“You thought they might lock us up?” whispered Alice.
The girl nodded. “No harm to have ‘em, Miss — it won’t hurt us.” She folded them tightly in a handkerchief, and thrust the parcel as far as her arm could reach between the mattress and the bed. “I’ll rip the ticken a bit just now, and stitch them in,” whispered the girl.
“Didn’t I hear another key clink as you put your hand in?” asked Alice.
The girl smiled, and drew out a large key, and nodded, still smiling as she replaced it.
“What does that open?” whispered Alice eagerly.
“Nothing, Miss,” said the girl gravely— “it’s the key of the old back-door lock; but there’s a new one there now, and this won’t open nothing. But I have a use for it. I’ll tell you all in time, Miss; and, please, you must keep up your heart, mind.”
Sir Richard Arden was not the cold villain you may suppose. He was resolved to make an effort of some kind for the extrication of his sister. He could not bear to open his dreadful situation to his Uncle David, nor to kill himself, nor to defy the vengeance of Longcluse. He would effect her escape and his own simultaneously. In the meantime he must acquiesce, ostensibly at least, in every step determined on by Longcluse.
It was a bright autumnal day as Sir Richard and Mr. Longcluse took the rail to Southampton. Longcluse had his reasons for taking the young baronet with him.
It was near the hour, by the time they got there, when David Arden would arrive from his northern point of departure. Longcluse looked animated — smiling; but a stupendous load lay on his heart. A single clumsy phrase in the letter of that detective scoundrel might be enough to direct the formidable suspicions of that energetic old gentleman upon him. The next hour might throw him altogether upon the defensive, and paralyse his schemes.
Alice Arden, you little dream of the man and the route by which, possibly, deliverance is speeding to you.
Near the steps of the large hotel that looks seaward, Longcluse and Sir Richard lounge, expecting the arrival of David Arden almost momentarily. Up drives a fly, piled with portmanteaus, hat-case, dressing-case, and all the other travelling appurtenances of a comfortable wayfarer. Beside the driver sits a servant. The fly draws up at the door near them.
Mr. Longcluse’s seasoned heart throbs once or twice oddly. Out gets Uncle David, looking brown and healthy after his northern excursion. On reaching the top of the steps, he halts, and turns round to look about him. Again Mr. Longcluse feels the same odd sensation.
Uncle David recognises Sir Richard, and smiling greets him. He runs down the steps to meet him. After they have shaken hands, and, a little more coldly, he and Mr. Longcluse, he says, —
“You are not looking yourself, Dick; you ought to have run down to the moors, and got up an appetite. How is Alice?”
“Alice? Oh! Alice is very well, thanks.”
“I should like to run up to Mortlake to see her. She has been complaining, eh?”
“No, no — better,” says Sir Richard.
“And you forget to tell your uncle what you told me,” interposes Mr. Longcluse, “that Miss Arden left Mortlake for Yorkshire yesterday.”
“Oh!” said Uncle David, turning to Richard again.
“And the servants went before — two or three days ago,” said Sir Richard, looking down for a moment, and hastening, under that clear eye, to speak a little truth.
“Well, I wish she had come with us,” said David Arden; “but as she could not be persuaded, I’m glad she is making a little change of air and scene, in any direction. By-the-bye, Mr. Longcluse, you had a letter, had not you, from our friend, Paul Davies?”
“Yes; he seemed to think he had found a clue — from Paris it was — and I wrote to tell him to spare no expense in pushing his inquiries and to draw upon me.”
“Well, I have some news to tell you. His exploring voyage will come to nothing; you did not hear?”
“No.”
“Why, the poor fellow’s dead. I got a letter — it reached me, forwarded from my house in town, yesterday, from the person who hires the lodgings — to say he had died of scarlatina very suddenly, and sending an inventory of the things he left. It is a pity, for he seemed a smart fellow, and sanguine about getting to the bottom of it.”
“An awful pity!” exclaimed Longcluse, who felt as if a mountain were lifted from his heart, and the entire firmament had lighted up; “an awful pity! Are you quite sure?”
“There can’t be a doubt, I’m sorry to say. Then, as Alice has taken wing, I’ll pursue my first plan, and cross by the next mail.”
“For Paris?” inquired Mr. Longcluse, carelessly.
“Yes, Sir, for Paris,” answered Uncle David deliberately, looking at him; “yes, for Paris.”
And then followed a little chat on indifferent subjects. Then Uncle David mentioned that he had an appointment, and must dine with the dull but honest fellow who had asked him to meet him here on a matter of business, which would have done just as well next year, but he wished it now. Uncle David nodded, and waved his hand, as on entering the door he gave them a farewell smile over his shoulder.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
THE CATACOMBS.
At his disappearance, for Sir Richard the air darkened as when, in the tropics, the sun sets without a twilight, and the silence of an awful night descended.
It seemed that safety had been so near. He had laid his hand upon it, and had let it glide ungrasped between his fingers; and now the sky was black above him, and an unfathomable sea beneath.
Mr. Longcluse was in great spirits. He had grown for a time like the Walter Longcluse of a year before.
They two dined together, and after dinner Mr. Longcluse grew happy, and as he sat with his glass by him, he sang, looking over the waves, a sweet little sentimental song, about ships that pass at sea, and smiles and tears, and “true, boys, true,” and “heaven shows a glimpse of its blue.” And he walks with Sir Richard to the station, and he says, low, as he leans and looks into the carriage window, of which young Arden was the only occupant —
“Be true to me now, and we may make it up yet.”
And so saying, he gives his hand a single pressure as he looks hard in his eyes.
The bell had rung. He was remaining there, he said, for another train. The clapping of the doors had ceased. He stood back. The whistle blew its long piercing yell, and as the train began to glide towards London, the young man saw the white face of Walter Longcluse in deep shadow, as he stood with his back to the lamp, still turned towards him.
The train was now thundering on its course; the solitary lamp glimmered in the roof. He threw himself back, with his foot against the opposite seat.
“Good God! what is one to resolve! All men are cruel when they are exasperated. Might not good yet be made of Longcluse? What creatures women are! — what fools! How easy all might have been made, with the least temper and reflection! What d —— d selfishness!”
*
Uncle David was now in Paris. The moon was shining over that beautiful city. In a lonely street, in a quarter which fashion had long forsaken — over whose pavement, as yet unconscious of the Revolution, had passed, in the glare of torchlight, the carved and emblazoned carriages of an aristocracy, as shadowy now as the courts of the Cæsars — his footsteps are echoing.
A huge house presents its front. He stops and examines it carefully for a few seconds. It is the house of which he is in search.
At one time the Baron Vanboeren had received patients from the country, to reside in this house. For the last year, during which he had been gathering together his wealth, and detaching himself from business, he had discontinued this, and had gradually got rid of his establishment.
When David Arden rang the bell at the hall-door, which he had to do repeatedly, it was answered at last by an old woman, high-shouldered, skin and bone, with a great nose, and big jawbones, and a high-cauled cap. This lean creature looks at him with a vexed and hollow eye. Her bony arm rests on t
he lock of the hall-door, and she blocks the narrow aperture between its edge and the massive door-case. She inquires in very nasal French what Monsieur desires.
“I wish to see Monsieur the Baron, if he will permit me an interview,” answered Mr. Arden in very fair French.
“Monsieur the Baron is not visible; but if Monsieur will, notwithstanding, leave any message he pleases for Monsieur the Baron, I will take care he receives it punctually.”
“But Monsieur the Baron appointed me to call tonight at ten o’clock.”
“Is Monsieur sure of that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Eh, very well; but, if he pleases, I must first learn Monsieur’s name.”
“My name is Arden.”
“I believe Monsieur is right.” She took a bit of notepaper from her capacious pocket, and peering at it, spelled aloud, “D-a-v-i-d — — “
“A-r-d-e-n,” interrupted and continued the visitor, spelling his name, with a smile.
“A-r-d-e-n,” she followed, reading slowly from her paper; “yes, Monsieur is right. You see, this paper says, ‘Admit Monsieur David Arden to an interview.’ Enter, if you please Monsieur, and follow me.”
It was a decayed house of superb proportions, but of a fashion long passed away. The gaunt old woman, with a bunch of large keys clinking at her side, stalked up the broad stairs and into a gallery, and through several rooms opening en suite. The rooms were hung with cobwebs, dusty, empty, and the shutters closed, except here and there where the moonlight gleamed through chinks and seams.
David Arden, before he had seen the Baron Vanboeren in London, had pictured him in imagination a tall old man with classic features, and manners courteous and somewhat stately.
We do not fabricate such images; they rise like exhalations from a few scattered data, and present themselves spontaneously. It is this self-creation that invests them with so much reality in our imaginations, and subjects us to so odd a surprise when the original turns out quite unlike the portrait with which we have been amusing ourselves.
She now pushed open a door, and said, “Monsieur the Baron here is arrived Monsieur David d’Ardennes.”
The room in which he now stood was spacious, but very nearly dark. The shutters were closed outside, and the moonlight that entered came through the circular hole cut in each. A large candle on a bracket burned at the further end of the room. There the baron stood. A reflector which interposed between the candle and the door at which David Arden entered directed its light strongly upon something which the baron held, and laid upon the table, in his hand; and now that he turned toward his visitor, it was concentrated upon his large face, revealing, with the force of a Rembrandt, all its furrows and finer wrinkles. He stood out against a background of darkness with remarkable force.
The baron stood before him — a short man in a red waistcoat. He looked more broad-shouldered and short-necked than ever in his shirtsleeves. He had an instrument in his hand resembling a small bit and brace, and some chips and sawdust on his flannel waistcoat, which he brushed off with two or three sweeps of his short fat fingers. He looked now like a grim old mechanic. There was no vivacity in his putty-coloured features, but there were promptitude and decision in every abrupt gesture. It was his towering, bald forehead, and something of command and savage energy in his lowering face, that redeemed the tout ensemble from an almost brutal vulgarity.
The baron was not in the slightest degree “put out,” as the phrase is, at being detected in his present occupation and deshabille.
He bowed twice to David Arden, and said, in English, with a little foreign accent —
“Here is a chair, Monsieur Arden; but you can hardly see it until your eyes have grown a little accustomed to our crépuscula.”
This was true enough, for David Arden, though he saw him advance a step or two, could not have known what he held in the hand that was in shadow. The sound, indeed, of the legs of the chair, as he set it down upon the floor, he heard.
“I should make you an apology, Mr. Arden, if I were any longer in my own home, which I am not, although this is still my house; for I have dismissed my servants, sold my furniture, and sent what things I cared to retain over the frontier to my new habitation, whither I shall soon follow; and this house too, I shall sell. I have already two or three gudgeons nibbling, Monsieur.”
“This house must have been the hotel of some distinguished family, Baron; it is nobly proportioned,” said David Arden.
As his eye became accustomed to the gloom, David Arden saw traces of gilding on the walls. The shattered frames on which the tapestry was stretched in old times remained in the panels, with crops of small, rusty nails visible. The faint candlelight glimmered on a ponderous gilded cornice, which had also sustained violence. The floor was bare, with a great deal of litter, and some scanty furniture. There was a lathe near the spot where David Arden stood, and shavings and splinters under his feet. There was a great block with a vice attached. In a portion of the fireplace was built a furnace. There were pincers and other instruments lying about the room, which had more the appearance of an untidy workshop than of a study, and seemed a suitable enough abode for the uncouth figure that confronted him.
“Ha! Monsieur,” growls the baron, “stone walls have ears, you say if only they had tongues; what tales these could tell! This house was one of Madame du Barry’s, and was sacked in the great Revolution. The mirrors were let into the plaster in the walls. In some of the rooms there are large fragments still stuck in the wall so fast, you would need a hammer and chisel to dislodge and break them up. This room was an anteroom, and admitted to the lady’s bedroom by two doors, this and that. The panels of that other, by which you entered from the stair, were of mirror. They were quite smashed. The furniture, I suppose, flew out of the window; everything was broken up in small bits, and torn to rags, or carried off to the broker after the first fury, and sansculotte families came in and took possession of the wrecked apartments. You will say then, what was left? The bricks, the stones, hardly the plaster on the walls. Yet, Monsieur Arden, I have discovered some of the best treasures the house contained, and they are at present in this room. Are you a collector, Monsieur Arden?”
Uncle David disclaimed the honourable imputation. He was thinking of cutting all this short, and bringing the baron to the point. The old man was at the period when the egotism of age asserts itself, and was garrulous, and being, perhaps, despotic and fierce (he looked both), he might easily take fire and become impracticable. Therefore, on second thoughts, he was cautious.
“You can now see more plainly,” said the baron. “Will you approach? Concealed by a double covering of strong paper pasted over it, and painted and gilded, each of these two doors on its six panels contains six distinct masterpieces of Watteau’s. I have known that for ten years, and have postponed removing them. Twelve Watteaus, as fine as any in the world! I would not trust their removal to any other hand, and so, the panel comes out without a shake. Come here, Monsieur, if you please. This candle affords a light sufficient to see, at least, some of the beauties of these incomparable works.”
“Thanks, Baron, a glance will suffice, for I am nothing of an artist.”
He approached. It was true that his sight had grown accustomed to the obscurity, for he could now see the baron’s features much more distinctly. His large waxen face was shorn smooth, except on the upper lip, where a short moustache still bristled; short black eyebrows contrasted also with the bald massive forehead, and round the eyes was a complication of mean and cunning wrinkles. Some peculiar lines between these contracted brows gave a character of ferocity to this forbidding and sensual face.
“Now! See there! Those four pictures — I would not sell those four Watteaus for one hundred thousand francs. And the other door is worth the same. Ha!”
“You are lucky, Baron.”
“I think so. I do not wish to part with them: I don’t think of selling them. See the folds of that brocade! See the ease and grace of the lady in
the sacque, who sits on the bank there, under the myrtles, with the guitar on her lap! and see the animation and elegance of that dancing boy with the tambourine! This is a chef-d’œuvre. I ought not to part with that, on any terms — no, never! You no doubt know many collectors, wealthy men, in England. Look at that shot silk, green and purple; and whom do you take that to be a portrait of, that lady with the castanets?”
He was pointing out each object, on which he descanted, with his stumpy finger, his hands being, I am bound to admit, by no means clean.
“If you do happen to know such people, nevertheless, I should not object to your telling them where this treasure may be seen, I’ve no objection. I should not like to part with them, that is true. No, no, no; but every man may be tempted, it is possible — possible, just possible.”
“I shall certainly mention them to some friends.”
“Wealthy men, of course,” said the baron.
“It is an expensive taste, Baron, and none but wealthy people can indulge it.”
“True, and these would be very expensive. They are unique; that lady there is the Du Barry — a portrait worth, alone, six thousand francs. Ha! he! Yes, when I take zese out and place zem, as I mean before I go, to be seen, they will bring all Europe together. Mit speck fangt man mause — with bacon one catches mice!”
“No doubt they will excite attention, Baron. But I feel I am wasting your time and abusing your courtesy in permitting my visit, the immediate object of which was to earnestly beg from you some information which, I think, no one else can give me.”
“Information? Oh! ah! Pray resume your chair, Sir. Information? yes, it is quite possible I may have information such as you need, Heaven knows! But knowledge, they say, is power, and if I do you a service I expect as much from you. Eine hand wascht die and’re — one hand, Monsieur, washes ze ozer. No man parts wis zat which is valuable, to strangers, wisout a proper honorarium. I receive no more patients here; but you understand, I may be induced to attend a patient: I may be tempted, you understand.”
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 560
