Arriving in Paris at the highly inconvenient hour of 8 A.M., ourrapidedeposited its breakfastless and grumpy passengers on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, washed its hands of us with the final formality of collecting our tickets, and turned us forth into a gray, foggy morning to seek the food and shelter adapted to our purses and tastes. Every one, of course, emerged from seclusion only at the ultimate moment; and, far from holding any lengthy conversation with Miss Falconer, I was lucky to stumble upon her in the vestibule, help her descend, find a taxi for her at the exit, and see her smile back at me where I stood hatless as she drove away.
While I waited for my own cab I found myself beside Mr. John Van Blarcom, who eyed me with mingled hostility and pity, as if I were a cross between a lunatic and a thief. I returned his stare coolly; indeed, I found it braced me. Left to myself, I had experienced a creeping doubt as to the girl’s activities and my own intelligence; but as soon as this fellow glared at me, all my confidence returned.
“Well, Mr. Bayne,” he remarked sardonically, breaking the silence, “I suppose you’re worrying for fear I’ll give you another piece of good advice. Don’t you fret! From now on you can hang yourself any way you want to. I’d as soon talk to a man in a padded cell and a strait-jacket. Only don’t blame me when the gendarmes come for you next week.”
“Oh, go to the devil!” I retorted curtly. It was a relief; I had been wanting to say it ever since we had first met. His jaw shot out menacingly, and for an instant he squared off from me with the look of the professional boxer; but, rather to my disappointment, he thought better of it and turned a contemptuous back.
Upon leaving Genoa I had reserved a room at the Ritz by telegraph. I drove there now, and refreshed myself with a bath and breakfast, casting about me meanwhile for some mode of occupying the hours till noon. There were various tasks, I knew, that should have claimed me; a visit to the police to secure acarte de sejour, the presentation of my credentials as an ambulance-driver, a polite notification to friends that I had arrived. These things should have been my duty and pleasure, but somehow they were uninviting. Nothing appealed to me, I realized with sudden enlightenment, except a certain appointment that I had already made.
I went out, to find that the fog was lifting and spring was in the air. Since my dinner the previous night I had felt an odd exhilaration, a pleasure quickened by the staccato sparkle of the French tongue against my ears, the pale-blue uniforms, and gay French faces glimpsed as the train had stopped at various lighted stations. Saluting Napoleon’s statue, I strolled up the rue de la Paix, took a table on a cafe pavement, and, ordering a glass of something fizzy for the form of it, sat content and happy, watching the whole gigantic pageant of Paris in war-time defile before my eyes.
The Cook’s tourists and their like, bane of the past, had disappeared; but all nationalities that the world holds seemed to be about. At the next table two Russian officers, with high cheek-bones and wide-set eyes, were drinking, chatting together in their purring, unintelligible tongue. Beyond them a party of Englishmen in khaki, cool-mannered, clear of gaze, were talking in low tones of the spring offensive. The uniforms of France swarmed round me in all their variety, and close at hand a general, gorgeous in red and blue and gold, sat with his hand resting affectionately on the knee of a lad in the horizon blue of a simple poilu, who was so like him that I guessed them at a glance for father and son.
A cab drew up before me, and a Belgian officer with crutches was helped out by the cafe starter, who himself limped slightly and wore two medals on his breast. First one troop and then another defiled across the Place l’Opera: a company of infantry with bayonets mounted, a picturesque regiment of Moroccans, turbaned, of magnificently impassive bearing, sitting their horses like images of bronze. Men of the Flying Corps, in dark blue with wings on their sleeves, strolled past me; and once, roused by exclamations and pointing fingers, I looked up to see a monoplane, light and graceful as a darting bird, skimming above our heads.
Even the faces had a different look, the voices a different ring. It was another country from that of the days of peace. Superb and dauntless, tried by the most searing of fires and not found wanting, France was standing girt with her shining armor, barring the invader from her cities, her villages, her homes.
Deep in my heart—too deep to be talked of often—there had lain always a tenderness for this heroic France. “A man’s other country,” some wise person had christened it; and so it was for me, since by a chance I had been born here, and since here my father and then my mother had died. I was glad I had run the gauntlet and had reached Paris to do my part in a mighty work. An ambulance drove heavily past me, and with a thrill I wondered how soon I should bend over such a steering wheel, within sound of the great guns.
Leaving the cafe at last, I beckoned a taxi and settled myself on its cushions for a drive. Each new vista that greeted me was enchanting. The pavements, the river, the buildings, the stately bridges,—all held the same soft, silvery tint of pale French gray. In the Place de la Concorde the fountains played as always, but—heart-warming change—the Strasburg statue, symbol of the lost Lorraine and Alsace, no longer drooped under wreaths of mourning, but sat crowned and garlanded with triumphant flowers.
Like diminishing flies, the same eternal swarm of cabs and motors filled the long vista of the Champs-Elysees between the green branches of the chestnut trees. At the end loomed the Arc de Triomphe, beneath which the hordes of the kaiser, in their first madness of conquest, had sworn to march. Farther on, in the Bois, along the shady paths and about the lakes, the French still walked in safety, because on the frontier their soldiers had cried to the Teutons the famous watchword, “You do not pass!” Noon was approaching, and at the Porte Maillot I consulted Miss Falconer’s card.
“Number 630, rue St.-Dominique,” I bade the driver, the address falling comfortably on my ears. I knew the neighborhood. Deep in the Faubourg St.-Germain, it was a stronghold of the old noblesse, suggesting eminent respectability, ancient and honorable customs, and family connections of a highly desirable kind. It would be a point in Miss Falconer’s favor if I found her conventionally established—a decided point. Along most lines I was in the dark concerning her, but to one dictum I dared to hold: no girl of twenty-two or thereabouts, more than ordinarily attractive, ought to be traveling unchaperoned about this wicked world.
I felt very cheerful, very contented, as my taxi bore me into old Paris. The ancient streets, had a decided lure and charm. Now we passed a quaint church, now a dim and winding alley, now a house with mansard windows or a portal of carved stone. On all sides were buildings that in the old days had been thehotelsof famous gentry, this one sheltering a Montmorency, that one a Clisson or Soubise. It was just the setting for a romance by Dumas. And, with a chuckle, I felt myself in sudden sympathy with that writer’s heroes, none of whom had, it seemed to me, been enmeshed in a mystery more baffling or involved than mine.
“They’ve got nothing on my affair,” I decided, “with their masks and poisoned drinks and swords. For a fellow who leads a cut-and-dried existence generally, I’ve been having quite a lively time. And now, to cap the climax, I’m going to call on a girl about whom I know just one thing—her name. By Jove, it’s exactly like a story! I’ve got the data. If I had any gray matter I could probably work out the facts.
“Take the St. Ives business. It’s plain enough that some one wished those papers on me, intending to unwish them in short order once we got across. The logical suspect, judging by appearances, was Miss Falconer. The little German went out through her room; she was the one person I saw both at the hotel and on theRe d’Italia; and she acted in a suspicious manner that first night aboard the ship. But she says she didn’t do it, and probably she didn’t; it seemed infernally odd, all along, for her to be a spy.
“Still, if she is innocent, who can be responsible? And if that affair didn’t bring her over here, what the dickens did? Something mysterious, something dangerous, something that the French police wouldn’t appreciate, but that her conscience sanctions—that is all she deigns to say. And why on earth did she ask me to destroy that extra? I thought it was because she was Franz von Blenheim’s agent and the paper had an account of him that might have served as a clue to her. She says, though, that she never heard of him. And I may be all kinds of a fool, but it sounded straight.
“Then, there’s Van Blarcom, hang him! He seemed to take a fancy to me. He warned me about the girl, but he kept a still tongue to Captain Cecchi and the rest. He lied deliberately, for no earthly reason, to shield me in that interrogation; yet when those papers materialized in my trunk, though he must have thought just what I thought as to Miss Falconer’s share in it, he didn’t breathe a word. He claimed that he had met her. She said she had never seen him. And then—rather strong for a coincidence—we all three met again on the express. What is he doing on this side? Shadowing her? Nonsense? And yet he seemed almighty keen about her—Oh, hang it! I’m no Sherlock Holmes!”
The taxi pausing at this juncture, I willingly abandoned my attempt at sleuthing and got out in the highest spirits compatible with a strictly correct mien. I dismissed my driver. If asked to remain todejeuner, I should certainly do so. Then, with feelings of natural interest, I gazed at the house before which I stood.
In the outward seeming, at least, it was all that the most fastidious could have required; a gem of Renaissance architecture in its turrets, its quaint, scrolled windows, and the carving of its stone facade. Age and romance breathed from every inch of it. For not less than four hundred years it had watched the changing life of Paris; and even to a lay person like myself a glance proclaimed it one of those ancestralhotels, the pride of noble French families, about which many romantic stories cling.
At another time it would have charmed me hugely, but to-day, as I stood gazing, somehow, my spirits fell. Was it the almost sepulchral silence of the place, the careful drawing of every shutter, the fact that the grilled gateway leading to the court of honor was locked? I did not know; I don’t know yet; but I had an odd, eerie feeling. It seemed like a place of waiting, of watching, and of gloom.
This was unreasonable; it was even down-right ridiculous. I began to think that late events were throwing me off my base. “It’s a house like any other, and a jolly fine old one!” I assured myself, approaching the grilled entrance and producing one of my cards.
An entirely modern electric button was installed there, beneath a now merely ornamental knocker in grotesque gargoyle form. I pressed it, peering through the iron latticework at the stately court. The answer was prompt. Down the steps of the hotel came a white-headed majordomo, gorgeously arrayed, and so pictorial that he might have been a family retainer stepping from the pages of an old tale.
There was something queer about him, I thought, as he crossed the courtyard; just as there was about the house, I appended doggedly, with growing belief. His air was tremulous, his step slow, his gaze far-off and anxious.
“For Miss Falconer, who waits for me,” I announced in French, offering him my card through the grille.
He bowed to me with the deference of a Latin, the grand manner of an ambassador; but he made no motion to let me in.
“Mademoiselle,” he replied, “sends all her excuses, all her regrets to monsieur, but she leaves Paris within the hour and, therefore may not receive.”
I had feared it for a good sixty seconds. None the less, it was a blow to me. My suspicions, never more than half laid, promptly raised their heads again.
“Have the kindness,” I requested, with a calm air of command that I had known to prove hypnotic, “to convey my card to mademoiselle, and to say that I beg of her, before her departure, one little instant of speech.”
But the old fellow’s faded blue eyes were gazing past me, hopelessly sad, supremely mournful. What the deuce ailed him? I wondered angrily. The thing was almost weird. Of a sudden, with irritation, yet with dread, too, I felt myself on the threshold of a house of tragedy. The man might, from the look of him, have been watching some loved young master’s bier.
“Mademoiselle regrets greatly,” he intoned, “but she may not receive. Mademoiselle sends this letter to monsieur that he may understand.” He passed me, through the locked grille, a slender missive; then he saluted me once more and, still staring before him with that fixed, uncanny look, withdrew.
I was divided between exasperation and pity. The old fellow was in a bad way; I felt sorry for him. Dunny had an ancient butler, a household institution, who had presided over our destinies since my childhood and would, I fancied, look something like this if he should hear that I was dead. But in heaven’s name, what was wrong here, and was nothing in the world clear and aboveboard any longer? On the chance that the letter might enlighten me I tore open the envelope and read with mixed feelings the following note:
DEAR Mr. BAYNE:
The news that I found waiting for me was not good, as I had hoped. It was bad, very bad—as bad as news can be. I must leave Paris at once, and I can see no one, talk to no one, before I go. Please believe that I am sorry, and that I shall never forget the kindness you showed me on the ship.
Sincerely yours,
ESME FALCONER.
That was all. Well, the episode was ended—ended, moreover, with a good deal of cavalierness. She had treated me like a meddlesome, pertinacious idiot who had insisted on calling and had to be taught his place. This was a Christian country where the formalities of life prevailed; I could not—unless escorted and countenanced by gendarmes—seize upon a club and batter down that grille.
I was resentful, wrathful, in the very deuce of a humor. Black gloom settled over me. I admitted that Van Blarcom had been right. I recalled the girl’s vague explanations as we sat over our dinner; her denials, unbolstered save by my willingness to accept them; all the chain of incriminating circumstances that I had pondered over in the cab. Her charm and the mystery that enveloped her had thrilled and stirred me; she had seen it. To gain a few hours’ leeway she had once again duped me; and this hotel, with its deceptive air of family and respectability, was a blind, a rendezvous, another such setting for intrigue as the St. Ives.
Her work might be already accomplished. Perhaps she had left Paris. I told myself with some savageness that I did not know and did not care. From the first my presence in this luridly adventurous galley had been incongruous; I would get back with all despatch to the Ritz and the orderly world it typified.
I had gone perhaps twenty feet when a grating noise attracted me. Glancing back across my shoulder, I saw that the old majordomo was unlocking and setting wide the gate. The hum of a self-starter reached me faintly, and a moment later there rolled slowly forth a dark-blue touring-car of luxurious aspect, driven by a chauffeur whose coat and cap and goggles gave him rather the appearance of a leather brownie, and bearing in the tonneau Miss Falconer, elaborately coated and veiled.
She was turning to the right, not the left; she would not pass me. I stood transfixed, watching from my post against the wall. As the car crept by the old majordomo, he saluted, and she spoke to him, bending forward for a moment to rest her fingers on his sleeve.
“Be of courage, Marcel, my friend! All will be well ifle bon Dieuwills it,” I heard her say. Then to the chauffeur she added: “En avant, Georges! Vite, aBleau!” The motor snorted as the car gained speed, and they were gone.
The ancient Marcel, reentering, locked the grille behind him. I was left alone, more astounded than before. The girl’s kind speech to the old servant, her gentle tones, her womanly gesture, had been bewildering. Despite all the accusing features her case offered, I should have said just then, as I watched Miss Esme Falconer, that she was nothing more or less than a superlatively nice girl.
“Honk! Honk! Honk!”
I swung round, startled. A moment earlier the length and breadth of the street had stretched before me, empty; yet now I saw, sprung apparently out of nowhere, a long, lean, gray car, low-built like a racer, carrying four masked and goggled men. Steadily gaining speed as it came, it bore down upon me and, after grazing me with its running-board and nearly deafening me with the powerful blast of its horn, flew on down the street and vanished in Miss Falconer’s wake.
Trying to clarify my emotions, I stared after this Juggernaut. Was it merely the sudden appearance of the thing, its look, so lean and snake-like and somber-colored, and the muffled air of its occupants that had struck me as sinister when it went flashing by? I wasn’t sure, but I had formed the impression that these men were following Miss Falconer. A patently foolish idea! And yet, and yet—
My experiences at the St. Ives and on theRe d’Italiahad contributed to my education. I could no longer deny that melodrama, however unwelcome, did sometimes intrude itself into the most unlikely lives. The girl was bound somewhere on a secret purpose. Could these four men be her accomplices? Were they going too?
“ABleau!”
Those had been her words to the chauffeur; for Bleau, then, she was bound. But where did such a place exist? I had never heard of it; and yet I possessed, I flattered myself, through the medium of motor-touring, a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the map of France.
The affair was becoming a veritable nightmare. It seemed incredible that a few minutes earlier I had resolved to wash my hands of it all. If the girl had a disloyal mission, it was my plain duty to intercept her. I could not denounce her to the police. I didn’t analyze the why and wherefore of my inability to take this step; I simply knew and accepted it. If I interfered with what she was doing, I must interfere quietly, alone.
Ordinarily I have as much imagination as a turnip, but now I indulged in a sudden and surprising flight of fancy. Might it be, I found myself wondering, that the men in the gray care were not Miss Falconer’s accomplices, but her pursuers? In that case, high as was her courage, keen as were her wits,—I found myself thinking of them with a sort of pride,—she was laboring under a handicap of which she could not dream.
Again, where had that long, lean, pursuing streak sprung from? Could it have lurked somewhere in the neighborhood, spying on the hotel that Miss Falconer had just left, waiting for her to emerge? I was aware of my absurdity, but I couldn’t put an end to it; with each instant that went by my uneasiness seemed to grow. So I yielded, not without qualms as to whether the quarter would take me for a gibbering idiot. Grimly and doggedly I stalked the length of the rue St.-Dominique, and the stately houses on both sides seemed to scorn me, their shutters to eye me pityingly, as I peered to right and left for the possible cache of the car.
And within four hundred feet I found it. Against all reason and probability, there it was. At my left there opened unostentatiously one of those short, dark, neglected blind alleys so common in the older part of Paris, with the houses meeting over it and forming an arched roof. Running back twenty feet or so, it ended in a blank wall of stone; and, amid the dust and debris that covered its rough paving, I distinctly made out the tracks of tires, with between them, freshly spilt, a tiny, gleaming pool of oil.
At this psychological moment a taxicab came meandering up the street. It was unoccupied, but its red flag was turned down. The driver shook his head vigorously as I signaled him.
“I go to mydejeuner, Monsieur!” he explained.
“On the contrary,” said I fiercely, “you go to the tourist bureau of Monsieur Cook in the Place de l’Opera, at the greatest speed thesergents de villeallow!”
I must have mesmerized him, for he took me there obediently, casting hunted glances back at me from time to time when the traffic momentarily halted us, as if fearing to find that I was leveling a pistol at his head.
It being noon, the office of the tourist bureau was almost deserted, a single, bored-looking, young French clerk keeping vigil behind the travelers’ counter. With the sociable instinct of his nation he brightened up at my appearance.
“I want,” I announced, “to ask about trains to Bleau.”
For a moment he looked blank; then he smiled in understanding.
“Monsieur is without doubt an artist,” he declared.
I was not, decidedly; but the words had been an affirmation and not a question. It seemed clear that for some cryptic reason I ought to have been an artist. Accordingly, I thought it best to bow.
He seemed childishly pleased with his acumen.
“Monsieur will understand,” he explained, “that before the war we sold tickets to many artists, who, like monsieur, desired to paint the old mill on the stream near Bleau. It has appeared at the Salon many times, that mill! Also, we have furnished tickets to archaeologists who desired to see the ruins of the antique chapel, a veritable gem! But monsieur has not an archaeologist’s aspect. Therefore, monsieur is an artist.”
“Perfectly,” I agreed.
“As to the trains,” he continued contentedly, “there is but one a day. It departs at two and a half hours, upon the Le Moreau route. Monsieur will be wise to secure, before leaving Paris, a safe-conduct from theprefecture; for the village is, as one might say, on the edge of the zone of war. With such a permit monsieur will find his visit charming; regrettable incidents will not occur; undesirable conjectures about monsieur’s identity will not be roused. I should strongly advise that monsieur provide himself with such a credential, though it is not, perhaps, absolutelyde rigueur.”
Back in my room at the Ritz, I consulted my watch. It was a quarter of two; certainly time had marched apace. Should I, like a sensible man, descend to the restaurant and enjoy a sample of the justly famous cuisine of the hotel? Or should I throw all reason overboard and post off on—what was it Dunny had called my mission—a wild-goose chase?
I glanced at myself in the mirror and shook a disapproving head. “You’re no knight-errant,” I told my impassive image. “You’re too correct, too indifferent-looking altogether. Better not get beyond your depth!” I decided for luncheon, followed by a leisurely knotting of the threads of my Parisian acquaintance. Then, as if some malign hypnotist had projected it before me, I saw again a vision of that flashing, lean, gray car.
“I’m hanged if I don’t have a shot at this thing!”
The words seemed to pop out of my mouth entirely of their own accord. By no conscious agency of my own, I found myself madly hurling collars, handkerchiefs, toilet articles, whatever I seemed likeliest to need in a brief journey, into a bag. Lastly I realized that I was standing, hat in hand, overcoat across my arm, considering my revolver, and wondering whether taking it with me would be too stagy and absurd.
“No more so than all the rest of it,” I decided, shrugging. Dropping the thing into my pocket, I made for theascenseur.
“I shan’t be back to-night,” I informed the hall porter woodenly. “Or perhaps to-morrow night. But, of course, I’m keeping my room.”
With his wish for a charming trip to speed me, I left the Ritz, and luckily no vision was vouchsafed me of the condition in which I should return: Two crutches, a bandaged head, an utterly disreputable aspect; my bedraggled state equaled—and this I would maintain with swords and pistols if necessary—that of any poilu of them all.
As I drove toward the station, various headlines stared at me from the kiosks. “Franz von Blenheim Rumored on Way to France,” ran one of them. Hang Franz. I had had enough of him to last the rest of my life. “Duke of Raincy-la-Tour Still Missing,” proclaimed another. I knew something about him, too; but what? Ah, to be sure, he was the Firefly of France, the hero of the Flying Corps, the young nobleman of whose suspected treason I had read in that extra on the ship. In that damned extra, I amended, with natural feeling. For it was like Rome; everything seemed to lead its way.
“What’s the best hotel in the place?” I inquired somewhat dubiously. The man in the blouse, who had performed the three functions of opening my compartment-door, carrying my bag to the gate, and relieving me of my ticket, achieved a thoroughly Gallic shrug.
“Monsieur,” said he, “what shall I tell you? The best hotel, the worst hotel—these are one. There is only the Hotel des Trois Rois in the town of Bleau. Let monsieur proceed by the street of the Three Kings and he will reach it. Formerly there was an omnibus, but now the horses are taken. And if they remained, who could drive them with all the men at the war?”
Carrying my bag and feeling none too amiable, I set off along the indicated route. In Paris, rushing from the rue St.-Dominique to Cook’s office, from that office to the hotel, from the hotel to thegare, I had been a sort of whirling dervish with no time for sober thought. My trip of four hours on a slow, stuffy, crowded train had, however, afforded me ample leisure; and I had spent the time in grimly envisaging the possibilities that, I decided, were most likely to befall.
First and foremost disagreeable; that the men in the gray automobile were helping Miss Falconer in some nefarious business. In this case, it would be up to me to fight the gentlemen single-handed, rescue the girl, and escort her back to Paris, all without scandal. Easier said than done!
Second possibility: that Miss falconer, pausing at Bleau only en route, might already have departed, and that I would be left with my journey for my pains.
Third: that the gray car had no connection with her; that she had some entirely blameless errand. I hoped so, I was sure. If this proved true, I was bound to stand branded as a meddling, officious idiot, one who, in defiance of the most elementary social rules, persisted in trailing her against her will. Vastly pleasant, indeed!
Fuming, I shifted my bag from one hand to the other and walked faster. Night was falling, but it was not yet really dark, and I formed a clear enough notion of the village as I traversed it. It was one of the hundreds of its kind which make an artists’ paradise of France. Entirely unmodernized, it was the more picturesque for that. If I tripped sometimes on the roughly paved street I could console myself with the knowledge that these cobbles, like the odd, jutting houses rising on both sides of them, were at least three hundred years old. Green woods, clear against a background of rosy sunset, ran up to the very borders of the town. I passed a little, gray old church. I crossed a quaint bridge built over a winding stream lined with dwellings and broken by mossy washing-stones. It was all very peaceful, very simple, and very rustic. Without second sight I could not possibly have visioned the grim little drama for which it was to serve as setting.
A blue sign with gilded letters beckoned me, and I paused to read it. The Touring Club of France recommended to the passing stranger the Hotel of the Three Kings. Here I was, then. From the street a dark, arched, stone passage of distinctlymoyen-ageflavor led me into a courtyard paved with great square cobbles, round the four sides of which were built the walls of the inn. Winding, somewhat crazy-looking, stone staircases ran up to the galleries from which the bedroom doors informally opened; vines, as yet leafless, wreathed the gray walls and framed the shuttered windows; before me I glimpsed a kitchen with a magnificent oaken ceiling and a medieval fireplace in which a fire roared redly; and at my right yawned what had doubtless been a stable once upon a time, but with the advent of the motor, had become a primitive garage.
I took the liberty of peering inside. Eureka! There, resting comfortably from its day’s labors, stood a dark-blue automobile. If this was not the motor that had brought Miss Falconer from the rue St.-Dominique, it was its twin.
“You’ll notice it’s alone, though,” I told myself. “Where’s the gray car?”
My mood was grumpy in the extreme. The inn was charming, but I knew from sad experience that no place combines all attractions, and that a spot so picturesque as this would probably lack running water and electric light.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur!”
A buxom, smiling, bare-armed woman had emerged from the kitchen door. She was plainly the hostess. I set down my bag and removed my hat.
“Madame,” I responded, “I wish you a good evening. I desire a room for the night in the Hotel of the Three Kings.”
“To accommodate monsieur,” she assured me warmly, “will be a pleasure. Monsieur is an artist without doubt?”
I wanted to say “Et tu, Brute!” but I didn’t. When one came to think of it, I had no very good reason to advance for having appeared at Bleau. It wasn’t the sort of place into which one would drop from the skies by pure chance, either. I was lucky to find a ready-made explanation.
“But assuredly,” said I.
She disappeared into the kitchen, returned immediately with a candle, and led me up the stone staircase on the left of the courtyard, talking volubly all the while.
“We have had many artists here,” she declared; “many friends of monsieur, doubtless. Since monsieur is of that fine profession, his room will be but four francs daily; his dinner, three francs; his little breakfast, a franc alone.”
“Madame,” I responded, “it is plain that the high cost of living, which terrorizes my country, does not exist at Bleau.”
Equally plain, I thought pessimistically, was the explanation. My saddest forebodings were realized; if the name of the hotel meant anything and three kings ever tarried here, that conjunction of sovereigns had put up with housing of a distinctly primitive sort. My room was clean, I acknowledged thankfully, but that was all I could say for it. I eyed the bowl and pitcher gloomily, the hard-looking bed, the tiny square of carpeting in the center of the stone floor.
“Your house, Madame,” I suggested craftily, with a view to reconnoissance, “is, of course, full?”
She heaved a sigh.
“It is war-time, Monsieur,” she lamented. “None travel now. Yet why should I mourn, since I make enough to keep me till the war is ended and my man comes home? There are those who eat here daily at the noon hour—the cure, the mayor, the mayor’s secretary, sometimes the notary of the town, as well. And to-night I have two guests, monsieur and the young lady—the nurse who goes to the hospital at Carrefonds with the great new remedy for burns and scars.Au revoir, Monsieur. In one little moment I will send the hot water, and in half an hour monsieur shall dine.”
I closed the door behind her and flung down my bag, fuming. So Miss Falconer was a nurse, carrying a panacea to the wounded, doubtless a specimen of the sensational new remedy just recognized by the medical authorities, of which the one newspaper I had glanced through in Paris had been full. The masquerade was too preposterous to gain an instant’s credence. It gave me, as the French say, furiously to think; it resolved all doubts.
I felt inexplicably angry, then preternaturally cool and competent. For the first time since the Modane episode I was my clear-sighted self. I had been trying futilely to blindfold my eyes, to explain the inexplicable, to be unaware of the obvious. Now with a sort of grim relief I looked the facts in the face.
My hot water appearing, I made a sketchy toilet, and then descended to the courtyard where I lounged and smoked. My state of mind was peculiar. As I struck a match I noticed with a queer pride that my hand was steady. With a cold, almost sardonic clarity, I thought of Miss Falconer. First a prosperous tourist, next a dweller in an aristocratic French mansion, then a nurse. She equaled, I told myself, certain heroines of our Sunday supplements, queens of the smugglers, moving spirits of the diamond ring.
Upstairs in the right-hand gallery a door opened. A light footstep sounded on the winding stairs. The critical moment was upon me; she was coming. I threw away my cigarette and advanced.
She was playing her part, I saw, with due regard for detail. Now that her furs were off she stood forth in the white costume, the flowing head-dress, the red cross—all the panoply of theinfirmiere. She came half-way down the stairs before perceiving me; then, with a low exclamation, grasping the balustrade, she stood still.
I didn’t even pretend surprise. What was the use of it?
“Good-evening, Miss Falconer,” was all I said.
It seemed a long time before she answered. Rigid, uncompromising, she faced me; and I read storm signals in the deep flush of her cheeks, the gray flash of her eyes, the stiffness of her white-draped head.
“Oh, Lord!” I groaned to myself in cold compassion, “she means to bluff it! Can’t she see that the game’s played out?”
“This is very strange, Mr. Bayne,” she was saying idly. “I understood that you were to drive an ambulance at the Front.”
How young, how lovely, how glowing she looked as she stood there in her snowy dress. I found myself wondering impersonally what had led her to these devious paths.
“So I am,” I responded with accentuated coolness. “My time is valuable; it was a sacrifice to come to Bleau; but I had no choice. What’s wrong, Miss Falconer? You don’t object to my presence surely? If you go on freezing me like this, I shall think there’s something about my turning up here that worries you—upon my soul I shall!”
She should by rights have been trembling, but her eyes blazed at me disdainfully. I felt almost like a caitiff, whatever that may be.
“It doesn’t worry me,” she denied, with the same crisp iciness, “but it does surprise me. Will you tell me, please, what you are doing here?”
Should I return, “And you?” in a voice of obvious meaning? Should I take a leaf from the book of my hostess and say: “I’m a bit of an artist. I’ve sketched all over Europe, and I’ve come to have a go at the old mill that so many fellows try?” Such a claim would just match the assumption of her costume. But no.
“The fact is,” I said serenely, “I came straight from the rue St. Dominique to keep the appointment you forgot.”
The announcement, it was plain, exasperated her, for slightly, but undeniably, she stamped one arched, slender, attractively shod foot.
“Mr. Bayne,” she demanded, “are you a secret-service agent?”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, startled. “No!”
“Then I’m sorry. That would have been a better reason for following me than—than the only one there is,” she swept on stormily. “You knew I didn’t wish to see any one at present. I said so in the note I left. Yet you spied on me and you tracked me deliberately, when I had trusted you with my address. It’s outrageous of you. You ought to be ashamed of doing it, Mr. Bayne.”
A stunned realization burst on me of the line that she was taking, the position into which, willy-nilly, she was crowding me. I had trailed her here, she assumed, to thrust my company on her; and, upon the surface, I had to own that my behavior really had that air. If I had followed her with equal brazenness along Fifth Avenue, I should have had a chance to explain my conduct to the first police officer who noticed it, later to an indignant magistrate. But, heavens and earth! She knew why I had come. And knowing, how did she dare defy me? I retained just sufficient presence of mind to stare back impassively and to mumble with feeble sarcasm:
“I’m very sorry you think so.”
She came down a step.
“Are you?” she asked imperiously. “Then—will you prove it? Will you go back to Paris by to-night’s train?”
I had recovered myself.
“There isn’t any train to-night,” I protested, civil, but adamant. “And—I’m sorry, but if there was I wouldn’t take it—not until I’ve accomplished what I came to do!”
The girl seemed to concentrate all the world’s disdain in the look that measured me, running from my head to my unoffending feet, from my feet back to my head.
“Most men would go, Mr. Bayne,” she flung at me, her red lips scornful. “But then, most men wouldn’t have come, of course. And all you will accomplish is to make me dine up here in this—this wretched, stuffy room.” Before I could lift a hand in protest, she had turned, mounted the stairs again, and vanished. The door—shall I own it?—slammed.
Presently, summoned by the hostess, I went to my lonely meal in a mood that nobody on earth had cause to envy me. One thing was certain: Should it ever be disclosed that Miss Esme Falconer was not a spy, I should lack courage to go on living. Remembering the coolly brazen line I had taken and the assumptions she had drawn from it, I could think of no desert wide enough to hide my confusion, no pit sufficiently deep to shelter my utterly crestfallen head.
In any case, I had not managed my attack at all triumphantly. From the first skirmish the adversary had retired with all the honors on her side. Carrying the matter with a high hand, she had dazed me into brief inaction, and then, as I gave signs of rally, had retreated in what to say the least was a highly strategic way. Well, let her go for the moment! She could scarcely escape me. I would see the thing through, I told myself with growing stubbornness; but I didn’t feel that the doing of a civic duty was what it is cracked up to be. Not at all!
I felt the need of a cocktail with a kick to it. But I did not get one. However, the cabbage soup was eatable, if primitive; and, in fact, no part of the dinner could be called distinctly bad.
Having finished my coffee, I went outside feeling more cheerful. It was dark now. A lantern swinging from the entrance cast flickering darts of light about the courtyard, the rough paving-stones, the odd old galleries and stairs. Upstairs a candle shone through the window of Miss Falconer’s room. In the kitchen by the great chimney place I could see a leather-clad chauffeur eating, the same fellow that had driven the blue car from the rue St.-Dominique; and while I watched, madame emerged, bearing the girl’s dinner tray, which with much groaning and panting she carried up the winding stairs.
It was foolish of Miss Falconer, I thought, to insist on this comedy. She might better have dined with me, heard what I had to say, and yielded with a good grace. However, let her have her dinner in peace and solitude, I resolved magnanimously. The moon had come out, the stars too; I would take a stroll and mature my plans.
Lighting a cigarette, I lounged into the street and addressed myself forthwith to an unhurried tour of Bleau. I was gone perhaps an hour, not a very lengthy interval, but one in which a variety of things can occur, as I was to learn. My walk led me outside the village, down a water path between trees, and even to the famous mill, which was charming. Had I been of the fraternity of artists, as I had claimed, I should have asked no better fate than to come there with canvas and brushes and immortalize the quiet beauty of the scene.
A rustic bridge invited me, and I stood and smoked upon it, listening to the ripple of the half-golden, half-shadowy water, watching the revolutions of the green old wheel. I had laid out my plan of action. On my return to the inn I would insist on an interview with Miss Falconer, and would tell her that either she must return with me to Paris or that the police of Bleau—I supposed it had police—must take a hand.
My metamorphosis into a hero of adventure, racing about the country, visiting places I had never heard of, coolly assuming the control of international spy plots, brutally determining to kidnap women if necessary, was astounding to say the least. That dinner in the St. Ives restaurant rose before me, and I heard again Dunny’s charge that I was growing stodgy with advancing years. Suppose he should see me now, involved in these insane developments? He might call me various unflattering things, but not stodgy—not with truth. I chuckled half-heartedly, my last chuckle, by the by, for a long time. Unknown to me and unsuspected, the darker, more deadly side of the adventure was steadily drawing near.
When I entered the courtyard of the Three Kings, the door of the garage stood open, and the first object my eyes met within it was the pursuing gray car. I stared at the thing, transfixed. In the march of events I had forgotten it. I was still gaping at it when madame came hurrying forth.
“I have been watching,” she informed me, “for monsieur’s return. Friends of his arrived here soon after he left the house.”
“The deuce they did!” I thought, dumb-founded. I judged prudence advisable.
“They have names, these friends?” I inquired warily.
“Without doubt, Monsieur,” she agreed, “but they did not offer them; and who am I to ask questions of the officers of France? They are bound on a mission, plainly. In time of war those so engaged talk little. They have eaten, and they have gone to their rooms, off the gallery to the west. And the fourth of their party—he alone wears no uniform; he is doubtless of monsieur’s land—asked of me a description of my guests, and exclaimed in great delight, saying that monsieur was his old friend, whom he had hoped to find here and with whom he must have speech the very moment that monsieur should return. I know no more.”
It was enough.
“He’s mistaken,” I said shortly. For the moment I really thought that this must be the case.
Her broad, good-natured face was all astonishment.
“But, Monsieur,” she burst forth, “he even told me, this gentleman, that such might be monsieur’s reply! And in that event he commanded me to beg monsieur to walk upstairs, since he had a thing of importance to reveal to monsieur—one best said behind closed doors!”
I stared at her, my head humming like a top. Then, scrutinizingly, I looked about the court. The light in Miss Falconer’s room had been extinguished. Did that have some significance? Was she lying perdue because these people had come? In the rooms opening from the west gallery above the street entrance I could see moving shadows. The gray car had arrived, and it bore three officers of France for passengers. What could this mean?
Of course, whoever had left the message had mistaken me for a confederate. I could not know any of the new arrivals; it was equally impossible that they could know me. None the less, with a slight, unaccustomed thrill of excitement, I resolved to accept the invitation as if in absolute good faith. It was a first-class chance to get inside those rooms, to use my eyes, to sound this affair a little, to learn whether these men were the girl’s pursuers. As army officers they could scarcely be her accomplices. Would they forestall me by arresting her, by taking her back to Paris? It was astonishing how distasteful I found the idea of that.
I told madame that I thought I knew, now, who the gentlemen were. I climbed the west staircase with determination and knocked on the door of the first room that had a light. A voice from within, vaguely familiar, bade me enter, I did so immediately and closed the door.
Through an inner entrance I saw three men grouped about a table in the next room, all smoking cigarettes, all clad in horizon blue. They glanced up at me for a moment, and then, politely, they looked away. But a fourth man, who had stood beside them, came striding out to meet me, and I confronted Mr. John Van Blarcom face to face.
Officers fresh from the trenches have told me that one can lose through sheer accustomedness all horror at the grim sights of warfare, all consciousness of ear-splitting noises, all interest in gas and shrapnel and bursting shells. In the same way one can lose all capacity for astonishment, I suppose. I don’t think I manifested much surprise at this unexpected meeting; and I heard myself remarking quite coolly that there had been a mistake, that I had been told downstairs that a friend of mine was here.
“That’s right, Mr. Bayne,” cut in Van Blarcom shortly. “I’ve been a friend of yours clear through, and I’m acting as one now. Just a minute, sir, please!”
He had shut the door between ourselves and the officers, and now he was drawing the shutters close. Coming back into the room, he seated himself, and motioned me toward a chair, which I didn’t take. His authoritative manner was, I must say, not unimpressive. And he knew how to arrange a rather crude stage-setting; the room, with all air and sound excluded, seemed tense and breathless; the one dim candle on the table lent a certain solemnity to the scene.
“Look here, Mr. Bayne,” he began bluffly, “last time you spoke to me you told me to—Well, we’ll let bygones by bygones; I guess you remember what you said. You don’t like me, and I’m not wasting any love on you; as far as you’re personally concerned, I’d just as soon see you hang! But I’ve got to think of the United States. I’m in the service, and it doesn’t do her any good to have her citizens get in bad with France.”
Standing there, gazing at him with an air of bored inquiry, behind my mask of indifference I racked my brain. What did he want of me? What did he want of Miss Falconer? What was he doing in this military galley? Hopeless queries, without the key to the puzzle!
“Well?” I said.
“I don’t ask you,” he went on crisply, “what you’re doing here—”
“You had better not!” I snapped. “What tomfoolery is this? Do you think you are a police officer heckling a crook? And why should you ask me such a question any more than I should ask you?”
He grinned meaningly.
“Well,” he commented, “there might be reasons. I’m here on business, with papers in order, and three French officers to answer for me; but you’re a kind of a funny person to make a bee-line for a place like Bleau. An inn like this doesn’t seem your style, somehow. I’d say the Ritz was more your type. And while we’re at it, did you go to the ParisPrefecturethis morning, like all foreigners are told to, and show your passport, and get your police card? Have you got it with you? If you have you stepped pretty lively, considering you left Paris by three o’clock.”
“If any one in authority asks me that,” I said, “I’ll answer him. I certainly don’t propose to answer you.” My arms were folded; I looked haughtily indifferent; but it was pure bluff. The only paper I had with me was my passport. What the dickens could I do if he turned nasty along such lines.
“As I was saying,” he resumed, unruffled, “I’m not asking you why you’re here—because I know. I’ve got to hand it to you that you’re a dead-game sport. Most men’s hair would have turned white at Gibraltar after the fuss you had. And here you are again—in the ring for all you’re worth!”
“I suppose you mean something,” I said wearily, “but it’s too subtle and cryptic. Please use words of one syllable.”
He nodded tolerantly. Leaning back, thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, swelling visibly, he was an offensive picture of self-satisfaction and content.
“You can’t get away with it, Mr. Bayne,” he declared impressively. “You’ve taken on too much; I’m giving it to you straight. You can do a lot with money and good clothes, and being born a gentleman and acting like one, and having friends to help you; but you can’t buck the French Government and the French army and the French police. In a little affair of this sort you wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Even your ambassador would turn you down cold. He wouldn’t dare do anything else. This is the last call for dinner in the dining-car, for you. Last time I wanted to tell you the facts of the case you wouldn’t listen. Will you listen now?”
I considered.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll listen. Go ahead!”
He foundered for a moment, and then plunged in boldly.
“About this young lady who’s brought you and me to Bleau. Oh, you needn’t lift your eyebrows, much as to say, ‘What young lady?’ You know she’s here, and I know it; and she knows I’ve come and has put her light out and is shaking in her shoes over there. I can swear to that. Well, I want to tell you I never started out to get her; I just stumbled across her on the steamer by a fluke. But I kept my eyes open and I saw a lot of things; and when I got to Paris to-day I told them at thePrefecture. You can see what they thought of the business by my being here. I wasn’t keen to come. I’ve got my own work to do. But they want me to identify her; and they’ve sent three officers with me—not policemen, you’ll notice, because this is an army matter, and before we make an end of it we’ll be in the army zone.”
I don’t know just what he saw in my eyes; but it seemed to bother him. He fidgeted a little; as he approached the crucial point, his gaze evaded mine.
“Now, then, we’ll come down to brass tacks, Mr. Bayne,” said he. “I don’t know what kind of story the girl told you; but I know it wasn’t the truth or you wouldn’t be here. That’s sure. She’s a German agent; she’s come to get the Germans some papers that they want about as bad as anything under heaven. There’s one man who tried the job already. He got killed for his pains; but he hid the papers before he died, and she knows where; and she’s on her way to get them and carry the business through. I don’t say she hasn’t plenty of courage. Why, she’s gone up against the whole of France; but I guess you’re not very anxious to be mixed up in this underhand, spying sort of matter, eh?”
My hands were doubling themselves with automatic vigor. I wanted—consumedly—to knock the fellow down. However, I controlled myself.
“What’s your offer?” I asked.
“It’s this.” He was obviously relieved, positively swelling in his tolerant, good-humored patronage. “I said once before I was sorry for you, and that still goes; we won’t be hard on you if we have got the whip-hand, Mr. Bayne. You just stay in your room to-morrow until she’s gone and we’re gone, and you needn’t be afraid your name will ever figure in this thing. I’ve made it all right with my friends in the next room. They know a pretty girl can fool a man sometimes, and they’ve got a soft spot for Americans, like all the Frenchies here. Take it from me, you’d better draw out quietly, instead of being arrested, tried, shot, or imprisoned maybe—or being sent home with an unproved charge hanging over you, and having all your friends fight shy of you as a suspected pro-German. Isn’t that so?”
“You certainly,” I agreed, “draw a most uninviting picture. I’ll have to consider this, Mr. Van Blarcom, if you’ll give me time?”
“Sure!” with his hearty response. “Take as long as you like to think it over; I know how you’ll decide. You don’t belong in a thing like this anyhow; you never did. It’s bound to end in a nasty mess for all concerned. There’s a train goes to Paris to-morrow morning at eleven. You just take it, sir, and forget this business, and you’ll thank me all your life.”