The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  The road proved quite as rough and declivitous as its reputation. One surmised that the Spring rains had found it in a bad way and done nothing to better its condition. Deep ruts and a liberal sprinkling of small boulders collaborated to keep the horses stumbling, plunging and pitching as they strained back against the singletrees. Duchemin was grateful for the moonlight which alone enabled him to keep the road and avoid the worst of the going—until he remembered that without the moon there would have been no expedition that night to view the mock ruins of Montpellier by its unearthly light, and consequently no adventure to entangle him.

  Upon this reflection he swore softly but most fervently into his becoming beard. He was well fed up with adventures, thank you, and could have done very well without this latest. And especially at a time when he desired nothing so much as to be permitted to remain the footloose wanderer in a strange land, a bird of passage without ties or responsibilities.

  He thought it devilish hard that one may never do a service to another without incurring a burden of irksome obligations to the served; that bonds of interest forged in moments of unpremeditated and generous impulse are never readily to be broken.

  Now because Chance had seen fit to put him in the way of saving a hapless party of sightseers from robbery or worse, he found himself hopelessly committed to take a continuing interest in them. It appeared that their home was a château somewhere in the vicinity of Nant. Well, after their shocking experience, and with the wounded man on their hands—and especially if La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite told the story one confidently expected—Duchemin could hardly avoid offering to see them safely as far as Nant. And once there he would be definitely in the toils. He would have to stop in the town overnight; and in the morning he would be able neither in common decency to slip away without calling to enquire after the welfare of d’Aubrac and the tranquillity of the ladies, nor in discretion to take himself out of the way of the civil investigation which would inevitably follow the report of what had happened in Montpelier.

  No: having despatched a bandit to an end well-earned, it now devolved upon André Duchemin to satisfy Society and the State that he had done so only with the most amiable motives, on due provocation, to save his own life and possibly the lives of others.

  He had premonitions of endless delays while provincial authorities wondered, doubted, criticised, procrastinated, investigated, reported, and—repeated.

  And then there was every chance that the story, thanks to the prominence of the persons involved, for one made no doubt that the names of Sévénié and Montalais and d’Aubrac ranked high in that part of the world—the story would get into the newspapers of the larger towns in the department. And what then of the comfortable pseudonymity of André Duchemin? Posed in an inescapable glare of publicity, how long might he hope to escape recognition by some acquaintance, friend or enemy? Heaven knew he had enough of both sorts scattered widely over the face of Europe!

  It seemed hard, indeed.…

  But it was—of course! he assured himself grimly—all a matter of fatality with him. Never for him the slippered ease of middle age, the pursuit of bourgeois virtues, of which he had so fondly dreamed in Meyrueis. Adventures were his portion, as surely as humdrum and eventless days were many another’s. Wars might come and wars might go: but his mere presence in its neighbourhood would prove enough to turn the Palace of Peace itself into Action Front.

  Or so it seemed to him, in the bitterness of his spirit.

  Nor would he for an instant grant that his lot was not without its own, peculiar compensations.

  At La Roque, a tiny hamlet huddled in the shadow of Montpellier and living almost exclusively upon the tourists that pass that way, it was as Duchemin had foreseen, remembering the American uniform and the face smudged with soot—that favourite device of the French criminal of the lower class fearing recognition. For there it appeared that, whereas the motor car was waiting safe and sound enough, its chauffeur had vanished into thin air. Not a soul could be found who recalled seeing the man after the barouche Tiad left the village. Whereupon Duchemin asked whether the chauffeur had been a stout man, and being informed that it was so, considered the case complete. Mesdames de Sévénié et de Montalais, he suggested, might as well then and there give up all hope of ever again seeing that particular chauffeur—unless by some mischance entirely out of the reckoning of the latter. The landlord of the auberge, a surly sot, who had supplied the barouche with the man to act as driver and guide in one, took with ill grace the charge that his employee had been in league with the bandits. But this was true on the word of Madame de Montalais; it was their guide, she said, whom Duchemin had driven over the cliff. And (as Duchemin had anticipated) her name alone proved enough to silence the landlord’s virtuous protestations. One could not always avoid being deceived, he declared; he knew nothing of the dead man more than that he had come well recommended. With which he said no more, but lent an efficient if sullen hand to the task of transferring d’Aubrac to the motor car.

  D’Aubrac came to, while this was being accomplished, begged feebly for water, was given it with a little brandy to boot and, comfortably settled in the rear seat, between Louise de Montalais and her grandmother, relapsed once more into unconsciousness.

  Learning that Madame de Montalais would drive, Duchemin dissembled a sigh of relief and, standing beside the car, doffed his cap to say good-bye. He was only too happy to have been of such slight service as the circumstances had permitted; and if at any time he could do more, a line addressed to him at Nimes, poste restante.…

  “But if Monsieur Duchemin would be good enough,” Madame de Sévénié interposed in a fretful quaver—“and if it would not be taking him too far out of his way—it is night, anything may happen, the car might break down, and I am an old woman, monsieur, with sorely tried nerves—”

  Looking down at him from her place at the wheel, Madame de Montalais added: “It would be an act of charity, I think, monsieur, if it does not inconvenience you too greatly.”

  “On the contrary,” he fabricated without blushing, “you will be obliging a weary man by putting him several miles on his way.”

  He had no cause to regret his complaisance. Seated beside Madame de Montalais, he watched her operate the car with skilful hands, making the best of a highway none too good, if a city boulevard in comparison with that which they had covered in the barouche.

  Following the meandering Dourbie, it ran snakily from patches of staring moonlight to patches of inky shadows, now on narrow ledges high over the brawling stream, now dipping so low that the tyres were almost level with the plane of broken waters.

  The sweep of night air in his face was sweet and smooth, not cold—for a marvel in that altitude—and stroked his eyelids with touches as bland as caresses of a pretty woman’s fingers. He was sensible of drowsiness, a surrender to fatigue, to which the motion of the motor car, swung seemingly on velvet springs, and the shifting, blending chiaroscuro of the magic night were likewise conducive. So that there came a lessening of the tension of resentment in his humour.

  It was true that Life would never let him rest in the quiet byways of his desire; but after all, unrest was Life; and it was good to be alive tonight, alive and weary and not ill-content with self, in a motor car swinging swiftly and silently along a river road in the hills of Southern France, with a woman lovely, soignée and mysterious at the wheel.

  Perhaps instinctively sensible of the regard that dwelt, warm with wonder, on the fair curve of her cheek, the perfect modelling of her nose and mouth, she looked swiftly askance, after a time, surprised his admiration, and as if not displeased smiled faintly as she returned attention to the road.

  Duchemin was conscious of something like a shock of emotion, a sudden surging of some hunger that had long lain dormant in his being, unsuspected, how long he could not surmise, gaining strength in latency, waiting to be awakene
d and set free by one careless, sidelong look and smile of a strange woman.

  “Eve,” he whispered, unheard, “Eve de Montalais…”

  Then of a sudden he caught himself up sharply. It was natural enough that one should be susceptible to gentler impulses, at such a time, under circumstances so strange, so unforeseen, so romantic; but he must not, dared not, would not yield. That way danger lay.

  Not that he feared danger; for like most of mankind he loved it well.

  But here the danger held potentialities if not the certainty of pain—pain, it might be, not for one alone.

  Besides, it was too absurd.…

  CHAPTER V

  PHINUIT & CO.

  In the upshot, however, the necessity of his dismal forebodings had nothing to do with the length of time devoted by Monsieur Duchemin to kicking idle heels in the town of Nant; where the civil authorities proved considerate in a degree that—even making allowance for the local prestige of the house of Montalais—gratified and surprised the confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world besides steeped in eternal night.

  The driver-guide of La Roque turned out to have been a thorough-paced scamp, well and ill-known to the gendarmerie; the wound sustained by Monsieur d’Aubrac bore testimony to the gravity of the affair, amply excusing Duchemin’s interference and its fatal sequel; while the statements of Mesdames de Sévénié et de Montalais, duly becoming public property, bade fair to exalt the local reputation of André Duchemin to heroic stature. And, naturally, his papers were unimpeachable.

  So that he found himself, before his acquaintance with Nant was thirty-six hours of age, free once more to humour the dictates of his own sweet will, to go on to Nimes (his professed objective) or to the devil if he liked. A freedom which, consistent with the native inconsistency of man, he exercised by electing to stop over in Nant for another day or two, at least; assuring himself that he found the town altogether charming, more so even than Meyrueis—and sometimes believing this fiction for as much as twenty minutes at a stretch.

  Besides, the weather was unsettled.…

  The inn, which went by the unpretending style of the Grand Hôtel de l’Univers, he found clean, comfortable, and as to its cuisine praiseworthy. The windows of the cubicle in which he had been lodged—one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant Universe—not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton, glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag, the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban—peaks each a rendezvous just then for hosts of cloud that scowled forbiddingly down upon the peaceful, sun-drenched valley.

  Moreover, even from the terrasse of the café below, one needed only to lift one’s eyes to see, afar, perched high upon a smiling slope of green, with the highway to Millau at its foot and a beetling cliff behind, the Château de Montalais. Seated on that terrasse, late in the afternoon of his second day in Nant, discussing a Picon and a villainous caporal cigarette of the Régie (to whose products a rugged constitution was growing slowly reconciled anew) Duchemin let his vision dwell upon the distant château almost as constantly as his thoughts.

  He was to dine there that very evening. Even taking into account the signal service Duchemin had rendered, this wasn’t easy to believe when one remembered the tradition of social conservatism among French gentlefolk. Still, it was true: Duchemin of the open road was bidden to dine en famille at the Château de Montalais. In his pocket lay the invitation, penned in the crabbed antique hand of Madame de Sévénié and fetched to the hotel by a servitor quite as crabbed and antique: Monsieur Duchemin would confer a true pleasure by enabling the ladies of the château to testify, even so inadequately, to their sense of obligation, etc.; with a postscript to say that Monsieur d’Aubrac was resting easily, his wound mending as rapidly as heart could wish.

  Of course Duchemin was going, had in fact already despatched his acceptance by the hand of the same messenger. Equally of course he knew that he ought not to go. For a man of his years he was, as a matter of training and habit, amazingly honest with himself. He knew quite well what bent his inclination toward visiting the Château de Montalais just once before effecting, what he was resolved upon, a complete evanishment from the ken of its people. He had yet to hold one minute of private conversation with Eve de Montalais, he had of her no sign to warrant his thinking her anything but utterly indifferent to him; and yet.…

  No; he wasn’t ass enough to dream that he was in love with the woman; to the contrary, he was wise enough, knew himself well enough, to know that he could be, easily, and would be, given half a chance to lose his head.

  His warning had been clear beyond mistake, in that hour in the motor car on the road from La Roque to Nant, when Nature, as she sometimes will, incautiously had shown her hand to one whom she herself had schooled to read shrewdly, letting him discern what was her will with him, the snare that was laid for his feet and in which he must soon find himself trapped beyond extrication…always providing he lacked the wit and resolution to fly his peril, who knew through bitterest of learning that love was never for him.

  Now he had seen Madame de Montalais another time, and had found that she fitted to the sweetest detail of perfection his ideal of Woman.

  On the previous afternoon, meeting the ladies of the château by arrangement in the bureau of the maire, Duchemin had sat opposite and watched and listened to Eve de Montalais for upwards of two hours—as completely devoted to covert study of her as if she had been the one woman in the room, as if the girl Louise, Madame de Sévénié, and the officials and functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person which had the night before so stirred his pulses.

  Posed with consummate grace in a comfortless chair, a figure of slender elegance in her half-mourning, she had narrated quietly her version of last night’s misadventure, an occasional tremor of humour lightening the moving modulations of her voice. A deep and vibrant voice, contralto in quality, hinting at hidden treasures of strength in the woman whose superficial mind it expressed. A fair woman, slim but round, with brown eyes level and calm, a translucent skin of matchless texture, hair the hue of bronze laced with intimations of gold…

  Her story told, and taken down in longhand by a withered clerk, she supplied without reluctance or trace of embarrassment such intimate personal information as was necessary in order that her signature to the document might be acceptable to the State.

  Her age, she said, was twenty-nine; her birthplace, the City of New York; her parents, Edmund Anstruther, once of Bath, England, but at the time of her birth a naturalised citizen of the United States, and Eve Marie Anstruther, née Legendre, of Paris. Both were dead. In June 1914 she had married, in Paris, Victor Maurice de Montalais, who had been killed in action at La Fère-Champenoise on the ninth of September following. Her home? The Château de Montalais.

  On the hand she stripped in order to sign her deposition Duchemin saw a blue diamond of such superb water that this amateur of precious stones caught his breath for sheer wonder at its beauty and excellence and worth. Such jewels, he knew, were few and far to seek outside the collections of princes.

&
nbsp; Out of these simple elements imagination reconstructed a tragedy, a tragedy of life singularly close to the truth as he later came to learn it, a story not at all calculated to lessen his interest in the woman.

  Such women, he knew, are the product of a cultivation seldom to be achieved by poverty. This one had been made before, and not by, her marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely château, buried deep in the loneliest hills of all France, the sole companion and comfort of her husband’s bereaved sister and grandmother, chained by sorrow to their sorrow, by an inexorable reluctance to give them pain by seeming to slight the memory of the husband, brother and grandson through turning her face toward the world of life and light and gaiety of which she was so essentially a part, isolate from which she was so inevitably a thing existing without purpose or effect.

  How often, Duchemin wondered, had she in hours of solitude and restlessness felt her spirit yearning toward Paris, the nearest gateway to her world, and had cried out: How long, O Lord! how long?…

  The mellow resonance of a two-toned automobile horn, disturbing the early evening hush and at the same time Duchemin’s meditations, recalled him to Nant in time to see a touring car of majestic proportions and mien which, coming from the south, from the direction of the railroad and Nimes, was sweeping a fine curve round two sides of the public square. Arriving in front of the Hôtel de l’Univers it executed a full stop and stood curbed yet palpitant, purring heavily: an impressive brute of a car, all shining silver plate and lustrous green paint and gold, the newest model of the costliest and best automobile manufactured in France.