Collected Works of Gaston Leroux

by Gaston Leroux

  “Turning his head round!... Three cheers for turning his head round! You thought of that all by yourself — turning his head round! Of course, he can’t turn his head round now,” laughed the hideous Mazeppa, just come in.

  Though M. Barkimel was aware of M. Hilaire’s new custom of open-handed hospitality he had not hitherto met this new “pauper.” He drew back in dismay. But Daddy Peanuts, seeming to wake from a dream, introduced the youthful Mazeppa to him. “My secretary,” he added with an unexpected and grating laugh that scared the others more than anything else.

  He was the first to enter the dining-room, and they heard him laugh again — a terrible laugh. M. Hilaire’s cheeks blanched. As to M. Frederic, the so-called coal dealer, he took his leave after apologizing to Mme Hilaire for being unable to accept her invitation to dinner that evening.

  Mme Hilaire, rankling under her recent discovery, said to herself: “Play the farce to the end, my little men. We shall have the whole thing out shortly.” And she went into the dining-room, giving her arm to M. Barkimel and ignoring the other guests.

  “I don’t know what has happened to Mme Hilaire to-day,” came the rasping voice of Chéri-Bibi, who had already taken a seat at table like an ill-bred person, “but there is a look about her that suits her to perfection.”

  Mme Hilaire did not wince. Her turn would come.

  The conversation fell on the news of d’Askof’s arrest, published in the Journal des Clubs, and Daddy Peanuts expressed his surprise that the police should still be unable to trace the hiding-place of the de Touchais family.

  “The beautiful Marchioness must be rather crestfallen,” said Virginie. “She was so high and mighty that one scarcely dared speak to her. Where is she now? Perhaps she has found someone to hide her in a cellar, as other people are doing.”

  On hearing this last sentence uttered in an aggressive tone the guests seemed for a moment to suspend their eating. Hilaire quivered with nervousness, which did not escape Mme Hilaire, and she rejoiced in his confusion with scarcely concealed malevolence. Polydore and Jean Jean exchanged glances. Daddy Peanuts told Mazeppa to go for a stroll and not to return until he whistled for him. Then he coughed, raised his tinted spectacles to Mme Hilaire, and said in a voice that trembled slightly:

  “What do you mean? You ought to explain yourself.”

  “Explain myself,” echoed this notable woman, her face radiant at the effect she had produced. “Need I explain myself? M. Hilaire knows perfectly well what I mean.”

  “I?” protested M. Hilaire with an air of innocence. “Why, I confess that I don’t even understand Daddy Peanuts’s surprise at what you say. Obviously the lady may be hiding in a cellar or garret.”

  “Cellar or garret, she’ll get no pity out of me,” exclaimed Mme Hilaire. “And if ever they nab the conceited thing and that affected Lydia and that old hypocrite Jacqueline I shall be the first to shout ‘Hurrah!’”

  “So you really hate her?” said Chéri-Bibi in a hoarse voice.

  “I will explain...” broke in M. Hilaire.

  “Shut up!” growled Chéri-Bibi. “Don’t interrupt a lady. It’s not done in polite society.”

  “Oh, on that subject we have never agreed,” went on Mme Hilaire. “Though he now wins as many honors as he pleases he certainly regrets the day when he was a servant with these people. He told me so. He will not deny it. And he calls himself a Republican, a Revolutionist, and all the rest of it. I am only a woman of the people, but I feel more resentment.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” exclaimed M. Hilaire.

  But Virginie continued her yelping:

  “Not a bit of it. When he sees her he bows to the very ground. Upon my word, one might almost think he was in love with her. It’s enough to make one sick, not to mention that Madame Cecily is no better than she should be. There was a great deal of talk about her at Dieppe when she was making assignations with the Vicomte de Pont Marie, even in church.”

  A pause ensued — all was silence. It seemed as if Mme Hilaire’s words had struck M. Hilaire dead. He remained motionless, gave no sign of life. Suddenly the hoarse voice of the peanut dealer was heard:

  “I can see that you don’t like her.”

  “Oh no,” exploded Virginie. “Look here, as I can’t hope to have her as my housemaid, I have only one wish — to see her arrested, sentenced and guillotined.”

  The sound of breaking crockery seemed to emphasize the significance of such a wish. It was Daddy Peanuts, who had rolled under the table with his plate. He used often to eat under the table like a dog. He was generally quite comfortable, seated on his haunches on the floor, and as a rule joined in the conversation only by uttering a series of grunts. But this time no sound came from him. M. Barkimel broke the silence, which was becoming intolerable.

  “Madame, you are a true citizen. I can tell you something that will please you — we are on the point of discovering the Marchioness de Touchais’s hiding-place.”

  “So there is a Providence after all,” exclaimed Virginie.

  Something stirred under the table, and M. Hilaire, to show, perhaps, that he was not really dead, made a movement on his seat. Polydore and Jean Jean rocked themselves on theirs.

  “Yes,” went on M. Barkimel, “the thing occurred at the end of the sitting of the Revolutionary Tribunal. A young laundry-maid was brought before us. She was no more a laundry-maid than I am. In reality she was the Baroness d’Askof, the wife of Subdamoun’s friend, who himself was arrested in the Café Werther.

  “The Baroness d’Askof, whose fate we were to settle at once, and who naturally feared to be sentenced to death and executed to-morrow, asked us whether we would spare her life if she placed us in a position to arrest the Marchioness de Touchais, Subdamoun’s mother.

  “The public prosecutor took it upon himself to promise to agree to her request if her information turned out to be of real value. Then she stated that the laundress who had received and concealed her and dressed her up as a laundry-maid was the Marchioness’s former laundress, and had recognized some of her things among linen recently sent to her by a customer.”

  On hearing these words M. Hilaire seemed to be about to faint, and then he uttered a piercing shriek. They were all seriously alarmed.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “It’s over.... A slight heart attack.”

  The truth was that he had been bitten in the leg by the thing under the table. He at once realized his blunder in sending among his house linen an article belonging to the Marchioness, and he realized also that if his blunder had the terrible consequences which would now have to be provided for it was not his wife who would be destroyed by the thing under the table but himself, Commissioner for the Division and Inspector of Prisons though he was.

  M. Barkimel, failing to notice the dramatic interest which his story excited, went on:

  “She gave us the name of the laundress in the Rue aux Phoques.”

  “Rue aux Phoques!” exclaimed Virginie. “Why, that’s our laundress.”

  “The case was adjourned while we sent a Commissioner to make enquiries,” continued M. Barkimel. “This officer soon returned and informed us that he had discovered the laundress dead, hanging from the fastening of the window.... Well, what do you think of that? Was not the matter getting rather intricate? He at first assumed that it was a case of suicide because a love-letter was found near the body, but afterwards he had no difficulty in reconstructing the crime. It was another blow struck by Subdamoun’s friends, who must have been warned of our being on the track of the mother of their idol. These men stop at nothing.”

  “What did you do with the Baroness d’Askof?” M. Hilaire had the strength to ask, wiping the beads of perspiration from his forehead.

  “We were on the point of sentencing her to death, since her information had been of no avail, when she told us that she remembered quite well the initials of the customer who had sent the linen in question. These initials are—”

  M. Barkime
l was unable to proceed. A terrific crash resounded in the dining-room. The heavy table, with all that lay on it — china, glass, knives and forks, everything — was overturned, and the table itself fell on M. Barkimel’s feet. He began to cry out as if he were being flayed alive. In the midst of the confusion Daddy Peanuts apologized to Mme Hilaire for having risen a little too abruptly and thus stupidly caused the catastrophe.

  M. Barkimel, greatly disgusted with a dinner at which he had found no pleasure and his feet were nearly crushed, took leave somewhat in the sulks, assisted by Mazeppa, who was told to see him home and look after him, “as if he were his father.”

  On a sign from Daddy Peanuts, Polydore and Jean Jean returned to their cellar, where their bed was waiting for them, alleging as a pretext that they were worn out with the exertions of the day, so that Daddy Peanuts and M. and Mme Hilaire remained alone in the dining-room. Mme Hilaire, who no longer doubted the identity of the visitor whom they were hiding, seemed ready to burst. Her face scarlet from the influxion of blood, her bosom raging, her arms akimbo, she waited for the word that should be the signal for the explosion.

  Daddy Peanuts, after very carefully closing the door, said:

  “I don’t think that ass Barkimel has any suspicion or else he would not have come here to dinner for fear of compromising himself, nor would he have told us his story.”

  “I quite agree with you,” said M. Hilaire, trembling in every limb.

  “How should he have any suspicion?” began Virginie. “But personally I have nothing more to learn.”

  “Madame Hilaire,” broke in Daddy Peanuts, seizing her wrists in an iron grip and forcing her back to the other end of the room. “Madame Hilaire, I like you because I cannot forget that you are the wife of my good friend Hilaire. Let me then advise you not to open your mouth so wide when you speak of your cellar....

  “Do you realize that M. Barkimel’s blindness and stupidity are an untold advantage to him, seeing that he knows nothing of what happens to be in your cellar?... Those who discovered the fact have died from their knowledge. The coal man who preceded Monsieur Frederic died from it. Your laundress died from it!”

  He let go of her. She fell into a chair in a state of collapse and stared haggard-eyed at the diabolical old man. Then he resumed in a slightly quieter tone:

  “What can I do with you now, madame — now that you know this thing? It is a secret of which you are no longer the mistress. A gesture, a look may betray us. In these circumstances you see for yourself that you must disappear....”

  “O God, take pity on her!” groaned M. Hilaire, who was not a bad sort of man.

  Virginie gave an agonizing gasp.

  “I will spare your life,” said the old man after reflection, “but I say again — you must disappear. And the best way for you to disappear, in my interests and in every one’s interests, is for you to go down into the cellar and be shut up there with the lady in question.”

  “Nev—” Virginie began but did not finish the sentence. A flaming black look scorched her last effort of resistance.

  “You will be shut up with her, Madame Hilaire, and as this lady in the unhappy state to which for the time being she has been reduced needs little attentions you will give them to her. You will lavish them on her. You will be her servant — her humble and obedient servant. There is no menial work that you must stop at in your service.... I think I have made myself sufficiently clear. That is the best I can do for you.”

  He looked round and said to Hilaire:

  “Please pack such things in a valise as Mme Hilaire may need for her little journey.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  IN THE CONCIERGERIE PRISON

  THE CONCIERGERIE PRISON at that time was used as a State prison and as a temporary lock-up for prisoners already sentenced.

  M. Florent, whom revolutionary literature had ruined, and Baron d’Askof were taken there almost at the same time, so that they found themselves in the Record Office together, and were sent to a cell in which young Cazo, the ardent nationalist, had been incarcerated. M. Florent was in the slough of despair. He had been arrested at a moment when, at his wits’ end, he himself was delivering an article, more inflammatory than ever, to the Journal des Clubs. He could no longer see any limit to his ill-fortune, and the beginning of his stay in this sinister place led him only too clearly to perceive the early end of it all without being able to understand the mystery of it.

  As soon as he entered the prison he was unpleasantly impressed by the sight of the march past of prisoners summoned to appear on that particular day before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the new judges appointed at the instance of Coudry and the clubs were waiting for them.

  By this time some hard blows had been struck at the old bench of judges. All the same, they had not dared to lay sacrilegious hands on M. Dimier, the President of the Assize Court, an upright and conscientious judge, who plays but a small part in our story, but is of sufficient importance for us to pause a moment to set before the reader a portrait of him.

  A notable case brought him into prominence. It was the trial of the “bandits of the North,” who after plundering the province swooped down upon Paris when they learned that the city was in the grip of a revolution.

  An amazing and reckless burglary at a museum enabled the police to capture the leaders of this formidable gang. Some of them had the cleverness to claim acquaintance with certain bigwigs of the Revolution and to threaten to prove it. Friendly political association was an exaggeration, but undoubtedly there had been unpleasantly compromising relations between them.

  In short, two of the accused, Garot and Manol, would undoubtedly have escaped punishment had not M. Dimier, guided only by his conscience, set his face against it, and threatened the public prosecutor with a scandal.

  On the other hand, Garot and Manol, seeing that they were not to be released, though the magistrate’s examination was over, began to turn informer. They had been transferred to the Conciergerie Prison and were constantly demanding an interview with the Governor of the prison, who took down their statements and, like the honest man he was, made a report upon them and sent it to the proper authority. No attempt was made to interfere with M. Dimier, but the Governor was dismissed and succeeded by a dissolute person called Mathieu Talbot.

  Capable of any low-down job, he understood the difficulty of some of his old friends, and hinted vaguely that as he was Governor, Garot and Manol would be able to decamp — the only way to avoid a scandal at the Assize Court.

  When M. Florent passed through the guard-room he observed two narrow staircases, each leading to a tower on the first floor. In the tower on the right was the office of the Governor, and in the tower on the left was the office of the President of the Assize Court.

  It was to this room that M. Dimier came from time to time to cross-question prisoners. This honest man, sound judge, good father, upright character, adorned with every virtue, was greatly respected, even by Chéri-Bibi himself, for at the beginning of his career he had expressed the opinion in his book on “Judicial Blunders” that it might well be that Chéri-Bibi, the criminal of world-wide notoriety, was innocent of the first murder for which he had been found guilty and sentenced.

  M. Dimier despised M. Talbot, who had once come before him, and M. Talbot had a contempt for M. Dimier because he had come before him and been acquitted in circumstances that would have disgraced any other man.

  M. Talbot was convinced, after the Garot and Manol affair, that he would “dish” M. Dimier, and rather too openly made a boast about it one night in a café. That very night as he was undressing he found in his coat pocket half a dozen peanuts in a paper bag on which was written: “Don’t attempt to ‘dish’ M. Dimier.” M. Talbot, who was ignorant of peanut language, failed to understand the meaning of the warning, which gave him food for thought for a few moments, though it did not keep him awake that night.

  M. Talbot had a pimply face, red with erysipelas, and small grey eyes that never loo
ked anyone in the face.

  M. Dimier had a face as smooth as marble framed in a splendid white beard. His gaze was kindly with honest people, but hard when he was dealing with rogues.

  Chéri-Bibi, who worshipped virtue in other people, would have died for him and not hesitated for a moment to send the shady M. Talbot to the grave if his interests ever so little constrained him to do so. We shall see that his interests prevented him from remaining neutral in this struggle in which M. Dimier was striving to confound two criminals, the Governor of the prison was endeavoring to help them to escape, and Chéri-Bibi was trying to turn this difference to good account by substituting in the escape Major Jacques and Baron d’Askof for Garot and Manol. Without anticipating events we may say at once that such was the peanut dealer’s scheme — a scheme to ensure the success of which he had obtained M. Hilaire’s appointment as Inspector of Prisons. This ruse alone would enable him, he hoped, to save Subdamoun’s life — the much-loved son, for whom he would have shed the last drop of blood in his veins, and the last drop of blood in the veins of his friends as well as his enemies.

  Subdamoun in his cell was watched with a wealth of precautions. Four civic guards were always present with him, and a platoon of twenty-five others stood on duty at the door in the corridor. All this, of course, without prejudice to a veritable garrison of men whom Talbot could mobilize within five minutes — men who were constantly on the move in the old prison and giving it an air of réanimation that made M. Florent shudder in the very marrow of his bones, for he was more and more confusing this Revolution with its great predecessor, imagining himself living a hundred and fifty years before.

  Poor M. Florent! That Baron d’Askof, one of Subdamoun’s gang, and M. Cazo, longing to restore the monarchy in France, should be in a prison cell — he found nothing amiss in that. On the contrary he considered it quite just; but that he who had only taken part in politics once to eulogize the triumph of the cause and glorify the men of the day under the pseudonym of “The Old Cordelier” should be reduced to such misery — was that not inconceivable?