Hanaud made a schoolboy’s grimace. “We will go and sit in your box at the opera to-night,” he said, “and you shall explain to me all through the beautiful music the theory of the tonic sol-fa.”
They reached Covent Garden before the curtain rose. Mr. Ricardo’s box was on the lowest tier and next to the omnibus box.
“We are near the stage,” said Hanaud, as he took his seat in the corner and so arranged the curtain that he could see and yet was hidden from view. “I like that.”
The theatre was full; stalls and boxes shimmered with jewels and satin, and all that was famous that season for beauty and distinction had made its tryst there that night.
“Yes, this is wonderful,” said Hanaud. “What opera do they play?” He glanced at his programme and cried, with a little start of surprise: “We are in luck. It is The Jewels of the Madonna.”
“Do you believe in omens?” Mr. Ricardo asked coldly. He had not yet recovered from his rebuff of the afternoon.
“No, but I believe that Carmen Valeri is at her best in this part,” said Hanaud.
Mr. Ricardo belonged to that body of critics which must needs spoil your enjoyment by comparisons and recollections of other great artists. He was at a disadvantage certainly to-night, for the opera was new. But he did his best. He imagined others in the part, and when the great scene came at the end of the second act, and Carmen Valeri, on obtaining from her lover the jewels stolen from the sacred image, gave such a display of passion as fairly enthralled that audience, Mr. Ricardo sighed quietly and patiently.
“How Calvé would have brought out the psychological value of that scene!” he murmured; and he was quite vexed with Hanaud, who sat with his opera glasses held to his eyes, and every sense apparently concentrated on the stage. The curtains rose and rose again when the act was concluded, and still Hanaud sat motionless as the Sphynx, staring through his glasses.
“That is all,” said Ricardo when the curtains fell for the fifth time.
“They will come out,” said Hanaud. “Wait!” And from between the curtains Carmen Valeri was led out into the full glare of the footlights with the panoply of jewels flashing on her breast. Then at last Hanaud put down his glasses and turned to Ricardo with a look of exultation and genuine delight upon his face which filled that season-worn dilettante with envy.
“What a night!” said Hanaud. “What a wonderful night!” And he applauded until he split his gloves. At the end of the opera he cried: “We will go and take supper at the Semiramis. Yes, my friend, we will finish our evening like gallant gentlemen. Come! Let us not think of the morning.” And boisterously he slapped Ricardo in the small of the back.
In spite of his boast, however, Hanaud hardly touched his supper, and he played with, rather than drank, his brandy and soda. He had a little table to which he was accustomed beside a glass screen in the depths of the room, and he sat with his back to the wall watching the groups which poured in. Suddenly his face lighted up.
“Here is Carmen Valeri!” he cried. “Once more we are in luck. Is it not that she is beautiful?”
Mr. Ricardo turned languidly about in his chair and put up his eyeglass.
“So, so,” he said.
“Ah!” returned Hanaud. “Then her companion will interest you still more. For he is the man who murdered Mrs. Blumenstein.”
Mr. Ricardo jumped so that his eyeglass fell down and tinkled on its cord against the buttons of his waistcoat.
“What!” he exclaimed. “It’s impossible!” He looked again. “Certainly the man fits Joan Carew’s description. But—” He turned back to Hanaud utterly astounded. And as he looked at the Frenchman all his earlier recollections of him, of his swift deductions, of the subtle imagination which his heavy body so well concealed, crowded in upon Ricardo and convinced him.
“How long have you known?” he asked in a whisper of awe.
“Since ten o’clock to-night.”
“But you will have to find the necklace before you can prove it.”
“The necklace!” said Hanaud carelessly. “That is already found.”
Mr. Ricardo had been longing for a thrill. He had it now. He felt it in his very spine.
“It’s found?” he said in a startled whisper.
“Yes.”
Ricardo turned again, with as much indifference as he could assume, towards the couple who were settling down at their table, the man with a surly indifference, Carmen Valeri with the radiance of a woman who has just achieved a triumph and is now free to enjoy the fruits of it. Confusedly, recollections returned to Ricardo of questions put that afternoon by Hanaud to Joan Carew — subtle questions into which the name of Carmen Valeri was continually entering. She was a woman of thirty, certainly beautiful, with a clear, pale face and eyes like the night.
“Then she is implicated too!” he said. What a change for her, he thought, from the stage of Covent Garden to the felon’s cell, from the gay supper-room of the Semiramis, with its bright frocks and its babel of laughter, to the silence and the ignominious garb of the workrooms in Aylesbury Prison!
“She!” exclaimed Hanaud; and in his passion for the contrasts of drama Ricardo was almost disappointed. “She has nothing whatever to do with it. She knows nothing. André Favart there — yes. But Carmen Valeri! She’s as stupid as an owl, and loves him beyond words. Do you want to know how stupid she is? You shall know. I asked Mr. Clements, the director of the opera house, to take supper with us, and here he is.”
Hanaud stood up and shook hands with the director. He was of the world of business rather than of art, and long experience of the ways of tenors and prima-donnas had given him a good-humoured cynicism.
“They are spoilt children, all tantrums and vanity,” he said, “and they would ruin you to keep a rival out of the theatre.”
He told them anecdote upon anecdote.
“And Carmen Valeri,” Hanaud asked in a pause; “is she troublesome this season?”
“Has been,” replied Clements dryly. “At present she is playing at being good. But she gave me a turn some weeks ago.” He turned to Ricardo. “Superstition’s her trouble, and André Favart knows it. She left him behind in America this spring.”
“America!” suddenly cried Ricardo; so suddenly that Clements looked at him in surprise.
“She was singing in New York, of course, during the winter,” he returned. “Well, she left him behind, and I was shaking hands with myself when he began to deal the cards over there. She came to me in a panic. She had just had a cable. She couldn’t sing on Friday night. There was a black knave next to the nine of diamonds. She wouldn’t sing for worlds. And it was the first night of The Jewels of the Madonna! Imagine the fix I was in!”
“What did you do?” asked Ricardo.
“The only thing there was to do,” replied Clements with a shrug of the shoulders. “I cabled Favart some money and he dealt the cards again. She came to me beaming. Oh, she had been so distressed to put me in the cart! But what could she do? Now there was a red queen next to the ace of hearts, so she could sing without a scruple so long, of course, as she didn’t pass a funeral on the way down to the opera house. Luckily she didn’t. But my money brought Favart over here, and now I’m living on a volcano. For he’s the greatest scoundrel unhung. He never has a farthing, however much she gives him; he’s a blackmailer, he’s a swindler, he has no manners and no graces, he looks like a butcher and treats her as if she were dirt, he never goes near the opera except when she is singing in this part, and she worships the ground he walks on. Well, I suppose it’s time to go.”
The lights had been turned off, the great room was emptying. Mr. Ricardo and his friends rose to go, but at the door Hanaud detained Mr. Clements, and they talked together alone for some little while, greatly to Mr. Ricardo’s annoyance. Hanaud’s good humour, however, when he rejoined his friend, was enough for two.
“I apologise, my friend, with my hand on my heart. But it was for your sake that I stayed behind. You have a meretricious
taste for melodrama which I deeply deplore, but which I mean to gratify. I ought to leave for Paris to-morrow, but I shall not. I shall stay until Thursday.” And he skipped upon the pavement as they walked home to Grosvenor Square.
Mr. Ricardo bubbled with questions, but he knew his man. He would get no answer to any one of them to-night. So he worked out the problem for himself as he lay awake in his bed, and he came down to breakfast next morning fatigued but triumphant. Hanaud was already chipping off the top of his egg at the table.
“So I see you have found it all out, my friend,” he said.
“Not all,” replied Ricardo modestly, “and you will not mind, I am sure, if I follow the usual custom and wish you a good morning.”
“Not at all,” said Hanaud. “I am all for good manners myself.”
He dipped his spoon into his egg.
“But I am longing to hear the line of your reasoning.”
Mr. Ricardo did not need much pressing.
“Joan Carew saw André Favart at Mrs. Starlingshield’s party, and saw him with Carmen Valeri. For Carmen Valeri was there. I remember that you asked Joan for the names of the artists who sang, and Carmen Valeri was amongst them.”
Hanaud nodded his head.
“Exactly.”
“No doubt Joan Carew noticed Carmen Valeri particularly, and so took unconsciously into her mind an impression of the man who was with her, André Favart — of his build, of his walk, of his type.”
Again Hanaud agreed.
“She forgets the man altogether, but the picture remains latent in her mind — an undeveloped film.”
Hanaud looked up in surprise, and the surprise flattered Mr. Ricardo. Not for nothing had he tossed about in his bed for the greater part of the night.
“Then came the tragic night at the Semiramis. She does not consciously recognise her assailant, but she dreams the scene again and again, and by a process of unconscious cerebration the figure of the man becomes familiar. Finally she makes her début, is entertained at supper afterwards, and meets once more Carmen Valeri.”
“Yes, for the first time since Mrs. Starlingshield’s party,” interjected Hanaud.
“She dreams again, she remembers asleep more than she remembers when awake. The presence of Carmen Valeri at her supper-party has its effect. By a process of association, she recalls Favart, and the mask slips on the face of her assailant. Some days later she goes to the opera. She hears Carmen Valeri sing in The Jewels of the Madonna. No doubt the passion of her acting, which I am more prepared to acknowledge this morning than I was last night, affects Joan Carew powerfully, emotionally. She goes to bed with her head full of Carmen Valeri, and she dreams not of Carmen Valeri, but of the man who is unconsciously associated with Carmen Valeri in her thoughts. The mask vanishes altogether. She sees her assailant now, has his portrait limned in her mind, would know him if she met him in the street, though she does not know by what means she identified him.”
“Yes,” said Hanaud. “It is curious the brain working while the body sleeps, the dream revealing what thought cannot recall.”
Mr. Ricardo was delighted. He was taken seriously.
“But of course,” he said, “I could not have worked the problem out but for you. You knew of André Favart and the kind of man he was.”
Hanaud laughed.
“Yes. That is always my one little advantage. I know all the cosmopolitan blackguards of Europe.” His laughter ceased suddenly, and he brought his clenched fist heavily down upon the table. “Here is one of them who will be very well out of the world, my friend,” he said very quietly, but there was a look of force in his face and a hard light in his eyes which made Mr. Ricardo shiver.
For a few moments there was silence. Then Ricardo asked: “But have you evidence enough?”
“Yes.”
“Your two chief witnesses, Calladine and Joan Carew — you said it yourself — there are facts to discredit them. Will they be believed?”
“But they won’t appear in the case at all,” Hanaud said. “Wait, wait!” and once more he smiled. “By the way, what is the number of Calladine’s house?”
Ricardo gave it, and Hanaud therefore wrote a letter. “It is all for your sake, my friend,” he said with a chuckle.
“Nonsense,” said Ricardo. “You have the spirit of the theatre in your bones.”
“Well, I shall not deny it,” said Hanaud, and he sent out the letter to the nearest pillar-box.
Mr. Ricardo waited in a fever of impatience until Thursday came. At breakfast Hanaud would talk of nothing but the news of the day. At luncheon he was no better. The affair of the Semiramis Hotel seemed a thousand miles from any of his thoughts. But at five o’clock he said as he drank his tea:
“You know, of course, that we go to the opera to-night?”
“Yes. Do we?”
“Yes. Your young friend Calladine, by the way, will join us in your box.”
“That is very kind of him, I am sure,” said Mr. Ricardo.
The two men arrived before the rising of the curtain, and in the crowded lobby a stranger spoke a few words to Hanaud, but what he said Ricardo could not hear. They took their seats in the box, and Hanaud looked at his programme.
“Ah! It is Il Ballo de Maschera to-night. We always seem to hit upon something appropriate, don’t we?”
Then he raised his eyebrows.
“Oh-o! Do you see that our pretty young friend, Joan Carew, is singing in the rôle of the page? It is a showy part. There is a particular melody with a long-sustained trill in it, as far as I remember.”
Mr. Ricardo was not deceived by Hanaud’s apparent ignorance of the opera to be given that night and of the part Joan Carew was to take. He was, therefore, not surprised when Hanaud added:
“By the way, I should let Calladine find it all out for himself.”
Mr. Ricardo nodded sagely.
“Yes. That is wise. I had thought of it myself.” But he had done nothing of the kind. He was only aware that the elaborate stage-management in which Hanaud delighted was working out to the desired climax, whatever that climax might be. Calladine entered the box a few minutes later and shook hands with them awkwardly.
“It was kind of you to invite me,” he said and, very ill at ease, he took a seat between them and concentrated his attention on the house as it filled up.
“There’s the overture,” said Hanaud. The curtains divided and were festooned on either side of the stage. The singers came on in their turn; the page appeared to a burst of delicate applause (Joan Carew had made a small name for herself that season), and with a stifled cry Calladine shot back in the box as if he had been struck. Even then Mr. Ricardo did not understand. He only realised that Joan Carew was looking extraordinarily trim and smart in her boy’s dress. He had to look from his programme to the stage and back again several times before the reason of Calladine’s exclamation dawned on him. When it did, he was horrified. Hanaud, in his craving for dramatic effects, must have lost his head altogether. Joan Carew was wearing, from the ribbon in her hair to the scarlet heels of her buckled satin shoes, the same dress as she had worn on the tragic night at the Semiramis Hotel. He leaned forward in his agitation to Hanaud.
“You must be mad. Suppose Favart is in the theatre and sees her. He’ll be over on the Continent by one in the morning.”
“No, he won’t,” replied Hanaud. “For one thing, he never comes to Covent Garden unless one opera, with Carmen Valeri in the chief part, is being played, as you heard the other night at supper. For a second thing, he isn’t in the house. I know where he is. He is gambling in Dean Street, Soho. For a third thing, my friend, he couldn’t leave by the nine o’clock train for the Continent if he wanted to. Arrangements have been made. For a fourth thing, he wouldn’t wish to. He has really remarkable reasons for desiring to stay in London. But he will come to the theatre later. Clements will send him an urgent message, with the result that he will go straight to Clements’ office. Meanwhile, we can enjoy ourselves, eh?�
�
Never was the difference between the amateur dilettante and the genuine professional more clearly exhibited than by the behaviour of the two men during the rest of the performance. Mr. Ricardo might have been sitting on a coal fire from his jumps and twistings; Hanaud stolidly enjoyed the music, and when Joan Carew sang her famous solo his hands clamoured for an encore louder than anyone’s in the boxes. Certainly, whether excitement was keeping her up or no, Joan Carew had never sung better in her life. Her voice was clear and fresh as a bird’s — a bird with a soul inspiring its song. Even Calladine drew his chair forward again and sat with his eyes fixed upon the stage and quite carried out of himself. He drew a deep breath at the end.
“She is wonderful,” he said, like a man waking up.
“She is very good,” replied Mr. Ricardo, correcting Calladine’s transports.
“We will go round to the back of the stage,” said Hanaud.
They passed through the iron door and across the stage to a long corridor with a row of doors on one side. There were two or three men standing about in evening dress, as if waiting for friends in the dressing-rooms. At the third door Hanaud stopped and knocked. The door was opened by Joan Carew, still dressed in her green and gold. Her face was troubled, her eyes afraid.
“Courage, little one,” said Hanaud, and he slipped past her into the room. “It is as well that my ugly, familiar face should not be seen too soon.”
The door closed and one of the strangers loitered along the corridor and spoke to a call-boy. The call-boy ran off. For five minutes more Mr. Ricardo waited with a beating heart. He had the joy of a man in the centre of things. All those people driving homewards in their motor-cars along the Strand — how he pitied them! Then, at the end of the corridor, he saw Clements and André Favart. They approached, discussing the possibility of Carmen Valeri’s appearance in London opera during the next season.
“We have to look ahead, my dear friend,” said Clements, “and though I should be extremely sorry — —”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 806