The captain stopped. The girl reflected, with a thoughtful air. Presently she asked:
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Warn you!” he exclaimed. “And, if, after all, it wasn’t you? Why alarm you? And, if, on the other hand, it was you, why put you on your guard? After the attempt had failed, your enemies would have laid another trap for you; and we, not knowing of it, would have been unable to prevent it. No, the best thing was to accept the fight. I enrolled a little band of your former patients who were being treated at the home; and, as the friend whom I was expecting to meet happened to live in the square, here, in this house, I asked him to place his rooms at my disposal from six to nine o’clock. That’s what I did, Little Mother Coralie. And now that you know as much as I do, what do you think of it?”
She gave him her hand:
“I think you have saved me from an unknown danger that looks like a very great one; and I thank you.”
“No, no,” he said, “I can accept no thanks. I was so glad to have succeeded! What I want to know is your opinion of the business itself?”
Without a second’s hesitation, she replied:
“I have none. Not a word, not an incident, in all that you have told me, suggests the least idea to me.”
“You have no enemies, to your knowledge?”
“Personally, no.”
“What about that man to whom your two assailants were to hand you over and who says that he knows you?”
“Doesn’t every woman,” she said, with a slight blush, “come across men who pursue her more or less openly? I can’t tell who it is.”
The captain was silent for a while and then went on:
“When all is said, our only hope of clearing up the matter lies in questioning our prisoner. If he refuses to answer, I shall hand him over to the police, who will know how to get to the bottom of the business.”
The girl gave a start:
“The police?”
“Well, of course. What would you have me do with the fellow? He doesn’t belong to me. He belongs to the police.”
“No, no, no!” she exclaimed, excitedly. “Not on any account! What, have my life gone into? . . . Have to appear before the magistrate? . . . Have my name mixed up in all this? . . .”
“And yet, Little Mother Coralie, I can’t . . .”
“Oh, I beg, I beseech you, as my friend, find some way out of it, but don’t have me talked about! I don’t want to be talked about!”
The captain looked at her, somewhat surprised to see her in such a state of agitation, and said:
“You sha’n’t be talked about, Little Mother Coralie, I promise you.”
“Then what will you do with that man?”
“Well,” he said, with a laugh, “I shall begin by asking him politely if he will condescend to answer my questions; then thank him for his civil behavior to you; and lastly beg him to be good enough to go away.”
He rose:
“Do you wish to see him, Little Mother Coralie?”
“No,” she said, “I am so tired! If you don’t want me, question him by yourself. You can tell me about it afterwards. . . .”
She seemed quite exhausted by all this fresh excitement and strain, added to all those which already rendered her life as a nurse so hard. The captain did not insist and went out, closing the door of the drawing-room after him.
She heard him saying:
“Well, Ya-Bon, have you kept a good watch! No news? And how’s your prisoner? . . . Ah, there you are, my fine fellow! Have you got your breath back? Oh, I know Ya-Bon’s hand is a bit heavy! . . . What’s this? Won’t you answer? . . . Hallo, what’s happened? Hanged if I don’t think . . .”
A cry escaped him. The girl ran to the hall. She met the captain, who tried to bar her way.
“Don’t come,” he said, in great agitation. “What’s the use!”
“But you’re hurt!” she exclaimed.
“I?”
“There’s blood on your shirt-cuff.”
“So there is, but it’s nothing: it’s the man’s blood that must have stained me.”
“Then he was wounded?”
“Yes, or at least his mouth was bleeding. Some blood-vessel . . .”
“Why, surely Ya-Bon didn’t grip as hard as that?”
“It wasn’t Ya-Bon.”
“Then who was it?”
“His accomplices.”
“Did they come back?”
“Yes; and they’ve strangled him.”
“But it’s not possible!”
She pushed by and went towards the prisoner. He did not move. His face had the pallor of death. Round his neck was a red-silk string, twisted very thin and with a buckle at either end.
CHAPTER II. RIGHT HAND AND LEFT LEG
“ONE ROGUE LESS in the world, Little Mother Coralie!” cried Patrice Belval, after he had led the girl back to the drawing-room and made a rapid investigation with Ya-Bon. “Remember his name — I found it engraved on his watch — Mustapha Rovalaïof, the name of a rogue!”
He spoke gaily, with no emotion in his voice, and continued, as he walked up and down the room:
“You and I, Little Mother Coralie, who have witnessed so many tragedies and seen so many good fellows die, need not waste tears over the death of Mustapha Rovalaïof or his murder by his accomplices. Not even a funeral oration, eh? Ya-Bon has taken him under his arm, waited until the square was clear and carried him to the Rue Brignoles, with orders to fling the gentleman over the railings into the garden of the Musée Galliéra. The railings are high. But Ya-Bon’s right hand knows no obstacles. And so, Little Mother Coralie, the matter is buried. You won’t be talked about; and, this time, I claim a word of thanks.”
He stopped to laugh:
“A word of thanks, but no compliments. By Jove, I don’t make much of a warder! It was clever the way those beggars snatched my prisoner. Why didn’t I foresee that your other assailant, the man in the gray-felt hat, would go and tell the third, who was waiting in his motor, and that they would both come back together to rescue their companion? And they came back. And, while you and I were chatting, they must have forced the servants’ entrance, passed through the kitchen, come to the little door between the pantry and the hall and pushed it open. There, close by them, lay their man, still unconscious and firmly bound, on his sofa. What were they to do? It was impossible to get him out of the hall without alarming Ya-Bon. And yet, if they didn’t release him, he would speak, give away his accomplices and ruin a carefully prepared plan. So one of the two must have leant forward stealthily, put out his arm, thrown his string round that throat which Ya-Bon had already handled pretty roughly, gathered the buckles at the two ends and pulled, pulled, quietly, until death came. Not a sound. Not a sigh. The whole operation performed in silence. We come, we kill and we go away. Good-night. The trick is done and our friend won’t talk.”
Captain Belval’s merriment increased:
“Our friend won’t talk,” he repeated, “and the police, when they find his body to-morrow morning inside a railed garden, won’t understand a word of the business. Nor we either, Little Mother Coralie; and we shall never know why those men tried to kidnap you. It’s only too true! I may not be up to much as a warder, but I’m beneath contempt as a detective!”
He continued to walk up and down the room. The fact that his leg or rather his calf had been amputated seemed hardly to inconvenience him; and, as the joints of the knee and thighbone had retained their mobility, there was at most a certain want of rhythm in the action of his hips and shoulders. Moreover, his tall figure tended to correct this lameness, which was reduced to insignificant proportions by the ease of his movements and the indifference with which he appeared to accept it.
He had an open countenance, rather dark in color, burnt by the sun and tanned by the weather, with an expression that was frank, cheerful and often bantering. He must have been between twenty-eight and thirty. His manner suggested that of the officers of the First Empire,
to whom their life in camp imparted a special air which they subsequently brought into the ladies’ drawing-rooms.
He stopped to look at Coralie, whose shapely profile stood out against the gleams from the fireplace. Then he came and sat beside her:
“I know nothing about you,” he said softly. “At the hospital the doctors and nurses call you Madame Coralie. Your patients prefer to say Little Mother. What is your married or your maiden name? Have you a husband or are you a widow? Where do you live? Nobody knows. You arrive every day at the same time and you go away by the same street. Sometimes an old serving-man, with long gray hair and a bristly beard, with a comforter round his neck and a pair of yellow spectacles on his nose, brings you or fetches you. Sometimes also he waits for you, always sitting on the same chair in the covered yard. He has been asked questions, but he never gives an answer. I know only one thing, therefore, about you, which is that you are adorably good and kind and that you are also — I may say it, may I not? — adorably beautiful. And it is perhaps, Little Mother Coralie, because I know nothing about your life that I imagine it so mysterious, and, in some way, so sad. You give the impression of living amid sorrow and anxiety; the feeling that you are all alone. There is no one who devotes himself to making you happy and taking care of you. So I thought — I have long thought and waited for an opportunity of telling you — I thought that you must need a friend, a brother, who would advise and protect you. Am I not right, Little Mother Coralie?”
As he went on, Coralie seemed to shrink into herself and to place a greater distance between them, as though she did not wish him to penetrate those secret regions of which he spoke.
“No,” she murmured, “you are mistaken. My life is quite simple. I do not need to be defended.”
“You do not need to be defended!” he cried, with increasing animation. “What about those men who tried to kidnap you? That plot hatched against you? That plot which your assailants are so afraid to see discovered that they go to the length of killing the one who allowed himself to be caught? Is that nothing? Is it mere delusion on my part when I say that you are surrounded by dangers, that you have enemies who stick at nothing, that you have to be defended against their attempts and that, if you decline the offer of my assistance, I . . . Well, I . . . ?”
She persisted in her silence, showed herself more and more distant, almost hostile. The officer struck the marble mantelpiece with his fist, and, bending over her, finished his sentence in a determined tone:
“Well, if you decline the offer of my assistance, I shall force it on you.”
She shook her head.
“I shall force it on you,” he repeated, firmly. “It is my duty and my right.”
“No,” she said, in an undertone.
“My absolute right,” said Captain Belval, “for a reason which outweighs all the others and makes it unnecessary for me even to consult you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I love you.”
He brought out the words plainly, not like a lover venturing on a timid declaration, but like a man proud of the sentiment that he feels and happy to proclaim it.
She lowered her eyes and blushed; and he cried, exultantly:
“You can take it, Little Mother, from me. No impassioned outbursts, no sighs, no waving of the arms, no clapping of the hands. Just three little words, which I tell you without going on my knees. And it’s the easier for me because you know it. Yes, Madame Coralie, it’s all very well to look so shy, but you know my love for you and you’ve known it as long as I have. We saw it together take birth when your dear little hands touched my battered head. The others used to torture me. With you, it was nothing but caresses. So was the pity in your eyes and the tears that fell because I was in pain. But can any one see you without loving you? Your seven patients who were here just now are all in love with you, Little Mother Coralie. Ya-Bon worships the ground you walk on. Only they are privates. They cannot speak. I am an officer; and I speak without hesitation or embarrassment, believe me.”
Coralie had put her hands to her burning cheeks and sat silent, bending forward.
“You understand what I mean, don’t you,” he went on, in a voice that rang, “when I say that I speak without hesitation or embarrassment? If I had been before the war what I am now, a maimed man, I should not have had the same assurance and I should have declared my love for you humbly and begged your pardon for my boldness. But now! . . . Believe me, Little Mother Coralie, when I sit here face to face with the woman I adore, I do not think of my infirmity. Not for a moment do I feel the impression that I can appear ridiculous or presumptuous in your eyes.”
He stopped, as though to take breath, and then, rising, went on:
“And it must needs be so. People will have to understand that those who have been maimed in this war do not look upon themselves as outcasts, lame ducks, or lepers, but as absolutely normal men. Yes, normal! One leg short? What about it? Does that rob a man of his brain or heart? Then, because the war has deprived me of a leg, or an arm, or even both legs or both arms, I have no longer the right to love a woman save at the risk of meeting with a rebuff or imagining that she pities me? Pity! But we don’t want the woman to pity us, nor to make an effort to love us, nor even to think that she is doing a charity because she treats us kindly. What we demand, from women and from the world at large, from those whom we meet in the street and from those who belong to the same set as ourselves, is absolute equality with the rest, who have been saved from our fate by their lucky stars or their cowardice.”
The captain once more struck the mantelpiece:
“Yes, absolute equality! We all of us, whether we have lost a leg or an arm, whether blind in one eye or two, whether crippled or deformed, claim to be just as good, physically and morally, as any one you please; and perhaps better. What! Shall men who have used their legs to rush upon the enemy be outdistanced in life, because they no longer have those legs, by men who have sat and warmed their toes at an office-fire? What nonsense! We want our place in the sun as well as the others. It is our due; and we shall know how to get it and keep it. There is no happiness to which we are not entitled and no work for which we are not capable with a little exercise and training. Ya-Bon’s right hand is already worth any pair of hands in the wide world; and Captain Belval’s left leg allows him to do his five miles an hour if he pleases.”
He began to laugh:
“Right hand and left leg; left hand and right leg: what does it matter which we have saved, if we know how to use it? In what respect have we fallen off? Whether it’s a question of obtaining a position or perpetuating our race, are we not as good as we were? And perhaps even better. I venture to say that the children which we shall give to the country will be just as well-built as ever, with arms and legs and the rest . . . not to mention a mighty legacy of pluck and spirit. That’s what we claim, Little Mother Coralie. We refuse to admit that our wooden legs keep us back or that we cannot stand as upright on our crutches as on legs of flesh and bone. We do not consider that devotion to us is any sacrifice or that it’s necessary to talk of heroism when a girl has the honor to marry a blind soldier! Once more, we are not creatures outside the pale. We have not fallen off in any way whatever; and this is a truth before which everybody will bow for the next two or three generations. You can understand that, in a country like France, when maimed men are to be met by the hundred thousand, the conception of what makes a perfect man will no longer be as hard and fast as it was. In the new form of humanity which is preparing, there will be men with two arms and men with only one, just as there are fair men and dark, bearded men and clean-shaven. And it will all seem quite natural. And every one will lead the life he pleases, without needing to be complete in every limb. And, as my life is wrapped up in you, Little Mother Coralie, and as my happiness depends on you, I thought I would wait no longer before making you my little speech. . . . Well! That’s finished! I have plenty more to say on the subject, but it can’t all be said in a day, can it? . .
.”
He broke off, thrown out of his stride after all by Coralie’s silence. She had not stirred since the first words of love that he uttered. Her hands had sought her forehead; and her shoulders were shaking slightly.
He stooped and, with infinite gentleness, drawing aside the slender fingers, uncovered her beautiful face:
“Why are you crying, Little Mother Coralie?”
He was calling her tu now, but she did not mind. Between a man and the woman who has bent over his wounds relations of a special kind arise; and Captain Belval in particular had those rather familiar, but still respectful, ways at which it seems impossible to take offence.
Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17) Page 189
