207XIIIFRIENDS
At seven o’clock that morning the men in the circus camp awoke, worried, fatigued, vaguely resentful, unusually profane. Horan was openly mutinous, and announced his instant departure.
By eight o’clock a miraculous change had taken place; the camp was alive with scurrying people, galvanized into hopeful activity by my possibly unwarranted optimism and a few judiciously veiled threats.
Clothed with temporary authority by Byram, I took the bit between my teeth and ordered the instant erection of the main tents, the construction of the ring, barriers, and benches, and the immediate renovating of the portable tank in which poor little Miss Claridge had met her doom.
I detailed Kelly Eyre to Quimperlé with orders for ten thousand crimson hand-bills; I sent McCadger, with Dawley, the bass-drummer, and Irwin, the cornettist, to plaster our posters from Pont Aven to Belle Isle, and I gave them three days to get back, and promised them a hundred dollars apiece if they succeeded in sticking our bills on the fortifications of Lorient and Quimper, with or without permission.
I sent Grigg and three exempt Bretons to beat up the country from Gestel and Rosporden to Pontivy, clear across to Quiberon, and as far east as St. Gildas Point.
By the standing-stones of Carnac, I swore that I’d have all Finistère in that tent. “Governor,” said I,208“we are going to feature Jacqueline all over Brittany, and, if the ladies object, it can’t be helped! By-the-way,dothey object?”
The ladies did object, otherwise they would not have been human ladies; but the battle was sharp and decisive, for I was desperate.
“It simply amounts to this,” I said: “Jacqueline pulls us through or the governor and I land in jail. As for you, Heaven knows what will happen to you! Penal settlement, probably.”
And I called Speed and pointed at Jacqueline, sitting on her satchel, watching the proceedings with amiable curiosity.
“Speed, take that child and rehearse her. Begin as soon as the tent is stretched and you can rig the flying trapeze. Use the net, of course. Horan rehearsed Miss Claridge; he’ll stand by. Miss Crystal, your good-will and advice I depend upon. Will you help me?”
“With all my heart,” said Miss Crystal.
That impulsive reply broke the sullen deadlock.
Pretty little Mrs. Grigg went over and shook the child’s hand very cordially and talked broken French to her; Miss Delany volunteered to give her some “Christian clothes”; Mrs. Horan burst into tears, complaining that everybody was conspiring to injure her and her husband, but a few moments later she brought Jacqueline some toast, tea, and fried eggs, an attention shyly appreciated by the puzzled child, who never before had made such a stir in the world.
“Don’t stuff her,” said Speed, as Mrs. Horan enthusiastically trotted past bearing more toast. “Here, Scarlett, the ladies are spoiling her. Can I take her for the first lesson?”
Byram, who had shambled up, nodded. I was glad to see him reassert his authority. Speed took the child by the hand, and together they entered the big209white tent, which now loomed up like a mammoth mushroom against the blue sky.
“Governor,” I said, “we’re all a bit demoralized; a few of us are mutinous. For Heaven’s sake, let the men see you are game. This child has got to win out for us. Don’t worry, don’t object; back me up and let me put this thing through.”
The old man shoved his hands into his trousers-pockets and looked at me with heavy, hopeless eyes.
“Now here’s the sketch for the hand-bill,” I said, cheerfully, taking a pencilled memorandum from my pocket. And I read:
``THE PATRIOTIC ANTI-PRUSSIAN REPUBLICAN CIRCUS,MORE STUPENDOUS, MORE GIGANTIC, MOREOVERPOWERING THAN EVER!GLITTERING, MARVELLOUS, SOUL-COMPELLING!''
“What’s ’soul-compelling’?” asked Byram.
“Anything you please, governor,” I said, and read on rapidly until I came to the paragraph concerning Jacqueline:
``THE WONDER OF EARTH AND HEAVEN!THE UNUTTERABLY BEAUTIFUL FLYINGMERMAID! CAUGHT ON THECOAST OF BRITTANY!WHAT IS SHE?FISH? BIRD? HUMAN? DIVINE?WHO KNOWS?THE SCIENTISTS OF FRANCE DO NOT KNOW!!THE SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLDARE CONFOUNDED!IS SHEA LOST SOULFROM THE SUNKEN CITY OF KER-YS?50,000 FRANCS REWARD FOR THE BRETON WHO CANPROVE THAT SHE DID NOT COME STRAIGHT FROMPARADISE!!!''
210
“That’s a damn good bill,” said Byram, suddenly.
He was so seldom profane that I stared at him, worried lest his misfortunes had unbalanced him. But a faint, healthy color was already replacing the pallor in his loose cheeks, a glint of animation came into his sunken eyes. He lifted his battered silk hat, replaced it at an angle almost defiant, and scowled at Horan, who passed us sullenly, driving the camel tentwards with awful profanity.
“Don’t talk such langwidge in my presence, Mr. Horan,” he said, sharply; “a camuel is a camuel, but remember: ’kind hearts is more than cornets,’ an’ it’s easier for that there camuel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a cussin’ cuss to cuss his way into Kingdom Come!”
Horan, who had betrayed unmistakable symptoms of insubordination that morning, quailed under the flowing rebuke. He was a man of muscular strength and meagre intellect; words hit him like trip-hammers.
“Certainly, governor,” he stammered, and spoke to the camel politely, guiding that enraged and squealing quadruped to his manger with a forced smile.
With mallet, hammer, saw, and screw-driver I worked until noon, maturing my plans all the while. These plans would take the last penny in the treasury and leave us in debt several thousand francs. But it was win or go to smash now, and personally I have always preferred a tremendous smash to a slow and oozy fizzle.
A big pot of fragrant soup was served to the company at luncheon; and it amused me to see Jacqueline troop into the tent with the others and sit down with her bit of bread and her bowl of broth.
She was flushed and excited, and she talked to her instructor, Speed, all the while, chattering like a linnet between mouthfuls of bread and broth.
“How is she getting on?” I called across to Speed.211
“The child is simply startling,” he said, in English. “She is not afraid of anything. She and Miss Crystal have been doing that hair-raising ’flying swing’without rehearsal!”
Jacqueline, hearing us talking in English, turned and stared at me, then smiled and looked up sweetly at Speed.
“You seem to be popular with your pupil,” I said, laughing.
“She’s a fine girl—a fine, fearless, straight-up-and-down girl,” he said, with enthusiasm.
Everybody appeared to like her, though how much that liking might be modified if prosperity returned I was unable to judge.
Now all our fortunes depended on her. She was not a ballon d’essai; she was literally the whole show; and if she duplicated the sensational success of poor little Miss Claridge, we had nothing to fear. But her troubles would then begin. At present, however, we were waiting for her to pull us out of the hole before we fell upon her and rent her professionally. And I use that “we” not only professionally, but with an attempt at chivalry.
Byram’s buoyancy had returned in a measure. He sat in his shirt-sleeves at the head of the table, vigorously sopping his tartine in his soup, and, mouth full, leaned forward, chewing and listening to the conversation around him.
Everybody knew it was life or death now, that each one must drop petty jealousies and work for the common salvation. An artificial and almost feverish animation reigned, which I adroitly fed with alarming allusions to the rigor of the French law toward foreigners and other malefactors who ran into debt to French subjects on the sacred soil of France. And, having lived so long in France and in the French possessions,212I was regarded as an oracle of authority by these ambulant professional people who were already deadly homesick, and who, in eighteen months of Europe, had amassed scarcely a dozen French phrases among them all.
“I’ll say one thing,” observed Byram, with dignity; “if ever I git out of this darn continong with my circus, I’ll recooperate in the undulatin’ medders an’ j’yful vales of the United States. Hereafter that country will continue to remain good enough for me.”
All applauded—all except Jacqueline, who looked around in astonishment at the proceedings, and only smiled when Speed explained in French.
“Ask maddermoselle if she’ll go home with us?” prompted Byram. “Tell her there’s millions in it.”
Speed put the question; Jacqueline listened gravely, hesitated, then whispered to Speed, who reddened a trifle and laughed.
Everybody waited for a moment. “What does she say?” inquired Byram.
“Oh, nothing; she talked nonsense.”
But Jacqueline’s dignity and serene face certainly contradicted Speed’s words.
Presently Byram arose, flourishing his napkin. “Time’s up!” he said, with decision, and we all trooped off to our appointed labors.
Now that I had stirred up this beehive and set it swarming again, I had no inclination to turn drone. Yet I remembered my note to the Countess de Vassart and her reply. So about four o’clock I made the best toilet I could in my only other suit of clothes, and walked out of the bustling camp into the square, where the mossy fountain splashed under the oaks and the children of Paradise were playing. Hands joined, they danced in a ring, singing:213
“Barzig ha barzig a GoneriAri e mab roue gand daou pe dri”—“Little minstrel-bard of ConériThe son of the King has come with two or three—Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,Crimson, silver, and violet.”
And the children, in their white coiffes and tiny wooden shoes, moved round and round the circle, in the middle of which a little lad and a little lass of Paradise stood motionless, hand clasping hand.
The couplet ended, the two children in the middle sprang forward and dragged a third child out of the circle. Then the song began again, the reduced circle dancing around the three children in the middle.
“—The son of the King has come with two or three—Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,Crimson, silver, and violet.”
It was something like a game I had played long ago—in the age of fable—and I lingered, touched with homesickness.
The three children in the middle took a fourth comrade from the circle, crying, “Will you go to the moon or will you go to the stars?”
“The moon,” lisped the little maid, and she was led over to the fountain.
“The stars,” said the first prisoner, and was conducted to the stone bridge.
Soon a small company was clustered on the bridge, another band at the fountain. Then, as there were no more to dance in a circle, the lad and lassie who had stood in the middle to choose candidates for the moon and stars clasped hands and danced gayly across the square to the group of expectant children at the fountain, crying:214
“Baradoz! Baradoz!”(Paradise! Paradise!)
and the whole band charged on the little group on the bridge, shouting and laughing, while the unfortunate tenants of the supposed infernal regions fled in every direction, screaming:
“Pater nosterDibi doub!Dibi doub!Dibi doub!”
Their shouts and laughter still came faintly from the tree-shaded square as I crossed the bridge and walked out into the moorland toward the sea, where I could see the sun gilding the headland and the spouting-rocks of Point Paradise.
Over the turning tide cormorants were flying, now wheeling like hawks, now beating seaward in a duck-like flight. I passed little, lonely pools on the moor, from which snipe rose with a startling squak! squak! and darted away inland as though tempest blown.
Presently a blue-gray mass in mid-ocean caught my eye. It was the island of Groix, and between it and Point Paradise lay an ugly, naked, black shape, motionless, oozing smoke from two stubby funnels—the cruiserFer-de-Lance! So solidly inert lay the iron-clad that it did not seem as if she had ever moved or ever could move; she looked like an imbedded ledge cropping up out of the sea.
Far across the hilly moorland the white semaphore glistened like a gull’s wing—too far for me to see the balls and cones hoisted or the bright signals glimmering along the halyards as I followed a trodden path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid the semaphore and at the same moment215brought a house into full view—a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque, walled in by an ancient buttressed barrier, above which I could see the tree-tops of a fruit-garden.
The Château de Trécourt was a fine example of the so called “fortified farm”; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls, pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A walled and loop-holed passageway connected the house with another stone enclosure in which stood stable, granary, cattle-house, and sheepfold, all of stone, though the roofs of these buildings were either turfed or thatched. And over them the weather-vane, a golden Dorado, swam in the sunshine.
One thing I noticed as I crossed the unused moat on a permanent bridge: the youthful Countess no longer denied herself the services of servants, for I saw a cloaked shepherd and his two wolf-like and tailless sheep-dogs watching the flock scattered over the downs; and there were at least half a dozen farm servants pottering about from stable to granary, and a toothless porter to answer the gate-bell and pilot me past the tiny loop-holed lodge-turret to the house. There was also a man, lying belly down in the bracken, watching me; and as I walked into the court I tried to remember where I had seen his face before.
The entire front of the house was covered with those splendid orange-tinted tea-roses that I had noticed in Paradise; thicket on thicket of clove-scented pinks choked the flower-beds; and a broad mat of deep-tinted pansies lay on the lawn, spread out for all the world like a glorious Eastern rug.
There was a soft whirring in the air like the sound of a humming-bird close by; it came from a spinning-wheel, and grew louder as a servant admitted me into the house and guided me to a sunny room facing the fruit garden.216
The spinner at the wheel was singing in an undertone—singing a Breton “gwerz,” centuries old, retained in memory from generation to generation:
“Woe to the Maids of Paradise,Yvonne!Twice have the Saxons landed; twice!Yvonne!Yet must Paradise see them thrice!Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik.”
Old as were the words, the melody was older—so old and quaint and sweet that it seemed a berceuse fashioned to soothe the drowsing centuries, lest the memories of ancient wrongs awake and rouse the very dead from their Gothic tombs.
All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of Armorica.
And now the singer was intoning the “Gwerz Ar Baradoz”—the “Complaint of Paradise”—a slow, thrilling miséréré, scarcely dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.
Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: “How do you do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you please?”
The girl was Mademoiselle Sylvia Elven, the marvellously clever actress from the Odéon, the same young woman who had played the Alsacienne at La Trappe, as perfectly in voice and costume as she now played the Bretonne.
“You need not be astonished at all,” she said, calmly, “if you will only reflect that my name is Elven, which is also the name of a Breton town. Naturally, I am a Bretonne from Elven, and my own name is217Duhamel—Sylvenne Duhamel. I thought I ought to tell you, so that you would not think me too clever and try to carry me off on your horse again.”
I laughed uncertainly; clever women who talk cleverly always disturb me. Besides, somehow, I felt she was not speaking the truth, yet I could not imagine why she should lie to me.
“You were more fluent to the helpless turkey-girl,” she suggested, maliciously.
I had absolutely nothing to say, which appeared to gratify her, for she dimpled and smiled under her snowy-winged coiffe, from which a thick gold strand of hair curled on her forehead—a sad bit of coquetry in a Bretonne from Elven, if she told the truth.
“I only came to renew an old and deeply valued friendship,” she said, with mock sentimentality; “I am going back to my flax now.”
However, she did not move.
“And, by-the-way,” she said, languidly, “is there in your intellectual circus company a young gentleman whose name is Eyre?”
“Kelly Eyre? Yes,” I said, sulkily.
“Ah.”
She strolled out of the room, hesitated, then turned in the doorway with a charming smile.
“The Countess will return from her gallop at five.”
She waited as though expecting an answer, but I only bowed.
“Would you take a message to Mistaire Kelly Eyre for me?” she asked, sweetly.
I said that I would.
“Then please say that: ‘On Sunday the book-stores are closed in Paris.’”
“Is that what I am to say?”
“Exactly that.”
“Very well, mademoiselle.”218
“Of course, if he asks who told you—you may say that it was a Bretonne at Point Paradise.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing, monsieur.”
She courtesied and vanished.
“Little minx,” I thought, “what mischief are you preparing now?” and I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden, where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and saffron.
Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.
I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a horse’s hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly, just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and gave me her gloved hand.
Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave young Countess whom I had known in Alsace—this incarnation of all that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had happened?
I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned,opened, with a strange note from219Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some word from me, here in Paradise, since September; “waited impatiently,” she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows for a moment—a moment only.
“But come out to my garden,” she said, smiling, and stripping off her little buff gauntlets. “There we will have tea a l’Anglaise, and sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will,” she added, laughing and coloring up; “for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do not believe I have given you one second to open your lips.”
Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips and listen to the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell with my own.
She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a sunny wall, a wall built of massive granite, deeply thatched with fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-butterflies flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.
Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and loveliness—the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual innocence on a tired, unstrung man?
“First of all,” she said, impulsively, “I know your life—all of it in minute particular. Are you astonished?”
“No, madame,” I replied; “Mornac showed you my dossier.”
“That is true,” she said, with a troubled look of surprise.
I smiled. “As for Mornac,” I began, but she interrupted me.220
“Ah, Mornac! Do you suppose I believed him? Had I not proof on proof of your loyalty, your honor, your courtesy, your chivalry—”
“Madame, your generosity—and, I fear, your pity—overpraises.”
“No, it does not! I know what you are. Mornac cannot make white black! I know what you have been. Mornac could not read you into infamy, even with your dossier under my own eyes!”
“In my dossier you read a sorry history, madame.”
“In your dossier I read the tragedy of a gentleman.”
“Do you know,” said I, “that I am now a performer in a third-rate travelling circus?”
“I think that is very sad,” she said, sweetly.
“Sad? Oh no. It is better than the disciplinary battalions of Africa.”
Which was simply acknowledging that I had served a term in prison.
The color faded in her face. “I thought you were pardoned.”
“I was—from prison, not from the battalion of Biribi.”
“I only know,” she said, “that they say you were not guilty; that they say you faced utter ruin, even the possibility of death, for the sake of another man whose name even the police—even Monsieur de Mornac—could never learn. Was there such a man?”
I hesitated. “Madame, there is such a man;Iam the man whowas.”
“With no hope?”
“Hope? With every hope,” I said, smiling. “My name is not my own, but it must serve me to my end, and I shall wear it threadbare and leave it to no one.”
“Is there no hope?” she asked, quietly.221
“None for the man whowas. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions and general mountebank,” I said, laughing down the rising tide of bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had forgotten—my dead self.
“No hope?” she repeated.
Suddenly the ghost of all I had lost rose before me with her words—rose at last after all these years, towering, terrible, free once more to fill the days with loathing and my nights with hell eternal,... after all these years!
Overwhelmed, I fought down the spectre in silence. Kith and kin were not all in the world; love of woman was not all; a chance for a home, a wife, children, were not all; a name was not all. Raising my head, a trifle faint with the struggle and the cost of the struggle, I saw the distress in her eyes and strove to smile.
“There is every hope,” I said, “save the hopes of youth—the hope of a woman’s love, and of that happiness which comes through love. I am a man past thirty, madame—thirty-five, I believe my dossier makes it. It has taken me fifteen years to bury my youth. Let us talk of Mornac.”
“Yes, we will talk of Mornac,” she said, gently.
So with infinite pains I went back and traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness.
She sat motionless, her face like cold marble, as I carefully gathered the threads of the plot and gently twitched that one which galvanized the mask of Mornac.
“Mornac!” she stammered, aghast.222
I showed her why Buckhurst desired to come to Paradise; I showed her why Mornac had initiated her into the mysteries of my dossier, taking that infernal precaution, although he had every reason to believe he had me practically in prison, with the keys in his own pocket.
“Had it not been for my comrade, Speed,” I said, “I should be in one of Mornac’s fortress cells. He overshot the mark when he left us together and stepped into his cabinet to spread my dossier before you. He counted on an innocent man going through hell itself to prove his innocence; he counted on me, and left Speed out of his calculations. He had your testimony, he had my dossier, he had the order for my arrest in his pocket.... And then I stepped out of sight! I, the honest fool, with my knowledge of his infamy, of Buckhurst’s complicity and purposes—I was gone.
“And now mark the irony of the whole thing: he had, criminally, destroyed the only bureau that could ever have caught me. But he did his best during the few weeks that were left him before the battle of Sedan. After that it was too late; it was too late when the first Uhlan appeared before the gates of Paris. And now Mornac, shorn of authority, is shut up in a city surrounded by a wall of German steel, through which not one single living creature has penetrated for two months.”
I looked at her steadily. “Eliminate Mornac as a trapped rat; cancel him as a dead rat since the ship of Empire went down at Sedan. I do not know what has taken place in Paris—save what all now know that the Empire is ended, the Republic proclaimed, and the Imperial police a memory. Then let us strike out Mornac and turn to Buckhurst. Madame, I am here to serve you.”223
The dazed horror in her face which had marked my revelations of Buckhurst’s villanies gave place to a mantling flush of pure anger. Shame crimsoned her neck, too; shame for her credulous innocence, her belief in this rogue who had betrayed her, only to receive pardon for the purpose of baser and more murderous betrayal.
I said nothing for a long time, content to leave her to her own thoughts. The bitter draught she was draining could not harm her, could not but act as the most wholesome of tonics.
Hers was not a weak character to sink, embittered, under the weight of knowledge—knowledge of evil, that all must learn to carry lightly through life; I had once thought her weak, but I had revised that opinion and substituted the words “pure in thought, inherently loyal, essentially unsuspicious.”
“Tell me about Buckhurst,” I said, quietly. “I can help you, I think.”
The quick tears of humiliation glimmered for a second in her angry eyes; then pride fell from her, like a stately mantle which a princess puts aside, tired and content to rest.
This was a phase I had never before seen—a lovely, natural young girl, perplexed, troubled, deeply wounded, ready to be guided, ready for reproof, perhaps even for that sympathy without which reproof is almost valueless.
She told me that Buckhurst came to her house here in Paradise early in September; that while in Paris, pondering on what I had said, she had determined to withdraw herself absolutely from all organized socialistic associations during the war; that she believed she could do the greatest good by living a natural and cheerful life, by maintaining the position that birth and fortune had given her, and by using that position and fortune for the benefit of those less fortunate.224
This she had told Buckhurst, and the rascal appeared to agree with her so thoroughly that, when Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier arrived, they also applauded the choice she made of Buckhurst as distributer of money, food, and clothing to the provincial hospitals, now crowded to suffocation with the wreck of battle.
Then a strange thing occurred. Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier disappeared without any explanation. They had started for St. Nazaire with a sum of money—twenty thousand francs, locked in the private strong-box of the Countess—to be distributed among the soldiers of Chanzy; and they had never returned.
In the light of what she had learned from me, she feared that Buckhurst had won them over; perhaps not—she could not bear to suspect evil of such men.
But she now believed that Buckhurst had used every penny he had handled for his own purposes; that not one hospital had received what she had sent.
“I am no longer wealthy,” she said, anxiously, looking up at me. “I did find time in Paris to have matters straightened; I sold La Trappe and paid everything. It left me with this house in Paradise, and with means to maintain it and still have a few thousand francs to give every year. Now it is nearly gone—I don’t know where. I am dreadfully unhappy; I have such a horror of treachery that I cannot even understand it, but this ignoble man, Buckhurst, is assuredly a heartless rascal.”
“But,” I said, patiently, “you have not yet told me where he is.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A week ago a dreadful creature came here to see Buckhurst; they went across the moor toward the semaphore and stood for a long while looking at the cruiser which is anchored off Groix.225Then Buckhurst came back and prepared for a journey. He said he was going to Tours to confer with the Red Cross. I don’t know where he went. He took all the money for the general Red Cross fund.”
“When did he say he would return?”
“He said in two weeks. He has another week yet.”
“Is he usually prompt?”
“Always so—to the minute.”
“That is good news,” I said, gayly. “But tell me one thing: do you trust Mademoiselle Elven?”
“Yes, indeed!—indeed!” she cried, horrified.
“Very well,” said I, smiling. “Only for the sake of caution—extra, and even perhaps useless caution—say nothing of this matter to her, nor to any living soul save me.”
“I promise,” she said, faintly.
“One thing more: this conspiracy against the state no longer concerns me—officially. Both Speed and I did all we could to warn the Emperor and the Empress; we sent letters through the police in London, we used the English secret-service to get our letters into the Emperor’s hand, we tried every known method of denouncing Mornac. It was useless; every letter must have gone through Mornac’s hands before it reached the throne. We did all we dared do; we were in disguise and in hiding under assumed names; we could not do more.
“Now that Mornac is not even a pawn in the game—as, indeed, I begin to believe he never really was, but has been from the first a dupe of Buckhurst—it is the duty of every honest man to watch Buckhurst and warn the authorities that he possibly has designs on the crown jewels of France, which that cruiser yonder is all ready to bear away to Saïgon.
“How he proposes to attempt such a robbery I can’t226imagine. I don’t want to denounce him to General Chanzy or Aurelles de Palladine, because the conspiracy is too widely spread and too dangerous to be defeated by the capture of one man, even though he be the head of it.
“What I want is to entrap the entire band; and that can only be done by watching Buckhurst, not arresting him.
“Therefore, madame, I have written and despatched a telegram to General Aurelles de Palladine, offering my services and the services of Mr. Speed to the Republic without compensation. In the event of acceptance, I shall send to London for two men who will do what is to be done, leaving me free to amuse the public with my lions. Meanwhile, as long as we stay in Paradise we both are your devoted servants, and we beg the privilege of serving you.”
During all this time the young Countess had never moved her eyes from my face—perhaps I was flattered—perhaps for that reason I talked on and on, pouring out wisdom from a somewhat attenuated supply.
And I now rose to take my leave, bowing my very best bow; but she sat still, looking up quietly at me.
“You ask the privilege of serving me,” she said. “You could serve me best by giving me your friendship.”
“You have my devotion, madame,” I said.
“I did not ask it. I asked your friendship—in all frankness and equality.”
“Do you desire the friendship of a circus performer?” I asked, smiling.
“I desire it, not only for what you are, but for what you have been—have always been, let them say what they will!”
I was silent.227
“Have you never given women your friendship?” she asked.
“Not in fifteen years—nor asked theirs.”
“Will you not ask mine?”
I tried to speak steadily, but my voice was uncertain; I sat down, crushed under a flood of memories, hopes accursed, ambitions damned and consigned to oblivion.
“You are very kind,” I said. “You are the Countess de Vassart. A man is what he makes himself. I have made myself—with both eyes open; and I am now an acrobat and a tamer of beasts. I understand your goodness, your impulse to help those less fortunate than yourself. I also understand that I have placed myself where I am, and that, having done so deliberately, I cannot meet as friends and equals those who might have been my equals if not friends. Besides that, I am a native of a paradox—a Republic which, though caste-bound, knows no caste abroad. I might, therefore, have been your friend if you had chosen to waive the traditions of your continent and accept the traditions of mine. But now, madame, I must beg permission to make my adieux.”
She sprang up and caught both my hands in her ungloved hands. “Won’t you take my friendship—and give me yours—my friend?”
“Yes,” I said, slowly. The blood beat in my temples, almost blinding me; my heart hammered in my throat till I shivered.
As in a dream I bent forward; she abandoned her hands to me; and I touched a woman’s hands with my lips for the first time in fifteen years.
“In all devotion and loyalty—and gratitude,” I said.
“And in friendship—say it!”
“In friendship.”228
“Now you may go—if you desire to. When will you come again?”
“When may I?”
“When you will.”
229XIVTHE PATH OF THE LIZARD
About nine o’clock the next morning an incident occurred which might have terminated my career in one way, and did, ultimately, end it in another.
I had been exercising my lions and putting them through their paces, and had noticed no unusual insubordination among them, when suddenly, Timour Melek, a big Algerian lion, flew at me without the slightest provocation or warning.
Fortunately I had a training-chair in my hand, on which Timour had just been sitting, and I had time to thrust it into his face. Thrice with incredible swiftness he struck the iron-chair, right, left, and right, as a cat strikes, then seized it in his teeth. At the same moment I brought my loaded whip heavily across his nose.
“Down, Timour Melek! Down! down! down!” I said, steadily, accompanying each word with a blow of the whip across the nose.
The brute had only hurt himself when he struck the chair, and now, under the blows raining on his sensitive nose, he doubtless remembered similar episodes in his early training, and shrank back, nearly deafening me with his roars. I followed, punishing him, and he fled towards the low iron grating which separated the training-cage from the night-quarters.
This I am now inclined to believe was a mistake of230judgment on my part. I should have driven him into a corner and thoroughly cowed him, using the training-chair if necessary, and trusting to my two assistants with their irons, who had already closed up on either side of the cage.
I was not in perfect trim that morning. Not that I felt nervous in the least, nor had I any lack of self-confidence, but I was not myself. I had never in my life entered a lion-cage feeling as I did that morning—an indifference which almost amounted to laziness, an apathy which came close to melancholy.
The lions knew I was not myself—they had been aware of it as soon as I set foot in their cage; and I knew it. But my strange apathy only increased as I went about my business, perfectly aware all the time that, with lions born in captivity, the unexpected is always to be expected.
Timour Melek was now close to the low iron door between the partitions; the other lions had become unusually excited, bounding at a heavy gallop around the cage, or clinging to the bars like enormous cats.
Then, as I faced Timour, ready to force him backward through the door into the night-quarters, something in the blank glare of his eyes seemed to fascinate me. I had an absurd sensation that he was slipping away from me—escaping; that I no longer dominated him nor had authority. It was not panic, nor even fear; it was a faint paralysis—temporary, fortunately; for at that instant instinct saved me; I struck the lion a terrific blow across the nose and whirled around, chair uplifted, just in time to receive the charge of Empress Khatoun, consort of Timour.
She struck the iron-bound chair, doubling it up like crumpled paper, hurling me headlong, not to the floor of the cage, but straight through the sliding-bars which Speed had just flung open with a shout. As231for me, I landed violently on my back in the sawdust, the breath knocked clean out of me.
When I could catch my breath again I realized that there was no time to waste. Speed looked at me angrily, but I jerked open the grating, flung another chair into the cage, leaped in, and, singling out Empress Khatoun, I sailed into her with passionless thoroughness, punishing her to a stand-still, while the other lions, Aicha, Marghouz, Timour, and Genghis Khan snarled and watched me steadily.
As I emerged from the cage Speed asked me whether I was hurt, and I gasped out that I was not.
“What went wrong?” he persisted.
“Timour and that young lioness—no,Iwent wrong; the lions knew it at once; something failed me, I don’t know what; upon my soul, Speed, I don’t know what happened.”
“You lost your nerve?”
“No, not that. Timour began looking at me in a peculiar way—he certainly dominated me for an instant—for a tenth of a second; and then Khatoun flew at me before I could control Timour—”
I hesitated.
“Speed, it was one of those seconds that come to us, when the faintest shadow of indecision settles matters. Engineers are subject to it at the throttle, pilots at the helm, captains in battle—”
“Men in love,” added Speed.
I looked at him, not comprehending.
“By-the-way,” said Speed, “Leo Grammont, the greatest lion-tamer who ever lived, once told me that a man in love with a woman could not control lions; that when a man falls in love he loses that intangible, mysterious quality—call it mesmerism or whatever you like—the occult force that dominates beasts. And he said that the lions knew it, that they perceived it232sometimes even before the man himself was aware that he was in love.”
I looked him over in astonishment.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, amused.
“What's the matter withyou?” I demanded. “If you mean to intimate that I have fallen in love you are certainly an astonishing ass!”
“Don’t talk that way,” he said, good-humoredly. “I didn’t dream of such a thing, or of offending you, Scarlett.”
It struck me at the same moment that my irritable and unwarranted retort was utterly unlike me.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I don’t know exactly what is the matter with me to-day. First I quarrel with poor old Timour Melek, then I insult you. I’ve discovered that I have nerves; I never before knew it.”
“Cold flap-jacks and cider would have destroyed Hercules himself in time,” observed Speed, following with his eyes the movements of a lithe young girl, who was busy with the hoisting apparatus of the flying trapeze. The girl was Jacqueline, dressed in a mended gown of Miss Delany’s.
“At times,” muttered Speed, partly to himself, “that little witch frightens me. There is no risk she dares not take; even Horan gets nervous; and when that bull-necked numbskull is scared there’s reason for it.”
We walked out into the main tent, where simultaneous rehearsals were everywhere in progress; and I picked up the ring-master’s whip and sent it curling after “Briza,” a harmless, fat, white mare on which pretty Mrs. Grigg was sitting expectantly. Round and round the ring she cantered, now astride two horses, now guiding a “spike,” practising assiduously her acrobatics. At intervals, far up in the rigging overhead,233I caught glimpses of Miss Crystal swinging on her trapeze, watching the ring below.
Byram came in to rehearse the opening processional and to rebuke his dearest foe, the unspeakable “camuel,” bestridden by Mrs. Horan as Fatima, Queen of the Desert. Speed followed, squatted on the head of the elephant, ankus on thigh, shouting, “Hôut! Mäil! Djebé Noain! Mäil the hezar! Mäil!” he thundered, triumphantly, saluting Byram with lifted ankus as the elephant ambled past in a cloud of dust.
“Clear the ring!” cried Byram.
Miss Delany, who was outlining Jacqueline with juggler’s knives, began to pull her stock of cutlery from the soft pine backing; elephant, camel, horses trampled out; Miss Crystal caught a dangling rope and slid earthward, and I turned and walked towards the outer door with Byram.
As I looked back for an instant I saw Jacqueline, in her glittering diving-skin, calmly step out of her discarded skirt and walk towards the sunken tank in the middle of the ring, which three workmen were uncovering.
She was to rehearse her perilous leap for the first time to-day, and I told Speed frankly that I was too nervous to be present, and so left him staring across the dusky tent at the slim child in spangles.
I had an appointment to meet Robert the Lizard at noon, and I was rather curious to find out how much his promises were worth when the novelty of his new gun had grown stale. So I started towards the cliffs, nibbling a crust of bread for luncheon, though the incident of the morning had left me small appetite for food.
The poacher was sunning himself on his doorsill when I came into view over the black basalt rocks. To my surprise, he touched his cap as I approached,234and rose civilly, replying to my greeting with a brief, “Salute, m’sieu!”
“You are prompt to the minute,” I said, pleasantly.
“You also,” he observed. “We are quits, m’sieu—so far.”
I told him of the progress that Jacqueline was making; he listened in silence, and whether or not he was interested I could not determine.
There was a pause; I looked out across the sun-lit ocean, taking time to arrange the order of the few questions which I had to ask.
“Come to the point, m’sieu,” he said, dryly. “We have struck palms.”
Spite of my training, spite of the caution which experience brings to the most unsuspicious of us, I had a curious confidence in this tattered rascal’s loyalty to a promise. And apparently without reason, too, for there was something wrong with his eyes—or else with the way he used them. They were wonderful, vivid blue eyes, well set and well shaped, but he never looked at anybody directly except in moments of excitement or fury. At such moments his eyes appeared to be lighted up from behind.
“Lizard,” I said, “you are a poacher.”
His placid visage turned stormy.
“None of that, m’sieu,” he retorted; “remember the bargain! Concern yourself with your own affairs!”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m not trying to reform you. For my purposes it is a poacher I want—else I might have gone to another.”
“That sounds more reasonable,” he admitted, guardedly.
“I want to ask this,” I continued: “are you a poacher from necessity, or from that pure love of the chase which is born in even worse men than you and I?”
“I poach because I love it. There are no poachers235from necessity; there is always the sea, which furnishes work for all who care to steer a sloop, or draw a seine, or wield a sea-rake. I am a pilot.”
“But the war?”
“At least the war could not keep me from the sardine grounds.”
“So you poach from choice?”
“Yes. It is in me. I am sorry, but what shall I do?It's in me.”
“And you can’t resist?”
He laughed grimly. “Go and call in the hounds from the stag’s throat!”
Presently I said:
“You have been in jail?”
“Yes,” he replied, indifferently.
“For poaching?”
“Eur e’harvik rous,” he said in Breton, and I could not make out whether he meant that he had been in jail for the sake of a woman or of a “little red doe.” The Breton language bristles with double meanings, symbols, and allegories. The word for doe in Breton iskarvez; or for a doe which never had a fawn, it isheiez; for a fawn the word iskarvik.
I mentioned these facts to him, but he only looked dangerous and remained silent.
“Lizard,” I said, “give me your confidence as I give you mine. I will tell you now that I was once in the police—”
He started.
“And that I expect to enter that corps again. And I want your aid.”
“My aid? For the police?” His laugh was simply horrible. “I? The Lizard? Continue, m’sieu.”
“I will tell you why. Yesterday, on a visit to Point Paradise, I saw a man lying belly down in the bracken; but I didn’t let him know I saw him. I have served236in the police; I think I recognize that man. He is known in Belleville as Tric-Trac. He came here, I believe, to see a man called Buckhurst. Can you find this Tric-Trac for me? Do you, perhaps, know him?”
“Yes,” said the Lizard, “I knew him in prison.”
“You have seen him here?”
“Yes, but I will not betray him.”
“Why?”
“Because he is a poor, hunted devil of a poacher like me!” cried the Lizard, angrily. “He must live; there’s enough land in Finistère for us both.”
“How long has he been here in Paradise?”
“For two months.”
“And he told you he lived by poaching?”
“Yes.”
“He lies.”
The Lizard looked at me intently.
“He has played you; he is a thief, and he has come here to rob. He is a filou—a town rat. Can he bend a hedge-snare? Can he line a string of dead-falls? Can he even snare enough game to keep himself from starving? He a woodsman?Hea poacher of the bracken? You are simple, my friend.”
The veins in the poacher’s neck began to swell and a dull color flooded his face.
“Prove that he has played me,” he said.
“Prove it yourself.”
“How?”
“By watching him. He came here to meet a man named Buckhurst.”
“I have seen that man Buckhurst, too. What is he doing here?” asked the Lizard.
“That is what I want you to find out and help me to find out!” I said. “Voilà! Now you know what I want of you.”237
The sombre visage of the poacher twitched.
“I take it,” said I, “that you would not make a comrade of a petty pickpocket.”
The poacher uttered an oath and shook his fist at me. “Bon sang!” he snarled, “I am an honest man if I am a poacher!”
“That’s the reason I trusted you,” said I, good-humoredly. “Take your fists down, my friend, and think out a plan which will permit me to observe this Monsieur Tric-Trac at my leisure, without I myself being observed.”
“That is easy,” he said. “I take him food to-day.”
“Then I was right,” said I, laughing. “He is a Belleville rat, who cannot feed himself where there are no pockets to pick. Does he know a languste from a linnet? Not he, my friend!”
The Lizard sat still, head bent, knees drawn up, apparently buried in thought. There is no injury one can do a Breton of his class like the injury of deceiving and mocking.
If Tric-Trac, a man of the city, had come here to profit by the ignorance of a Breton—and perhaps laugh at his stupidity!
But I let the ferment work in the dark blood of the Lizard, leaving him to his own sombre logic, undisturbed.
Presently the Lizard raised his head and fixed his bright, intelligent eyes on me.
“M’sieu,” he said, in a curiously gentle voice, “we men of Paradise are called out for the army. I must go, or go to jail. How can I remain here and help you trap these filous?”
“I have telegraphed to General Chanzy,” I said, frankly. “If he accepts—or if General Aurelles de Palladine is favorable—I shall make you exempt under238authority from Tours. I mean to keep you in my service, anyway,” I added.
“You mean that—that I need not go to Lorient—to this war?”
“I hope so, my friend.”
He looked at me, astonished. “If you can do that, m’sieu, you can do anything.”
“In the meanwhile,” I said, dryly, “I want another look at Tric-Trac.”
“I could show you Tric-Trac in an hour—but to go to him direct would excite his suspicion. Besides, there are two gendarmes in Paradise to conduct the conscripts to Lorient; there are also several gardes-champêtre. But I can get you there, in the open moorland, too, under everybody’s noses! Shall I?” he said, with an eager ferocity that startled me.
“You are not to injure him, no matter what he does or says,” I said, sharply. “I want to watch him, not to frighten him away. I want to see what he and Buckhurst are doing. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Then strike palms!”
We struck vigorously.
“Now I am ready to start,” I said, pleasantly.
“And now I am ready to tell you something,” he said, with the fierce light burning behind his blue eyes. “If you were already in the police I would not help you—no, not even to trap this filou who has mocked me! If you again enter the police I will desert you!”
He licked his dry lips.
“Do you know what a blood-feud is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then understand that a man in a high place has wronged me—and that he is of the police—the Imperial Military police!”
“Who?”239
“You will know when I pass my fagot-knife into his throat,” he snarled—“not before.”
The Lizard picked up his fishing-rod, slung a canvas bag over his stained velveteen jacket, gathered together a few coils of hair-wire, a pot of twig-lime, and other odds and ends, which he tucked into his broad-flapped coat-pocket. “Allons,” he said, briefly, and we started.
The canvas bag on his back bulged, perhaps with provisions, although the steel point of a murderous salmon-gaff protruded from the mouth of the sack and curved over his shoulder.
The village square in Paradise was nearly deserted. The children had raced away to follow the newly arrived gendarmes as closely as they dared, and the women were in-doors hanging about their men, whom the government summoned to Lorient.
There were, however, a few people in the square, and these the Lizard was very careful to greet. Thus we passed the mayor, waddling across the bridge, puffing with official importance over the arrival of the gendarmes. He bowed to me; the Lizard saluted him with, “Times are hard on the fat!” to which the mayor replied morosely, and bade him go to the devil.
“Au revoir, donc,” retorted the Lizard, unabashed. The mayor bawled after him a threat of arrest unless he reported next day in the square.
At that the poacher halted. “Don’t you wish you might get me!” he said, tauntingly, probably presuming on my conditional promise.
“Do you refuse to report?” demanded the mayor, also halting.
“Et ta sœur!” replied the poacher; “is she reporting at the caserne?”
The mayor replied angrily, and a typical Breton quarrel began, which ended in the mayor biting his240thumb-nail at the Lizard and wishing him “St. Hubert’s luck”—an insult tantamount to a curse.
Now St. Hubert was a mighty hunter, and his luck was proverbially marvellous. But as everything goes by contrary in Brittany, to wish a Breton hunter good luck was the very worst thing you could do him. Bad luck was certain to follow—if not that very day, certainly, inexorably,someday.
With wrath in his eyes the Lizard exhausted his profanity, stretching out his arm after the retreating mayor, who waddled away, gesticulating, without turning his head.
“Come back! Toad! Sourd! V-Snake! Bat of the gorse!” shouted the Lizard. “Do you think I’m afraid of your spells, fat owl of Faöuet? Evil-eyed eel! The luck of Ker-Ys to you and yours! Ho fois! Do you think I am frightened—I, Robert the Lizard? Your wife is a camel and your daughter a cow!” The mayor was unmarried, but it didn’t matter. And, moreover, as that official was now out of ear-shot, the Lizard turned anxiously to me.
“Don’t tell me you are superstitious enough to care what the mayor said,” I laughed.
“Dame, m’sieu, we shall have no luck to-day. To-morrow it doesn’t matter—but if we go to-day, bad luck must come to us.”
“To-day? Nonsense!”
“If not, then another day.”
“Rubbish! Come on.”
“Do you think we could take precautions?” he asked, furtively.
“Take all you like,” I said; “rack your brains for an antidote to neutralize the bad luck, only come on, you great gaby!”
I knew many of the Finistère legends; out of the corner of my eye I watched this stalwart rascal, cowed241by gross superstition, peeping about for some favorable sign to counteract the luck of St. Hubert.
First he looked up at the crows, and counted them as they passed overhead cawing ominously—one—two—three—four—five! Five is danger! But wait, more were coming: one—two—three—four—five—six—seven—! A loss! Well, that was not as bad as some things. But hark! More crows coming: one—two—three! Death!
“Jesû!” he faltered, ducking his head instinctively. “I’ll look elsewhere for signs.”
The signs were all wrong that morning; first we met an ancient crone with a great pack of fagots on her bent back, and I was sure he could have strangled her cheerfully, because there are few worse omens for a hunter of game or of men. Then he examined the first mushroom he found, but under the pink-and-pearl cap we saw no insects crawling. The veil, too, was rent, showing the poisonous, fluted gills; and the toadstool blackened when he cut it with the blade of his fagot-knife.
He tried once more, however, and searched through the gorse until he found a heavy lizard, green as an emerald. He teased it till it snapped at the silver franc in my hand; its teeth should have vanished, but when he held out his finger the creature bit into it till the blood spurted.
Still I refused to turn back. What should he do? Then into his mind crept a Pouldu superstition. It was a charm against evil, including lightning, black-rot, rheumatism, and “douleurs” of other varieties.
The charm was simple. We needed only to build a little fire of gorse, and walk through the smoke once or twice. So we built the fire and walked through the smoke, the Lizard coughing and cursing until I feared he might overdo it by smothering us both. Then242stamping out the last spark—for he was a woodsman always—we tramped on in better humor with destiny.
“You think that turned the curse backward, m’sieu?” he asked.
“There is not the faintest doubt of that,” I said.
Far away towards Sainte-Ysole we saw the blue woods which were our goal. However, we had no intention of going there as the bee flies, partly because Tric-Trac might see us, partly because the Lizard wished any prowling passer-by to observe that he was occupied with his illegitimate profession. For my part, I very much preferred a brush with a garde-champêtre or a summons to explain why no shots were found in the Lizard’s pheasants, rather than have anybody ask us why we were walking so fast towards Sainte-Ysole woods.
Therefore we promptly selected a hedge for operations, choosing a high, thick one, which separated two fields of wheat stubble.
Kneeling under the hedge, he broke a hole in it just large enough for a partridge to worry through. Then he bent his twig, fastened the hair-wire into a running noose, adjusted it, and stood up. This manœuvre he repeated at various hedges or in thickets where he “lined” his trail with peeled twigs on every bush.
Once he paused to reset a hare-trap with a turnip, picked up in a neighboring field; once he limed a young sapling and fixed a bit of a mirror in the branches, but not a bird alighted, although the blackthorns were full of fluttering wings. And all the while we had been twisting and doubling and edging nearer and nearer to the Sainte-Ysole woods, until we were already within their cool shadow, and I heard the tinkle of a stream among leafy depths.
Now we had no fear; we were hidden from the eyes243of the dry, staring plain, and the Lizard laughed to himself as he fastened a grasshopper to his hook and flung it into the broad, dark water of the pool at his feet.
Slowly he fished up stream, but, although he seemed to be intent on his sport, there was something in the bend of his head that suggested he might be listening for other sounds than the complex melodies of mossy waterfalls.
His poacher’s eyes began to glisten and shimmer in the forest dusk like the eyes of wild things that hunt at night. As he noiselessly turned, his nostrils spread with a tremor, as a good dog’s nose quivers at the point.
Presently he beckoned me, stepped into the moss, and crawled without a sound straight through the holly thicket.
“Watch here,” he whispered. “Count a hundred when I disappear, then creep on your stomach to the edge of that bank. In the bed of the stream, close under you, you will see and hear your friend Tric-Trac.”
Before I had counted fifty I heard the Lizard cry out, “Bonjour, Tric-Trac!” but I counted on, obeying the Lizard’s orders as I should wish mine to be obeyed. I heard a startled exclamation in reply to the Lizard’s greeting, then a purely Parisian string of profanity, which terminated as I counted one hundred and crept forward to the mossy edge of the bank, under the yellow beech leaves.
Below me stood the Lizard, intently watching a figure crouched on hands and knees before a small, iron-bound box.
The person addressed as Tric-Trac promptly tried to hide the box by sitting down on it. He was a young man, with wide ears and unhealthy spots on his face. His hair, which was oily and thick, he wore neatly plastered into two pointed love-locks. This not only244adorned and distinguished him, but it lent a casual and detached air to his ears, which stood at right angles to the plane of his face. I knew that engaging countenance. It was the same old Tric-Trac.
“Zut, alors!” repeated Tric-Trac, venomously, as the poacher smiled again; “can’t you give the company notice when you come in?”
“Did you expect me to ring the tocsin?” asked the Lizard.
“Flute!” snarled Tric-Trac. “Like a mud-rat, you creep with no sound—c’est pas polite, nom d’un nom!”
He began nervously brushing the pine-needles from his skin-tight trousers, with dirty hands.
“What’s that box?” asked the Lizard, abruptly.
“Box? Where?” A vacant expression came into Tric-Trac’s face, and he looked all around him except at the box upon which he was sitting.
“Box?” he repeated, with that hopeless effrontery which never deserts criminals of his class, even under the guillotine. “I don’t see any box.”
“You’re sitting on it,” observed the Lizard.
“Thatbox? Oh! You meanthatbox? Oh!” He peeped at it between his meagre legs, then turned a nimble eye on the poacher.
“What’s in it?” demanded the poacher, sullenly.
“Don’t know,” replied Tric-Trac, with brisk interest. “I found it.”
“Foundit!” repeated the Lizard, scornfully.
“Certainly, my friend; how do you suppose I came by it?”
“You stole it!”
They faced each other for a moment.
“Supposition that you are correct; what of it?” said the young ruffian, calmly.
The Lizard was silent.245
“Did you bring me anything to chew on?” inquired Tric-Trac, sniffing at the poacher’s sack.
“Bread, cheese, three pheasants, cider—more than I eat in a week,” said the Lizard, quietly. “It will cost forty sous.”
He opened his sack and slowly displayed the provisions.
I looked hard at the iron-bound box.
On one end was painted the Geneva cross.Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier had disappeared carrying red-cross funds. Was that their box?
“I said it costs forty sous—two silver francs,” repeated the Lizard, doggedly.
“Forty sous? That’s robbery!” sniffed the young ruffian, now using that half-whining, half-sneering form of discourse peculiar alike to the vicious chevalier of Paris and his confrère of the provincial centres. Accent and slang alone distinguish between them; the argot, however, is practically the same.
Tric-Trac fished a few coins from his pocket, counted carefully, and handed them, one by one, to the poacher.
The poacher coolly tossed the food on the ground, and, as Tric-Trac rose to pick it up, seized the box.
“Drop that!” said Tric-Trac, quickly.
“What’s in it?”
“Nothing! Drop it, I tell you.”
“Where’s the key?”
“There’s no key—it’s a machine.”
“What’s in it?”
“Now I’ve been trying to find out for two weeks,” sneered Tric-Trac, “and I don’t know yet. Drop it!”
“I’m going to open it all the same,” said the Lizard, coolly, lifting the lid.
A sudden silence followed; then the Lizard swore vigorously. There was another box within the light, iron-edged casket, a keyless cube of shining steel,246with a knob on the top, and a needle which revolved around a dial on which were engraved the hours and minutes. And emblazoned above the dial was the coat of arms of the Countess de Vassart.