The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  His own good boots would have to serve. As for hair, there was doubtless a good hairdresser in any village attached to a noble house. He remounted and rode towards the village, thinking:

  As a man of action, Jean Paul Marin, you haven’t done too badly—so far.

  He was right about the hairdresser. The man, with one glance at his rich attire, was at once all cringing servility.

  “My lordship’s hair? But of course! ‘Twill not be an easy task, my lord. If you will pardon my boldness, may I ask how long it has been since my lord has had it done!”

  “Not in years,” Jean said airily. “Twas a vow I made. And the lady has but today released me from it. Come, man! Your scissors, curling-tongs—your powder! Be quick about it—My Lord of Gravereau expects me at the Château within the hour.”

  “Ah, youth!” the hairdresser sighed; “ah, love! Even in my humble station I understand these things. When I have done, my lord may rest assured that the lady’s stony heart will melt like snow before the noonday sun. My lord will please be seated?”

  The man’s fingers were deft. In a shade under an hour, Jean Paul had been clipped, curled, bagged, and tied. The hairdresser next led him to another seat before an apparatus that looked for all the world like a pillory.

  It was. After one questioning glance, Jean Paul allowed his head to be placed through the semi-circular opening in the lower board, and the upper was lowered, thus firmly imprisoning his head. Then the hairdresser appeared on the other side with a pistol in his hand.

  Hell’s bells! Jean swore silently; what gave me away?

  Then he saw that the pistol was no ordinary weapon, and guessed it was some special implement of the hairdresser’s trade. He aimed it at Jean’s head. There was a click, and all the world was filled with a cloud of fine white powder. Jean lost his breath, coughed and sneezed violently.

  “A thousand pardons, my lord!” the hairdresser gasped; “I should have warned my lord to hold his breath!”

  “Damme, man, you’ve strangled me!” Jean Paul roared. “Have a care, won’t you?”

  “Yes, my lord, forgive me, my lord,” the hairdresser whispered. “I’m afraid, my lord, that with hair as black as my lord’s, it will require several additional shots

  “Go ahead, then,” Jean commanded; “I must be at my best tonight.”

  This time he was prepared, and held his breath. When, at last, the hairdresser held a mirror up before him, Jean Paul was amazed. A stranger stared back at him. A young prince. The transformation was startling. He would have to apologise to no man for his looks now; not even to the Lord of Gravereau.

  As he rode once more towards the château, after having paid and tipped the hairdresser extravagantly, he felt like singing. He was neither frightened nor nervous. For he was one of those people who, without knowing it, are born actors. Their flair for dramatising themselves is so instinctive that they become the role they are currently playing. It is to be doubted that any more arrogant young lordling ever entered the Château de Gravereau than this bourgeois son of a Marseilles merchant.

  It was ludicrously easy. The guards at the gate paid no attention to him at all. He strode in, mingled with the throng, took wine from the bowing servants, laughed at the sallies of the Duc de Gramont, and even ventured a few of his own.

  To test his disguise, he walked to within one scant yard of the Comte de Gravereau, and made him an elaborate bow. Gervais la Moyte stared, and for a moment his eyes were troubled. Then he smiled and bowed in his turn.

  “Glad to see you’ve arrived, Julien,” he said. “You’ve had wine?”

  “Of course, Gervais,” Jean Paul laughed; “but I’ll be delighted to repeat the offence.”

  Gervais languidly indicated a sideboard covered with bottles and glasses, with an imposing servant in attendance.

  “Help yourself,” he said; “meanwhile, there are other pleasures. . . .”

  Then he put his arm back around the waist of the painted little minx at his side.

  Jean Paul walked away on pure air.

  Julien! he laughed inside himself; I wonder who the devil Julien is! What frightfully precious luck! If only the beggar doesn’t appear in person!

  But he never reached the wine. He had that odd, prickly sensation that warns the over-sensitive that they are being watched. He turned, and came face to face with a girl of some twenty years or perhaps even less. He forgot his courtly Mariners. He stopped quite frankly and stared.

  She was a small girl, and very beautiful. Even looking at her he couldn’t believe it. Her hair, he decided, when unpowdered, must be the exact shade of the Comte de Gravereau’s, because her brows and lashes were pure blonde. Her eyes were the colour of the Mediterranean, far out, on a summer day. Her lips were shell-pink, moist, and a little parted. She was staring at him with undisguised wonder.

  “You,” she said firmly, “are not Julien!”

  “Of course I’m not,” Jean Paul laughed, “though I have been accused of it. Who the devil is this Julien, anyhow?”

  “Julien Lamont, Marquis de Saint Gravert,” the small girl said matter-of-factly. “He’s a distant cousin; we don’t see him often. But my brother has had more to drink than I have, or he would have been able to see that you aren’t Julien. . . .”

  “Your—your brother?” Jean whispered.

  “Gervais. You were talking to him just now. You do know Gervais, don’t you?”

  “Very well,” Jean laughed. “May I ask what you call yourself, Mademoiselle?”

  “Nicole” she said.

  “An enchanting name, Mademoiselle,” Jean Paul said, and bent and kissed her hand.

  “And your name, M’sieur?” Nicole said.

  Jean thought fast; then he smiled.

  “Giovanni Paoli Marino,” he laughed, “Conte di Roccasecca. . . .”

  “Italian, eh?” Nicole said gravely; “no wonder you’re so handsome.”

  Jean’s eyebrows crawled upward.

  “I am honoured that you think so, Mademoiselle,” he said.

  “But you are. You’re ever so much handsomer than Julien. That’s how I knew you weren’t he. But you speak French so perfectly. Know what I think? I think you’re an impostor. I don’t think you’re Italian at all. Speak some for me.”

  “Some what?” Jean Paul demanded.

  “Italian, silly! What on earth did you think I meant?”

  “I didn’t know,” Jean laughed. Then he obliged, praying that she didn’t know enough of that tongue to distinguish the rough Sicilian dialect he had learned at his father’s knee from the lovely, rippling Tuscan that he couldn’t speak at all.

  Nicole closed her eyes as she listened to him.

  “Beautiful!” she sighed, and opened them again when he had finished. “Still, it is strange—that you speak both languages so well, I mean . . .”

  “My mother was French,” Jean explained. That was the beauty of his lie—that most of it was true. His father had come from a tiny Sicilian town called Roccasecca, Dry Rock, in French; Giovanni Paoli Marino was not too bad a translation of Jean Paul Marin; and as for the title, Roccasecca had never had a lord, so little harm could result from remedying the omission. His success intoxicated him. He grew bold.

  “I’ll tell you another secret,” he whispered; “I wasn’t invited to this fête.”

  “Weren’t you?” she said serenely; “neither were most of the others. They just came. . . .”

  He threw back his head and laughed aloud, joyously.

  “Still,” she said gravely, cocking her little head to one side as she considered the matter, “I’d better keep you out of Gervais’ way. He knows the others; and he might find out that you aren’t Julien. Let me see, where can I take you?”

  “To Mademoiselle’s bedroom, of course,” Jean suggested smoothly. He had long since been aware how much of her oddity of Mariner was the product of wine.

  She considered this idea, too, with the same appealing gravity.

  “Good,” s
he said at last; “they would never think of looking for you there. But I shall have to come down after a time and be seen about, or Gervais might come looking for me.” She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. “But I’ll come back,” she whispered, putting her lips to his face. “You see—I like you!”

  Jean stared at her. Then he started to laugh. There was something irresistibly comic about the idea of paying Gervais la Moyte back in his own coin.

  “Wait,” Nicole whispered. “We mustn’t go up the stairway together. Everybody would see us. I’ll go up first, and you have another cup or two. Then you come up . . . no! That won’t do. The longer you stay down here, the greater the risk that Gervais will find you out. . . . You go first. It’s the second door to the left on the first floor.”

  Jean kissed her hand again, and mounted the stairs. Inside her bedroom a fire was burning in the fireplace, and Jean realised suddenly how cold it had grown. He thought about the poor devil he had robbed and left naked and bound in the woods.

  Can’t leave him like that, he thought; the poor fool will catch his death. . . . I don’t relish killing a man who never harmed me, even indirectly.

  He glanced quickly about the room. It was lovely. Everything was done in pale blue, heavily ornamented with gilt work. There was a huge mirror with a great frame of carved and gilded wood, in which he could see his face with the firelight flickering on it. In that light he looked more Mephistophelian than ever. The fire-screen of blue Chinese silk had gold figures worked into it, and the marble mantel and cornices around the fireplace were heavily incised with gold. The chairs were in the mode of the present reign, Louis XVI, delicate and fine, with their gilt-work showing through the pale blue paint. The fine crystal chandelier was not lit, but its myriads of crystal beads and bangles caught the firelight and brightened the whole room. Even the blue and gilt-work bed, fit for the Queen herself, was canopied with delicate blue silk, and the pillows and coverlets were the same colour.

  Jean could picture how Nicole la Moyte would look in this room, and the picture warmed him. But first he had a task to do. He opened all the cupboards until he found the linens, and selected a heavy blanket from among them. Then he came out on to the landing. As he suspected, there was a back stairway leading down to the rez-de-chaussée, or ground floor.

  He went down it, found himself in a hall pantry, paused long enough to purloin a bottle of wine. His new-found talent for thievery delighted him; all his new-found talents did. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself, which, had he been entirely sober, he would have regarded as a warning of impending trouble. But he was not entirely sober.

  He went straight to the place where he had left his victim. The poor young nobleman was thrashing about, trying to make enough noise to attract someone’s attention. But everyone had gone inside now, and he was too far away to be heard by the guards. Jean bent down and touched his shoulder. The young nobleman turned over and stared into the muzzle of Jean’s pistol, and was still.

  Jean wrapped him carefully in the blanket. Then he straightened up and looked at him.

  “Make one sound,” he warned, “and I will burn your brains.” He took the gag out of the young nobleman’s mouth. Then he uncorked the wine and poured a stiff drink down his victim’s throat. The nobleman spluttered, and Jean took the wine away.

  “More!” the young man croaked; “I’m freezing!”

  Jean stood by patiently until the young man had drunk three-quarters of the wine. Ordinarily he would have been consumed with impatience to get back to the fair Nicole, but the good wine in his own belly robbed him of a sense of time and made him strangely calm. He bent down to replace the gag, but saw, to his amusement, that his victim was already asleep.

  He marched grandly back towards the house. But coming up the drive, the cold sweep of the wind sobered him a bit, and he remembered, oddly, the cool generalship with which Nicole had arranged their first rendezvous.

  Displays a practised hand, he thought; she’s walked the primrose path many a time before

  Then he stopped short, amazed at how unpleasant he found that thought.

  “You, Jean Paul Marin,” he told himself sternly, “are a sentimental ass!” But the thought displeased him all the same. He walked through the hall until he came once more to the back stairway. As he passed the grand salon, the noise of revelry seemed to have doubled in volume.

  Good! he thought; we won’t be disturbed.

  But, when he was once more inside the room, he could not find Nicole. He had expected that she would have joined him by this time, but the room was empty. Moodily he sat down by the fire to wait. Then he heard it—the unmistakable sound of someone crying. It came from the big bed.

  He went over to it and pushed aside the canopy. Nicole was lying face-down on the bed, with utter disregard of the ruin she was doing to her sacque, or robe à la française, of the heaviest, finest white silk, with broad panniers and stitched back pleats, ornamented all over with seed pearls.

  “He’s gone,” she whispered to herself; “he’s gone and I’ll never see him again, and I think I’d rather die! Nom de Dieu, why did he ever have to come here at all? It wasn’t fair to let me meet him and talk with him and then. . . .” She subsided into a long trail of wordless sobbing.

  Jcan stood there, looking at her, a smile of pure self-mockery twisting his mouth.

  Consider well, he taunted himself, how much of this is sentiment and how much wine, before you become intoxicated with flattery. . . .

  Then very gently he bent down and touched her bare shoulder. She whirled, stared at him, her eyes in the firelight like star sapphires from her tears.

  “Oh!” she said furiously; “how long have you been standing there listening to me?”

  “This long,” he murmured, and, bending down again, he kissed her mouth very slowly and gently and well, cherishing it with his own so that, when finally he drew away, she remained like that in the same position, her head elevated, arched backward on the slim column of her throat, her mouth, soft, parted, sweet-sighing as though she were still suspended by his kiss, and from under each of her closed lids the great tears made a track like diamonds down her cheeks.

  “Too long,” she whispered; “far too long!”

  He sat down beside her on the great bed, and drew her to him. She came to him without any protest at all, and her slim arms stole upward and locked themselves about his neck.

  “I’m sorry that you heard me, Gio—Gio—oh, God, I cannot even say your name!”

  “Call me Jean,” he whispered; “it is the same.”

  “Jean—I love that nameShe put her cheek against his, and stared off into the firelight. “Tell me, Jean,” she murmured; “can a woman love a man she has seen but once, and then only for a few clock-ticks? Either I love you, or I am mad; and either way it is the same. . . .”

  “Wine helps,” Jean mocked.

  “I—I thought that, too,” Nicole said sadly. “So after you had gone upstairs I went back into the kitchen and bade the servants make me a whole pot of café noir. I drank it all. That’s what took me so long. And when I had finished it, your face was clearer in my mind than ever before, and I knew it was not wine. Then I came up here, and found you gone. . . .” She shuddered suddenly, thinking of it.

  He turned her towards him, seeing her head tilting back, waiting, her eyes closing, her mouth—and suddenly it was all wrong. This was not the vengeance that he had planned. This had gone wrong, and the other, the killing, was going wrong too, for in a few more minutes he was not going to be able to do it.

  He kissed her savagely, twisting his mouth into hers, hurting her with the pain that was inside him now, so that she started in surprise, drawing back, but he ground her to him furiously, feeling cheated, loathing himself with a bottomless loathing, until she did not draw away, but kissed him back wildly, digging her finger-tips into the rich brocade of his stolen coat, until, more from fury at this trick fate had played upon him than from passion, he sent h
is hand searching amid all the silks and laces until he found her body and caressed it roughly, as though she were a peasant.

  He heard the sharp intake of her breath; but she did not try to stop him. She drew away her mouth, and brought it up beside his ear.

  “Jean,” she whispered, “my Jean, my dearest, oh my dearest, please, Jean, oh, my darling, please—at least listen to me: I will not stop you, I cannot stop you, I—I—God help me, I want you so! But listen, dearest—please, Jean—Jeannot, hear me. . . .”

  It was that word that halted him, that tender diminutive, Jeannot—that Lucienne had always called him. He straightened up and sat there looking at her, dishevelled, bare-limbed, her mouth a little swollen, her face tear-streaked. She came up from the bed wildly, and locked her arms about him, once more crying:

  “Hold me! Don’t ever let me go—oh, Jeannot, Jeannot, I am mad, sick with love for you! I didn’t want it like this . . . I thought that when finally I came to love a man it would be for always; that there would be vows said before God’s priest, and in the sight of men . . . I never wanted a guilty, shameful love; but Jean, my love, Jeannot, my heart, my soul—if this is all I can be to you—then take me!”

  He sat there without moving, looking at her; and what was inside his heart was death itself and hell.

  “You mean,” he said harshly, “that you have never known a man?”

  Her glance was startled, but when she spoke, her voice was very gentle.

  “Of course not, Jean,” she said. Then: “Is that what you thought of me?”

  “Yes,” he mocked her; “I thought just that. . . .”

  “Oh!” she whispered, and the tears were there again, bright and sudden in her eyes. “I—I deserved that, I know. The way I acted downstairs. I was trying to be bold. ‘Tis the fashion now to be bold. . . .”

  She wasn’t lying, and he knew it. He stood up suddenly, paused for a moment, looking at her.