of the pane between Mr. Ricardo and that big white face with the full, mincing lips and the bald forehead; and it had not moved. Ricardo had never seen anything more disturbing, more ghostly. He came to Hanaud’s side reluctantly, uneasily. A foot away from the window the two men stood and stared. Did the Vicomte imagine that he had not been seen? That they were staring at him and overlooking him? No! For he did move, and the movement was even more grotesque and somehow more alarming than his immobility. For his face expanded in a grin which showed both the rows of his teeth and, lifting a fat finger, he beckoned. For a moment the heavy curtain swung aside, and both the men in the garden saw the examining magistrate leaning forward from a chair in the lighted room with the most baffling look of suspense upon his face. The curtain swept down again and hid the room. But the one brief glimpse had given to Ricardo a new and vague idea of Arthur Tidon, the examining magistrate. The astute judge, sitting over against his victim, playing with him, playing David to his Jonathan until the police arrived? No! There would have been exultation in his aspect if that had been the case. As it was, there was suspense. And fear? he asked himself. No. Calculation, perhaps, but above all suspense with its parted lips and wide, staring, expectant eyes.
Mr. Ricardo’s con
jectures were cut short by the opening of the door and the great panel of light which stretched of a sudden across the white pebbles of the drive.
“It is Monsieur Hanaud?” The mincing treble voice floated out softly to the watchers.
“It is.”
“Will you come in? Monsieur Tidon is with me. I was a little alarmed to see so many unexpected visitors in my garden at so late an hour. But you shall tell us all that you have done in Bordeaux.”
“All? I have been very busy, Monsieur Le Vicomte,” said Hanaud, in a dry, uncompromising voice. “Moreau!”
Moreau stepped out of the darkness, and the three visitors followed the Vicomte de Mirandol into the vestibule. But only two of them crossed the threshold of the library. Moreau remained outside the door.
CHAPTER 21
MUSTARD GAS
THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE was buttoning a glove upon his right hand. He nodded pleasantly to Hanaud and to Mr. Ricardo.
“Alas, my good Hanaud, you disappoint me,” he grumbled ruefully. “I am no nearer to Bordeaux than I was two days ago.”
“On the contrary, sir,” Hanaud retorted, smiling. “You are as good as there already.”
Tidon, the magistrate, was a little taken aback. “That is excellent,” he said. He seemed upon the point of asking for an explanation, but thought the better of it and contented himself with repeating in an even heartier tone: “Yes, that is excellent! Ah, the Paris police! Nothing is hidden from it for long.”
Hanaud shook his head. “Monsieur, the longer I practise my profession, the humbler I grow—” And of all the untruths, and the name of them was legion, which Mr. Ricardo had heard Hanaud utter, this most took his breath away and plunged him in a state of admiration. “For more and more clearly do I observe that the chief of our success we owe to chance and the mistakes of the other man.”
“You shall try to persuade me of that tomorrow morning,” said the Judge of Instruction very politely, and he rose from his chair and with his left hand he reached for his hat.
Hanaud did not respond to that invitation. He had come straight into the room and across it, and now stood with his back to the fireplace, and as far from the door as in that room any man could possibly be. Yet to everyone he seemed to hold the handle.
“You are going, Monsieur Le Juge?” he asked quietly, and Tidon stopped, and he had quite the air of a man begging permission to go, as he answered:
“My car has been waiting for me for some while—”
“For the best part of an hour,” Hanaud interrupted.
“You must have passed it in the courtyard of the old chateau.”
“We came by the gate which Monsieur de Mirandol was so careful to paint yesterday,” said Hanaud; and Mr. Ricardo, realizing somehow that the air was heavy with stupendous events, but quite at a loss to guess what events, said to himself: “All this is very singular. Here is the chief, the very powerful Judge of Instruction, asking permission of his subordinate to go away, and here is a roomful of people turned into pillars of salt by the mere mention by that subordinate that he came in by a newly painted gate.”
It certainly was extraordinary. There had been an extremely faint, an extremely subtle menace in Hanaud’s speech. He lingered ever so slightly on the words, but he did linger on them, and both the Vicomte and the Judge were disturbed. The Judge was the first to recover his serenity.
“Oh, you came by that longer way,” he said with a smile. “It took you past the Chateau Suvlac. Yes, I understand that you of all men would wish to see what was going on there.”
“There was not a light in any window,” said Hanaud.
Tidon the Judge leaped at that interruption. He had his cue, and like a good actor, he took it up at once.
“No. We provincials are early in our beds,” and he looked at his watch. “Oh, la, la, la! I ought to fine myself. What will the good people of Villeblanche say, when Monsieur Le Juge’s car rattles home at so voluptuous an hour?”
“You have certainly not far to go,” said Hanaud; and his words were the stroke of a hammer upon an anvil. The Judge swung round upon his heel, as though a masterful, invisible hand was on his elbow.
“Hardly a step, Monsieur Tidon,” Hanaud continued suavely. “Hardly a step.”
But there was no misreading the glances which those two men exchanged. One asked: “What do you know?” and the other answered: “I shan’t tell you.” And again one asked: “You dare to threaten me?” and the other replied: “I dare to do my duty.” Thus they stood staring at one another, and more than ever Mr. Ricardo was distressed to see how far the examining magistrate fell below his conceptions. Why, the whole hierarchy of the Law was coming down with a crash in a shower of dust like some old house which had stood a century too long. Oh, it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all!
“After all, there are some provincials who turn night into day,” Hanaud continued. “Monsieur Le Vicomte, for instance.”
The Vicomte was very unhappy at being dragged into the discussion. He smiled unsteadily. “Yes, yes. I work late at night.”
“And not in your fine library.” It was rather a question than a statement. “I am a little surprised at that.”
The Vicomte, however, was in no difficulty about the reply. He replied, indeed, a little too quickly and complacently, like a man who has foreseen an awkward inquiry and discovered the perfect explanation.
“In the winter I do my unimportant work here. I am shut off from the wind by the trees. It is quite still here when every window is rattling upstairs, and warm. But in the summer I use my big room on the floor above. It is really, of course, a room for our literary and philosophical conferences. Oh yes, we have quite a small society in the Medoc and many people do me the honour to come out from Bordeaux to attend them. Women, alas! for the most part. I know that to achieve permanence one must reach the men, but that we minor people cannot hope to do. The ladies, however, yes! It would surprise you to see how many blue-stockings we count in this little corner of France—”
Hanaud broke with a savage irony through the smooth, mincing phrases spoken by that too small mouth with the too red lips.
“And amongst those blue-stockings you reckon, no doubt, the widow Chicholle?”
Mr. Ricardo had a fancy that the very hearts of those two men were between the anvil and the hammer and received the blow. They stood so stupidly, like dolls or like living people mortally hurt. Then the Vicomte felt the palms of his hands and wiped the perspiration away.
“The widow Chicholle?” he repeated in a faint and curious tone, but his lips trembled and the name was pronounced all awry. Tidon glanced at his friend and his eyebrows went up into his forehead, as much as to say “the man’s mad,” but, nevertheless, his face was deadly white and his eyes burned in it like flames. “The widow Chicholle?” de Mirandol continued. “No, I have never heard of her. It might perhaps interest you, Monsieur Hanaud, to see the room in which I work whilst the weather is warm. You will appreciate, in an instant, my choice of it.”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “Since you invite me, sir, there will be nothing to see,” he replied, but de Mirandol would neither accept nor understand the retort.
“But you are wrong, Monsieur Hanaud. For once only, to be sure. I beg you to come and bring your friend.”
He was all smiles again and civility. He threw open the door and recoiled sharply.
“I had forgotten that there were three of you.”
“Monsieur Nicolas Moreau, my assistant.” Hanaud stepped forward without the least eagerness. He was merely gratifying the wish of his host, had the air, indeed, of a man a trifle bored. Mr. Ricardo, on the other hand, was all agog. He felt that it was very likely that he would observe some detail of importance which the rest had overlooked. Give him a few minutes in that room to use his eyes and feel its atmosphere and he would pluck its secret out. He was in the very mood for subtle discoveries. The Vicomte led the way. The corridor turned to the left beyond the library and at the sid
e of the house a staircase mounted to a small landing. A big door confronted them. De Mirandol opened it and switched on the lights. Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo entered a long room with a panelled wall upon their left hand and a row of windows upon their right.
Mr. Ricardo would not at first go far. He remained by the doorway. This long, low room had a message; from that row of windows upon his right the lights had blazed till two o’clock in the morning and then had gone out. What was the message? Mr. Ricardo emptied his mind of its preoccupations. He yielded himself to the room. Let the air pulse out its message, he would be the wax cylinder of a dictaphone to receive it. However, he received nothing.
So he looked about the room. There was a row of chairs ranged against the wall, chairs ready to be set in place for a conference or a lecture. There was a long table in the middle on which, at one end, were some books, a blotting- pad, ink, a great red quill pen, and a pile of sermon paper by the blotting- pad. At the far end opposite to the door was a dais such as you may see in any schoolroom raising the master’s desk and chair above the level of the floor. A table with a baize cloth stood upon the dais against the wall, and above the table were the doors of a big cupboard. There was nothing subtle, obscure, exotic, suggestive, bizarre or alarming about the room. It had no message. It was the very place for a philosophical conference at which the ladies predominated. Mr. Ricardo was at a loss. Here he stood in the centre of mysteries like a ship in the centre of a cyclone. On every side of him the hurricane raged, here in the centre was a treacherous calm. Never had he been so disappointed.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 108