For a little while I was confused by the mass of outlandish characters. Then suddenly, in the third column from the left, I saw a mark like one of those on the sheet of paper that I had brought with me, and unfolded here for a comparison. I ran up the column and found another and another—the whole five. They were characters of the Phoenician alphabet. There could be no doubt about them. They were here precisely as the paralytic had drawn them on his sheet of paper. I wrote down the equivalent English letter below each hieroglyphic.
And they spelled the word LIGHT!
I put the paper into my pocket, tipped the shopkeeper, and went to my dinner at the Maison Blanc. He gave me a sly wink as I departed:
“It is a cipher of the heart perhaps, that page. Mademoiselle comes, and then Monsieur!”
I found Monsieur Jonquelle at dinner. He talked without waiting for replies. Did I find adventures—distressed damsels and a quest of fleece? And could I bear it to remain a little? He must go back to Brussels. And then he spoke a word or two about my great-aunt, whom I was near forgetting. Long ago she had loved a Russian, a grand duke. He had been killed in a duel at Nice. But he had given her, for he was incredibly rich, a wonderful gage d’amour, that in the end had caused her death.
He rose, made me a rather pretentious genuflection, and went out.
I took it for a marked favor of heaven; for I was burning to get back with my report.…
It was scarcely dusk. I hired a motor to take me to the village, where I got down, dismissed it and went on afoot. I passed the tall peasant at his place beyond the village, but he strolled away into the field as I approached.
The girl ran to open the door for me, and stood back with her arm behind her as though to bow me in. I had the sense of having passed through a door in the hill into some witch’s cottage of a fairy land.
Her big eyes grew wider in a sort of amazed, vague wonder when I put the paper down on the table and explained what I had discovered.
She nestled down beside me on the arm of the chair in which I sat, and seemed to fall into reflection, light—light. What could her father mean by that cryptic word? Then she spoke slowly, as though she thought aloud.
“A window in Russia is called a ‘light.’”
“Then he means a window,” I said. “What window could he mean?”
She leaned forward until the mass of her straw-colored hair touched my face.
“It would be a window in Paris,” she replied; “for the packet is hidden in Paris.”
Then her voice caught vigor and went eagerly on:
“It would mean a window in the house on the Boulevard St. Germain, where we were living.… What window in that house? … Why, surely the window in my father’s room there!”
She sprang up and whirled around the table like one of those exquisite spring-driven toys that the Swiss so excellently put together.
Why, of course, that was the reading of the riddle; the window in that room in that house in Paris.
Would I go to Paris in the morning and bring it to her?
I was not a suspect alien from that mad Russia all Europe feared. I would not be searched and registered, as she and her father had been searched and registered at every turning when their arrival in France was known; a matron at the Customs here had fingered every stitch of clothing on her, as though bombs from Moscow could be carried in the seam of a bodice.
The Prince’s house was closed. He was now in England; for her father’s health they had come here to the sea when their host departed. But I would have no difficulty. I could climb the wall if the gate was locked, a grating by the door could be lifted; the room was the first to the right on the first landing of the stairway; and there was only a single window in it. The house was 68 on the left hand as one faced down the Seine. I could not fail to find it.
Then she stopped, her face lifted.
But where, about the window, was it hidden? The query seemed only then to strike her.
And here I was able to add my quota of deduction. Was there not always a line drawn below the word with that mystic cross mark? That would mean below the window; and was not the “x” always precisely under the center of this line? That would mean at the center under the window.
She whirled off again into the doll dance, as at the releasing of the spring that held her. And I stood up. Nothing in all the world could have been so alluring. The dainty wooden shoes, that one could have put into one’s waistcoat pocket, were noiseless on the floor, and the little fairy figure turned smiling, its arms extended. It was all beyond the resistance of any mortal man. As she passed beside me I gathered her up into my arms.…
I traveled on the morning train to Paris.
I had not seen Monsieur Jonquelle, but he met me as I stepped down from my compartment. He was suave and with that bit of acid in his voice. He had expected me on an earlier train; and I must pardon his lack of leisure. To-morrow he would see me—perhaps a little before that.… He thought I might be toughened now to the depravity of Paris.
I was so bewildered at the man’s appearing thus, with such knowledge of my acts, that to cover it I put the only query I could think of. Had he discovered my great-aunt’s assassin?
He laughed. Her assassins he had known from the very day. It was another thing that he was seeking to discover, and he had tethered out a kid to find it.… I had perhaps heard of that style of trapping cheetahs—to tether out a kid!
Then he made me a low, ironical, continental courtesy and walked away.
I followed precisely the girl’s directions; took a motor to the Rue St. Père, dismissed it at that point and walked along the Boulevard St. Germain, until I found the house. Then I turned in behind it to a narrow street; a little way between two walls. The gate was not locked. I closed it behind me and crossed the garden to the door. To the right of this door was the old iron grating of which the fastenings had rusted out, and by which I could enter. But as I approached I noticed that this door was not quite closed. And so I pushed it open and went in.
I found the old marble stairway and ascended. The furniture in the house was covered. But it was evidently a splendid house; the house of some one old and rich. The friend of these exiles in Paris had been a grandee; but I thought, from his surroundings, of an effeminate and decadent taste. I found the room to the right at the first landing and went in. There before me was the single great window. The sun of the afternoon, filtered through the heavy curtains, made a sort of golden twilight. And I paused for a moment, with my hand on the handle of the closed door.
The furnishings in this room were also covered. But I could see it was no man’s apartment. It was the boudoir of a woman. It was mellow with age and in the refined taste of one long accustomed to the luxuries of life. The Russian who had received here the exiled savant and his daughter was a strange exotic thus to surround himself with this effeminacy.
But such reflections were of no concern.
I went over to the window. The casement board came up easily when I put the blade of my knife under it, and there, as though hastily thrust into concealment, was a necklace of great Oriental pearls.
I lifted it out and gathered it into my hands; it filled them—a fortune!
At this moment I heard a faint sound behind me. I turned, my fingers a mass of jewels.
Before the door, the heels of his boots together, stood Monsieur Jonquelle, his body in the act of that mocking genuflection.
“Ah, Monsieur!” he said, “how great a thing this love is! Blind and with the strength of Samson! It ejects the great-aunt out of life, and sends the nephew to the service of distressed damsels and paralyzed old men. But also it is blind! Hieroglyphics spelling out an English word for the direction of a Russian lady does not seem queer to him; and doors unlatched for his convenience in the heart of Paris.…”
His voice was oiled with vitriol.
“But I felicitate Monsieur. He has made a perfect bait about our wolf trap for the cheetahs, and he finds the necklace that the Ser
vice de la Sûreté could get no track of.… It was this necklace, Monsieur, that we were seeking; its purloiners have been always in the hollow of our hand … and Monsieur finds it for us, here in his great-aunt’s house!”
I stammered in my profound amazement.
“My great-aunt’s house!”
“Why, certainement!” He continued in his acid voice: “And in the very room in which she died, when she awoke to find the cherished gift of her long dead lover vanished!”
I stammered on:
“You mean … you mean … the Russian savant and his daughter robbed her!”
He put out his hands with a great gesture of rejection.
“Ah, no! How blind this love is! … The robbery was accomplished by old Dutocq, who used to be a concierge in the wing of Archeology at the Louvre, and the American actress, Greysmith, called ‘Dolly Deep Dimple’ in the ‘Review of Toy Land.’”
X.—The Man with Steel Fingers
The great drawing-room through which Monsieur Jonquelle advanced was empty.
But it was not silent. A vague music, like some weird conception of Hoffman, seemed to feel about the room, extending itself—a thing that crept blindly and disturbed as though it would escape from something that followed it tirelessly and invisibly.
It required the fingers of a master, on the board of a keyed instrument, to produce these sounds. They came from the room beyond, a second drawing-room looking out on the Bois de Boulogne.
Monsieur Jonquelle had not allowed the servant to announce him.
“One is not permitted to disturb Lord Valleys at this hour,” the servant had said.
Monsieur Jonquelle’s card had added to the man’s perplexity. One was also not permitted to deny an entrance, anywhere, at any hour, to the Prefect of Police of Paris. The man had made a hopeless gesture, like one resigning himself to the inevitable.
And so Monsieur Jonquelle had entered.
It was a beautiful house beyond the Arc de Triomphe, built by that extraordinary Brazilian who had married two princes, divorced them both, and gone elsewhere on her search for new sensations.
It was of pale rose-colored stone with a great court, a wide, circular stairway, and these exquisite drawing-rooms now empty but for the priceless furniture and this haunting music.
Monsieur Jonquelle, after the door had closed behind him, remained for some moments quite motionless in the eddy, as one might write it, of this strange, weird music, in which there was always a note of ruthless vigor—a note of barbaric vigor, harsh and determined.
Monsieur Jonquelle could not place the music in any remembered composition. It was not the work of any master that he knew. It was an improvisation of the fingers that produced it. And perhaps for that reason the Prefect of Police gave it close attention.
Presently he advanced into the room from which the music issued. He paused a moment in the doorway, watching the figure with white, nimble fingers hard as steel. Then he spoke.
“Your pardon, Monsieur,” said the Prefect of Police, “I am desolated to disturb you.”
The man at the piano sprang up and turned swiftly as though his body accomplished the act with a single motion.
To the eye, the man was strange. His shoulders were very broad and stooped; his face was wide, massive—the face of a Slav. His hair was thick, close and heavy, but it was not long, and affected no mannerisms.
The man was very carefully dressed, after the English fashion, and with its well-bred restraint. But the impression he gave one was decidedly not English. It was that of a Slav adapted to an English aspect.
The eyes one did not see. One rarely saw them. They seemed to be hidden by heavy lids like curtained windows. And there was no expression in the face. The face was a mask. It seemed always in repose. The big nose, the square, brutal jaw, and the wide planes of the face were white as with a sort of pallor. Monsieur Jonquelle had a sudden, swift impression. The man before him was either the greatest criminal or the greatest genius that he had ever seen.
Jonquelle had also, a further impression of failure. He had meant to startle this man, and observe what followed. And he had startled him; but untrue to every experience, there was nothing to observe. The man’s face remained without an expression; he was behind it hidden from every eye. It was a mask that could not be changed by the will of another. Monsieur Jonquelle wondered in what manner it would change at the will of the man that it so admirably obscured. It was a thing he was not interested to discover.
It was only for an instant that the man was without expression. Then he smiled and came forward into the room. The smile began with a queer lifting of the lip and extended vaguely with but a slight changing of the man’s features.
His voice, when he spoke, was low, well modulated and composed. His manner was easy and gracious.
“Ah!” he said, “it is Monsieur Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police of Paris. I am honored.”
He placed a great chair by the window. It was a carved, heavy chair upholstered in a superb tapestry, a chair that servants did not move in a drawing-room. But Lord Valleys placed it by the window easily, as though its immense weight were nothing to him.
He indicated the chair with a gesture and withdrew to another beyond the window—a little beyond the light of it, beside a curtain.
Monsieur Jonquelle removed his gloves; he sat a moment twisting them in his fingers like one in a certain embarrassment. His host, also seated, regarded him with the vague smile which appeared now as a sort of background on the mask of his face. The Prefect of Police hesitated.
“Monsieur,” he said, “I have called upon you for an opinion upon a problem which has always perplexed me. It is a problem upon which the opinions of persons without experience are wholly without value, and unfortunately, all those who have had experience and were, therefore, able to give me an opinion, have been always persons lacking in a certain element of intelligence. I have not had the opinion of a man of intelligence, who was also a man of experience, upon this problem.”
He paused. The man before him did not reply. He waited as in a profound courtesy for Monsieur Jonquelle to complete the subject with which he had opened his discourse. He had taken a small chair, and he sat in it as a man of great strength and vigor and of an unusual bulk rests his weight upon something which he is uncertain will support it. He did not move, but the expression in his face changed slightly. His eyebrows lifted as in a courteous inquiry. Monsieur Jonquelle went on. He seemed not entirely at ease.
“I shall not pretend an ignorance of your affairs, Monsieur. The law courts of England are brutal and direct. They have no consideration for any one, and the press of those islands has a less restraint. When one is charged with a crime in England, and comes into its courts, no humiliation is neglected. That one is innocent, means nothing; that this innocence is presently demonstrated does not preserve one, in the events preceding such a verdict, from every imaginable humiliation.”
Monsieur Jonquelle continued to hesitate. But he went on.
“Monsieur,” he said, “out of this unfortunate experience you will have come, I feel, with a certain opinion upon the problem which disturbs me. And I am sure, Monsieur, you will not deny me the benefit of that opinion.”
The Prefect of Police looked up like one who with hesitation requests a favor from another.
Lord Valleys replied immediately.
“I shall be very glad to give you my opinion upon any point in the matter,” he said. “Surely I have been spared little. I have had every experience of humiliation. The criminal law of England is a bungling and cruel device. Those who find themselves concerned with it, I profoundly pity. There is no consideration of family or culture that in any way mitigates its severity or in any direction preserves one from odium, once the machinery of a criminal court of England is on its way. The experience of it is a horror to me, Monsieur; but if it can result in any benefit to you or to another, I am willing to recall it. What is the problem, Monsieur, upon which you would have my op
inion?”
“It is this, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect of Police. “Is it your conclusion, upon this experience of life, that there is a Providence of God that undertakes to adjust the affairs of mankind—to assist the helpless and to acquit the innocent—or do you believe that it is the intelligence of man that accomplishes this result? … What is it, Monsieur, that moves behind the machinery of the world—chance, luck, fortune or some sort of Providence?”
Lord Valleys seemed to reflect while the Prefect of Police was speaking, and he now replied with no hesitation.
“Chance, Monsieur,” he said, “is unquestionably the greatest and most mysterious factor in all human affairs, but it is modified and diverted by the human will.… Human intelligence, Monsieur, and chance are the two factors.”
The Prefect of Police continued to look down at his hands.
“I have been of a different opinion, Lord Valleys,” he said. “I think there is an intention behind events, a sort of will to justice, to righteousness, as one has said. It is not chance as we usually define the word, and the human will cannot circumvent it.… It is strange, as I see it, Lord Valleys. This thing we call human intelligence seems to be able to aid, to assist, to advance the vague, immense, persistent impulse behind events, and to delay and to disturb it, but not ultimately to defeat it.
“Take the extraordinary events that have happened to you, Lord Valleys, and tell me, if you can, how they could have arrived by chance!
“Your uncle, Lord Winton, took the title and the whole properties of your family by the accident of birth. Your father, the second son, having no title and no fortune, entered the diplomatic service and was allotted to one of the little courts of southeastern Europe. He married your mother there, and you were born and grew up in the atmosphere of Serbia. There was little chance that you would ever have this fortune or title. Lord Winton had two sons; one of them married an American; the other remained unmarried. There were three lives between you and this title and its immense estates in England.… What chance was there, Monsieur, that these persons would be removed and these benefits descend to you?”
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