Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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.

Instantly, as the wheels ceased to turn, a young man in the smartest livery imaginable, green garnished with gold, leaped smartly from the driver's seat, with military precision opened the door of the tonneau and, holding it, immobilised himself into the semblance of a waxwork image with the dispassionate eye, the firm mouth, and the closely razored, square jowls of the model chauffeur. Rustics and townsfolk were already gathering, a gaping audience, when from the tonneau descended first a long and painfully emaciated gentleman, whose face was a cadaverous mask of settled melancholy and his chosen toilette for motoring (as might be seen through the open and flapping front of his ulster) a tightly tailored light grey cutaway coat and trousers, with a double-breasted white waistcoat, a black satin Ascot scarf transfixed by a single splendid pearl, and spotless white spats.

His hand, as gaunt as a skeleton's, assisted to alight a young woman whose brilliant blonde beauty, viewed for the first time in evening shadows, was like a shaft of sunlight in a darkened room. A well-made creature, becomingly and modishly gowned for motoring, spirited yet dignified in carriage, she was like a vision of, as she was palpably a visitation from, the rue de la Paix.

Following her, a third passenger presented the well-nourished, indeed rotund, person of a Frenchman of thirty devoted to "le Sport"; as witness his aggressively English tweeds and the single glass screwed into his right eye-socket. His face was chubby, pink and white, his look was merry, he was magnificently self-conscious and débonnaire.

Like shapes from some superbly costumed pageant of High Life in the Twentieth Century this trio drifted, rather than merely walked like mortals, across the terrasse and into the Café de l'Univers (which seemed suddenly to shrink in proportion as if reminded of its comparative insignificance in the Scheme of Things) where an awed staff of waiters, led by the overpowered propriétaires, monsieur et madame themselves, welcomed these apparitions from Another and A Better World with bowings and scrapings and a vast bustle and movement of chairs and tables; while all Nant, all of it, that is, that was accustomed to foregather in the café at this the hour of the aperitif, looked on with awed and envious eyes.

It was all very theatrical and inspiring--to Monsieur Duchemin, too; who, lost in the shuffle of Nant and content to be so, murmured to himself that serviceable and comforting word of the time, "Profiteers!" and contemplated with some satisfaction his personal superiority to such as these.

But there was more and better to come.

There remained in the car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture, dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather remained motionless, resting a hand on the windshield and thoughtfully gazing northwards along the road that, skirting the grounds of the Château de Montalais, disappeared from view round the sleek shoulder of a hill.

Now as the pattern chauffeur shut the door to the tonneau with the properly arrogant slam, the man who lingered in the car nodded gravely to some private thought, unlatched the door, got down, and turned toward the café, but before following his companions of more brilliant plumage paused for a quiet word with the chauffeur.

"We dine here, Jules," he announced in English.

Settling into place behind the wheel Jules saluted with fine finish and deference.

"Very good, Mr. Phinuit, sir," he said meekly, in the same tongue. To this he added, coolly, without the least flicker of a glance aside, without moving one muscle other than those involved by the act of speech, and in precisely the tone of respect that became his livery: "What's the awful idea, you big stiff?"

Mr. Phinuit betrayed not the slightest sense of anything untoward in this mode of address, but looked round to the chauffeur with a slow, not unfriendly smile.

"Why," he said pleasantly--"you misbegotten garage hound--why do you ask?"

In the same manner Jules replied: "Can't you see it's going to rain?"

Mr. Phinuit cocked a calm, observant eye heavenwards. Involuntarily but unobtrusively, under cover of the little tubbed trees that hedged the terrasse apart from the square, Duchemin did likewise, and so discovered, or for the first time appreciated, the cause of the uncommonly early dusk that loured over Nant.

Between the sentinel peaks that towered above the valley black battalions of storm cloud were fraternising, joining forces, coalescing into a vast and formidable army of ominous aspect.

"So it is," Mr. Phinuit commented amiably; indeed, not without a certain hint of satisfaction. "Blessed if you don't see everything!"

"Well, then: what about it?"

"Why, _I_ should say you'd better find a place to put the car under cover in case it comes on to storm before we're finished--and put up the top."

"You don't mean to go on in the rain?" Jules protested--yet studiously in no tone of protest.

"But naturally..."

"How do you get that way? Do you want us all to get soaked to our skins?"

"My dear Jules!" Mr. Phinuit returned with a winning smile--"I don't give a tupenny damn if we do." With that he went to join his company; while Jules, once the other's back was turned, permitted himself, for the sake of his own respect and the effect upon the assembled audience, the luxury of a shrug that outrivalled words in expression of his personal opinion of the madness that contemplated further travel on such a night as this promised to be.

Then, like the well-trained servant that he was not, he meshed gears silently and swung the car away to seek shelter, taking with him the sympathy as well as the wonder of the one witness of this bit of by-play who had been able to understand the tongue in which it was couched; and who, knowing too well what rain in those hills could mean, was beginning to regret that his invitation to the château had not been for another night.

As for the somewhat unusual tone of the passage to which he had just listened, his nimble wits could invent half a dozen plausible explanations. It was quite possible, indeed when one judged Mr. Phinuit by his sobriety in contrast with the gaiety of the others it seemed quite plausible, that he was equally with Jules a paid employee of those ostensible nouveaux riches: and that the two, the chauffeur and the courier (or whatever Mr. Phinuit was in his subordinate social rating) were accustomed to amuse themselves by indulging in reciprocal abuse.

But what Duchemin could by no means fathom was the reason why Phinuit should choose, and how he should rule the choice of his party, in the face of such threatening weather, to stop in Nant for an early dinner--with Millau only an hour away and the chances fair that before the storm broke the automobile would reach the latter city with its superior hotel and restaurant accommodations.

But it was after all none of the business of André Duchemin. He lighted another cigarette, observing the group of strangers in Nant with an open inquisitiveness wholly Gallic, therefore inconspicuous. The entire clientèle of the Café de l'Univers was doing the same; Mr. Phinuit's party was the focal point of between twenty and thirty pair of staring eyes, and was enduring this with much equanimity.

Mr. Phinuit was conferring earnestly over the menu with madame la propriétaire. The others were ordering aperitifs of a waiter. Through the clatter of tongues that filled the café one caught the phrase "veeskysoda" uttered by the monsieur in tweeds. Then the tall man consulted the beautiful lady as to her preference, and Duchemin caught the words "madame la comtesse" spoken in the rasping nasal drawl of an American.

Evidently a person of rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse" was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr. Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile; the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask of a face.

At that moment arrived the calèche which Duchemin had commanded to drive him to the château; and with a ride of two miles before him and rain imminent, he had no more time to waste.

VI

VISITATION

Dinner was served in a vast and sombre hall whose darkly panelled walls and high-beamed ceiling bred a multitude of shadows that danced about the table a weird, spasmodic saraband, without meaning or end, restlessly advancing and retreating as the candles flickered, failed and flared in the gusty draughts.

There was (Duchemin learned) no other means of illumination but by candle-light in the entire château. The time-old structure had been thoroughly renovated and modernised in most respects, it was furnished with taste and reverence (one could guess whose the taste and purse) but Madame de Sévénié remained its undisputed chatelaine, a belated spirit of the ancien régime, stubbornly set against the conveniences of this degenerate age. Electric lighting she would never countenance. The telephone she esteemed a convenience for tradespeople and vulgarians in general, beneath the dignity of leisured quality. The motor car she disapproved yet tolerated because, for all her years, she was of a brisk and active turn and liked to get about, whereas since the War good horseflesh was difficult to find in France and men to care for it more scarce still.

So much, and more besides, she communicated to Duchemin at intervals during the meal, comporting herself toward him with graciousness not altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.

"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong to an even earlier day..."

"I, madame? And why do you say that?"

"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur, you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on the Spanish Main."

"Madame may be right," said Duchemin, amused. "And quite possibly I was, you know."

Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the shrewdness of her intuitions.

He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to monsieur le curé of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?

The girl Louise was placed between the curé and her sister-in-law. Duchemia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration --which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a parched land wants rain.

Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth, her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old, old woman....

He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sévénié most intensely.

Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a gratuitous aversion: to-morrow would see him on the road again, his back forever turned to the Château de Montalais....

Or, if not to-morrow, then as soon as the storm abated.

It was raging now as if it would never weaken and had the will to raze the château though it were the task of a thousand years. From time to time the shock of some great blast of air would seem to rock upon its foundations even that ancient pile, those heavy walls of hewn stone builded in times of honest workmanship by forgotten Sieurs de Montalais who had meant their home to outlast the ages.

Rain in sheets sluiced the windows without rest. Round turrets and gables the wind raved and moaned like a famished wild thing denied its kill. Occasionally a venturesome gust with the spirit of a minor demon would find its way down the chimney to the drawing-room fire and send sparks in volleys against the screen, with thin puffs of wood smoke that lingered in the air like acrid ghosts.

At such times the curé, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sévénié, after dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed with his play.

Duchemin sat at a little distance, talking with Madame de Montalais over their cigarettes. To smoking, curiously enough, Madame de Sévénié offered no objection. Women had not smoked in her day, and she for her part would never. But Eve might: it was "done"; even in those circles of hidebound conservatism, the society of the Faubourg St. Germain, ladies of this day smoked unrebuked.

Louise had excused herself--to sit, Duchemin had no doubt, by the bedside of d'Aubrac, under the duenna-like eye of an old nurse of the family.

Being duly encouraged, Duchemin talked about himself, of his wanderings and adventures, all with discretion, with the neatest expurgations, and with an object, leading cunningly round to the subject of New York.

At mention of it he saw a new light kindle in Eve's eyes. Her breath came more quickly, gentle emotion agitated her bosom.

Monsieur knew New York?

But well: he had been there as a boy, again as a young man; and then later, in the year when America entered the Great War; not since ...

"It is my home," said Eve de Montalais softly, looking away.

(One noted that she said "is"--not "was.")

So Duchemin had understood. Madame had not visited her home recently?

Not in many years; not in fact since nineteen-thirteen. She assumed the city must have changed greatly.

Duchemin thought it was never the same, but forever changing itself overnight, so to speak; and yet always itself, always like no other city in the world, fascinating....

"Fascinating? But irresistible! How I long for it!" She was distrait for an instant. "My New York! Monsieur--would you believe?--I dream of it!"

He had found a key to one chamber in the mansion of her confidence. As much to herself as to him, unconsciously dropping into English, she began to talk of her life "at home"....

Her father had been a partner in a great jewellery house, Cottier's, of Paris, London, and New York. (So that explained it! She was wearing the blue diamond again tonight, with other jewels worth, in the judgment of a keen connoisseur, a king's ransom.) Schooled at an exclusive establishment for the daughters of people of fashion, Eve at an early age had made her début; but within the year her father died, and her mother, whose heart had always been in the city of her nativity, closed the house on East Fifty-seventh street and removed with her daughter to Paris. There Eve had met her future husband. Shortly after, her mother died. Eve returned to New York to attend to some business in connection with her estate, remaining only a few weeks, leaving almost reluctantly; but the new love was very sweet, she had looked forward joyfully to the final transplanting of her affections.

And then the War, the short month of long, long days in the apartment on the avenue des Champs-Elysées, waiting, waiting, while the earth trembled to the tramp of armed men and the tireless rumbling of caissons and camions, and the air was vibrant with the savage dialogue of cannon, ever louder, daily more near....

She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and gaze remote.

From the splendid jewels that adorned the fingers twisting together in her lap, the firelight struck coruscant gleams.

"Now I hate Paris, I wish never to see it again."

Duchemin uttered a sympathetic murmur.

"But New York--?"

"Ah, but sometimes I think I would give anything to be there once more!"

The animation with which this confession was delivered proved transient.

"Then I remind myself I have no one there--a few friends, yes, acquaintances; but no family ties, no one dear to me."

"But--pardon--you stay here?"

"It is beautiful here, monsieur."

"But such solitude, such isolation--for you, madame!"

"I know. Still, I am fond of the life here; it was here I found myself again, after my grief. And I am fond of my adopted mother and Louise, too, and they of me. Indeed, I am all they have left. Louise, of course, will marry before long, Georges"--she used d'Aubrac's given name--"will take her away, then Madame de Sévénié will have nobody but me. And at her age, it would be too sad..."

Across the drawing-room that lady looked up from her cards and sharply interrogated a manservant who had silently presented himself to her attention.

"What is it you want, Jean?"

The servant mumbled his justification: An automobile had broken down on the highroad near the château, the chauffeur was unable to move the car or make any repairs in the storm, a gentleman had come to the door to ask....

He moved aside, indicating the doorway to the entrance hall, beyond which Mr. Phinuit was to be seen, standing with cap in hand, tiny rivulets running from the folds of his motor-coat and forming pools on the polished flooring. As in concerted movement Madame de Sévénié, Eve de Montalais, the curé and Duchemin approached, his cool, intelligent, good-humoured glance surveyed them swiftly, each in turn, and with unerring instinct settled on the first as the one to whom he must address himself.

But the bow with which he also acknowledged the presence of Eve was hardly less profound; Duchemin himself, at his best, could hardly have bettered it. His manner, in fact, left nothing to be desired; and the French in which immediately he begged a thousand pardons for the intrusion was so admirable that it seemed hard to believe he was the same man who had, only a few hours earlier, composedly traded the slang of the States with a chauffeur in front of the Café de l'Univers.

Mr. Phinuit was desolated to think he might be imposing on madame's good nature, but the accident was positive, the night truly inclement, madame la comtesse was already suffering from the cold, and if one might beg shelter for her and the gentlemen of the party while one telephoned or sent to Nant for another automobile....

But monsieur might feel very sure Madame de Sévénié would never forgive herself if the hospitality of the Château de Montalais failed at such a time. She would send servants to the car at once with lights, wraps, umbrellas....

There was no necessity for that. The remainder of the party had, it seemed, presumed upon her courtesy in anticipation, and was not far from the heels of its ambassador. Even while madame was speaking, Jean was opening the great front doors to those who proved--formal introductions being duly effect by Mr. Phinuit--to be Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes, monsieur le comte, her husband (this was the well-fed body in tweeds) and Mr. Whitaker Monk, of New York.

These personages were really not at all in a bad way. Their wraps were well peppered with rain, they were chilly, the footgear of madame la comtesse was wet and needed changing. But that was the worst of their plight. And when Mr. Phinuit, learning that there was no telephone, had accepted an offer of the Montalais motor car to tow the other under cover and so enable Jules to make repairs, and Eve de Montalais had carried madame la comtesse off to her own apartment to change her shoes and stockings, the gentlemen trooped to the drawing-room fire, at the instance of Madame de Sévénié, and grew quite cheerful under the combined influence of warmth and wine and biscuits; Duchemin standing by with a half-rejected doubt to preoccupy him, vaguely disturbed by the oddness of this rencontre considered in relation to that injudicious stop for dinner at Nant in the face of the impending storm, and with Mr. Phinuit's declaration that he didn't give a tupenny damn if they did all get soaked to their skins.

It seemed far-fetched and ridiculous to imagine that people of their intelligence--and they were most of them unusually intelligent and alert, if demeanour and utterances might be taken as criterion--should adopt any such elaborate machinery of mystification and duplicity in order to gain an introduction to the Château de Montalais. With what possible motive...?

But there was the devil of having a mind like Duchemin's: once it conceived a notion like that, it was all but impossible for him to dislodge it unless or until something happened to persuade him of his stupidity.

Now to make his suspicions seem at all reasonable, a motive was lacking. And that worried the man hugely. He desired most earnestly to justify his captiousness; and to this end exercised a power of conscientious observation on his new acquaintances.

Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes he was disposed to pass at face value, as an innocuous being, good natured enough but none too brilliant, with much of the disposition of an overgrown boy and a rather boyish tendency to admire and imitate in others qualities which he did not himself possess.

Mr. Phinuit had not returned, so there was no present opportunity to take further note of him; though Duchemin first inferred from Mr. Monk's manner, and later learned through a chance remark of his, that Phinuit was his secretary.

Upon this Mr. Monk Duchemin concentrated close attention, satisfied that he had here to do with an extraordinary personality, if not one unique.

Mr. Whitaker Monk might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, so non-committal was that lantern-jawed countenance of a droll, with its heavy, black, eloquent eyebrows, its high and narrow forehead merging into an extensive bald spot fringed with greyish hair, its rather small, blue, illegible eyes, its high-bridged nose and prominent nostrils, its wide and thin-lipped mouth, its rather startling pallor. Taller by a head than anybody in the room except Duchemin, his figure was remarkably thin, yet not ill-proportioned. Neither was Mr. Monk ill at ease or ungraceful in his actions. Clothed in that extravagantly correct costume--correct, at least, for a drawing-room, if never for motoring--he had all the appearance of a comedian fresh from the hands of his dresser. One naturally expected of him mere grotesqueries--and found simply the courteous demeanour of a gentleman of the world. So much for externals. But what more? Nature herself had cast Mr. Monk in the very mould of a masquerader. What manner of man was hidden behind the mask? His words and deeds alone would tell; Duchemin could only weigh the one and await the other.

In the meantime Mr. Monk was sketching rapidly for the benefit of Madame de Sévénié the excuse for his present plight.

A chance meeting at Monte Carlo, he said, with his old friends, the Comte et Comtesse de Lorgnes, had resulted in their yielding to his insistence that they tour with him back to Paris by this roundabout way.

"A whim of my age, madame." Somehow the nasal intonation of the American suited singularly well his fluent French; he seemed to have less trouble with his R's than most Anglo-Saxons. "As a young man--a younger man--ah, well, in Ninety-four, then--I explored this country on a walking tour, inspired by Stevenson. You know, perhaps, his diverting Travels with a Donkey? But I daresay its spirit would hardly have survived translation.... At all events, I had the whim to revisit some of those well-remembered scenes. I say some, for naturally it would be impossible, even with the vastly improved roads of to-day, for my automobile to penetrate everywhere I wandered afoot. Nor would I wish it to; a few disappointments, a few failures to recapture something of that first fine careless rapture, would instill a lyric melancholy; but too many would make one morbid.... Well, then: at Nant, in those old days, I once had a famous dinner; and naturally, returning, I must try to duplicate it, even though it meant going on to Millau in the rain. But alas! the Café de l'Univers is no more what it was--or I am grown over critical."

What now of Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the curé interposed a gentle correction.

"But in Ninety-four, monsieur, there was no Café de l'Univers in Nant."

Astonished eyebrows climbed the forehead of Mr. Monk.

"No, monsieur le curé? Truly not? Then it must have been another. How one's memory will play one false!"

"How strange, then, is coincidence," Madame de Sévénié suggested. "You who made a walking tour of this country so long ago, monsieur, regard there that good Monsieur Duchemin, himself engaged upon just such an undertaking."

Duchemin acknowledged with a humorous little nod Mr. Monk's look of moderate amazement at this so strange coincidence.

"A whim of my age, monsieur," he said--"a project I have entertained since youth but always, till of late, lacked leisure to put into execution."

"But is there anything more wonderful than the workings of the good God?" madame pursued. "Observe that, if Monsieur Duchemin had been suffered to indulge his inclination in youth, we should all, I, my daughter, my grand-daughter, even poor Georges d'Aubrac, would quite probably be lying dead at the bottom of a cirque at Montpellier-le-Vieux."

Naturally the strangers required to know about that, and Madame de Sévénié would talk, in fact doted on telling the tale of that great adventure. Duchemin made a face of resignation, and heard himself extolled as a paladin for strength, address and valour; the truth being that he was not at all resigned and would infinitely liefer have been left out of the limelight. The more he was represented as a person of consequence, the less fair his chance to study these others at his leisure, in the comfortable obscurity of their indifference.

Now the enigmatic eyes of Monk were boring into him, seeking to search his soul, with a question in their stare which he could not read and, quite likely, would have declined to answer if he could. Also the eyes of Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes were very round and constant to him. And before Madame de Sévénié was finished, Phinuit strolled in and heard enough to make him subject Duchemin to a not unfriendly, steady and open inspection.

And when the trumpets had been flourished finally for Duchemin, and he had dutifully assured madame that she was too generous and had acknowledged congratulations on his exploit, Phinuit strolled over and offered a hand.

"Good work," he said in English. "Seen you before, haven't I, somewhere, Mr. Duchemin?"

Under other circumstances Duchemin, not at all hoodwinked by this too obvious stratagem, would have taken mean pleasure in looking blank and begging monsieur to interpret himself in French. But, with or without cunning, Phinuit's question was well-timed: Eve de Montalais was at that moment entering the drawing-room with Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes, and she knew very well that Duchemin's English was quite as good as his French.

"At the Café de l'Univers, this afternoon," he replied frankly.

"I remember. You drove away, just before the storm broke, in a ramshackle rig that must have come out of the Ark."

"To come here, Mr. Phinuit."

"Funny," said Phinuit, with hesitation, "your being there, and then our turning up here."

Duchemin thought he knew what was on the other's mind. "I was immensely entertained--do you mind my saying so?--to hear the way your chauffeur talked to you, monsieur. Tell me: Is it the custom in your country--?"

"Oh, Jules!" said Phinuit, and laughed. "Jules is my younger brother. When he was demobilised his job was gone, back home, and I wished him on Mr. Monk as a chauffeur. We're always kidding each other like that."

Now what could be more reasonable? Duchemin wondered, and concluded that, if anything, it would be the truth. But he did not pretend to himself that he wasn't, quite illogically and with no provocation whatsoever, most vilely prejudiced against the lot of them.

"But you must know America, to speak the language as well as you do."

Duchemin nodded: "But very slightly, monsieur."

"I was wondering ... Somehow I can't get it out of my head I've seen you somewhere before to-day."

"It is quite possible: when one moves about the world, one is visible--n'est-ce pas, monsieur? But my home," Duchemin added, "is Paris."

"I guess," said Phinuit in a tone of singular disappointment, "it must have been there I saw you."

Duchemin's bow signified that he was content to let it go at that. Moreover, Monk was signalling to Phinuit with his expressive eyebrows.

"What about the car, Phin?"

Examining his wrist watch, Phinuit drew near his employer. "Jules should not need more than half an hour now, monsieur."

Was there, in this employment of French to respond to a question couched in English, the suggestion of a subtle correction? From employé to employer? If not, why must Duchemin have thought so? If so, why did Monk, without betraying a sign of feeling the reproof, continue in French?

"Did Jules say half an hour?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"My God!" Monk addressed the company: "If I were pressed for time, I would rather have one of Jules' half-hours than anybody else's hour and a half."

"Let us hope, however," the Comtesse de Lorgnes interposed sweetly, "by that time this so dreadful tempest will have moderated."

"One has that hope," her husband uttered in a sepulchral voice.

"But, if the storm continue," Madame de Sévénié said, "you must not think of travelling farther--on such a night. The château is large, there is ample accommodation for all..."

There was a negligible pause, during which Duchemin saw the long lashes of the Comtesse de Lorgnes curtain momentarily her disastrous violet eyes: it was a sign of assent. Immediately it was followed by the least of negative movements of her head. She was looking directly at Phinuit, who, so far as Duchemin could see, made no sign of any sort, who neither spoke nor acted on the signals which, indubitably, he had received. On the other hand, it was Monk who acknowledged the proffered courtesy.

"Madame de Sévénié is too good, but we could not dream of imposing ... No, but truly, madame, I am obliged to ask my guests to proceed with me to Millau to-night regardless of the weather. Important despatches concerning my business await me there; I must consider them and reply by cable to-night without fail. It is really of the most pressing necessity. Otherwise we should be honoured..."

Madame de Sévénié inclined her head. "It must be as monsieur thinks best."

"But Monsieur Monk!" madame la comtesse exclaimed with vivacity: "do you know what I have just discovered? You and Madame de Montalais are compatriots. She is of your New York. You must know each other."

"I have been wondering," Monk admitted, bowing to Eve, "if it were possible I could be misled by a strong resemblance."

Eve turned to him with a look of surprise. "Yes, monsieur?"

"It is many years ago, you were a young girl then, if it was truly you, madame; but I have a keen eye for beauty, I do not soon forget it ... I was in the private office of my friend, Edmund Anstruther, of Cottier's, one afternoon, selecting a trinket with his advice, and--"

"That was my father, monsieur."

"Then it was you, madame; I felt sure of it. You came in unannounced, to see your father. He made me known to you as a friend of his, and requested you to wait in an adjoining office. But that was not necessary, I had already made up my mind, I left almost immediately. Do you by any chance remember?"

The effort of the memory knitted Eve's brows; but in the end she shook her head. "I am sorry, monsieur--"

"But why should you be? Why should you have remembered me? You were a young girl, then, as I say, and I already a man of middle age. You saw me once, for perhaps two minutes. It would have been a miracle had I remained in your memory for as long as a single day. Nevertheless, _I_ remembered."

"I am so glad to meet a friend of my father's, monsieur."

"And I to recall myself to his daughter. I have often wondered ... Would you mind telling me something, Madame de Montalais?"

"If I can..."

"Your father and I entertained one passion in common, one which he was better able than I to gratify, for good diamonds and emeralds. I have often wondered what became of his collection. He had some superb stones."

"I inherited them, monsieur."

"They did not find their way into Cottier's stock, then?"

The Comtesse de Lorgnes gave a gesture of excitement. "But what a fortunate woman! You truly have those magnificent emeralds, those almost matchless diamonds, of which one has heard--the Anstruther collection?"

"I have them, Madame la Comtesse," said Eve with a smiling nod--"yes."

"But, one presumes, in Paris, in some impregnable strong-box."

"No, madame, here."

"But not here, Madame de Montalais!" To this Eve gave another nod and smile. "But are you not afraid--?"

"Of what, madame? That they will be stolen? No. They have been in my possession for years--indeed, I should be unhappy otherwise, for I have inherited my father's fondness for them--and nobody has ever even attempted to steal them."

"But what of the affair at Montpellier the other night?" enquired the Comte de Lorgnes--"that terrible attack upon you of which Madame de Sévénié has just told us? Surely you would call that an attempt to steal."

"Simple highway robbery, if you like, monsieur le comte. But even had it proved successful, I had very few jewels with me. All that mattered, all that I would have minded losing, were here, in a safe place."

"Nevertheless," said Monk--"if you will permit me to offer a word of advice--I think you are very unwise."

"It may be, monsieur."

"Nonsense!" Madame de Sévénié declared. "Who would dare attempt to burglarise the Château de Montalais? Such a thing was never heard of."

"There is always the first time for everything, Madame," Monk suggested gently. "I fancy it was your first experience of the sort, at Montpellier."

"A rascally chauffeur from Paris, a few low characters of the department. Since the war things are not as they were."

"That is the very reason why I suggest, madame--"

"But, monsieur, I assure you all my life I have lived at Montalais. Monsieur le curé will tell you I know every face hereabouts. And I know that these poor country-folk, these good-natured dolts of peasants have not the imagination, much less the courage--"

"But what of criminals from outside, from the great cities, from London and Paris and Berlin? They have the imagination, the courage, the skill; and if they ever get wind of the fortune Madame de Montalais keeps locked up here..."

"What of the Lone Wolf?" the Comtesse de Lorgnes added. "I have heard that one is once more in France."

Duchemin blinked incredulously at the speaker. "But when did you hear that, madame la comtesse?"

"Quite recently, monsieur."

"I had understood that the monsieur in question had long since retired."

"Only for the duration of the war, monsieur, I am afraid."

"It is true, according to all reports," the Comte de Lorgnes said: "Monsieur Lanyard--that was the name, was it not?"

"If memory serves, monsieur le comte," Duchemin agreed.

"Yes." The count screwed his chubby features into a laughable mask of gravity. "Now one remembers quite well. He passed as a collector of objets d'art, especially of fine paintings, in Paris, for years before the War--this Monsieur Michael Lanyard. Then he disappeared. It was rumoured that he was of good service to the Allies as a spy, acting independently; and after the Armistice, I have heard, he did well for England in the matter of a Bolshevist conspiracy over there. But not long ago, according to my information, Monsieur the Lone Wolf resigned from the British Secret Service and returned to France--doubtless to resume his old practices."

"Perhaps not," Duchemin suggested. "Possibly his reformation was genuine and lasting."

The Comtesse de Lorgnes laughed that laugh of light derision which is almost exclusively the laugh of the Parisienne of a certain class. Remarking this, Duchemin eyed her mildly.

"Madame la Comtesse does not believe that. Well--who knows?--perhaps she is right. Possibly she knows more of the nature and habits of the criminal classes than we, sharing as she does, no doubt, the apparently accurate and precise sources of information of monsieur le comte."

"At all events," Phinuit put in promptly, "I know what I would do if I possessed a little fortune in jewels, and learned that a thief of the ability of this Lone Wolf was at large in France: I would charter an armoured train to convey the loot to the strongest safe deposit vault in Paris."

"Thereby advertising to the Lone Wolf the exact location of the jewels, monsieur, so that he might at his leisure make his plans perfect to burglarise the vaults?"

"Is that likely?" Phinuit jeered.

Duchemin gave a slight shrug.

"One has heard that the fellow had real ability," he said.

The servant Jean came in, caught the eye of Madame de Sévénié, and announced:

"The chauffeur of Monsieur Monk wishes me to say he has completed repairs on the automobile, and the rain has ceased."

VII

TURN ABOUT

Duchemin took back with him to Nant, that night, not only monsieur le curé in the hired calèche, but food in plenty for thought, together with a nebulous notion, which by the time he woke up next morning had taken shape as a fixed conviction, that he had better resign himself to stop on indefinitely at the Grand Hôtel de l'Univers and ... see what he should see.

That fatality on which he had so bitterly reflected when; acting as emergency coachman en route from Montpellier-le-Vieux to La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite, had him now fairly by the heels, as it were his very shadow, something as tenacious, as inescapable. Or he had been given every excuse for believing that such was the case. Impossible--and the more so the longer he pondered it--to credit to mere coincidence the innuendoes uttered at the château by Mr. Monk and his party.

No: there had been malice in that, Duchemin was satisfied, if not some darker purpose which perplexed the most patient scrutiny.

Now malice without incentive is unthinkable. But Duchemin searched his memory in vain for anything he could have said or done to make anybody desire to discredit him in the sight of the ladies of the Château de Montalais. Still the attempt so to do had been unmistakable: the Lone Wolf had been lugged into the conversation literally by his legendary ears.

Surely, one would think, that nocturnal prowler of pre-War Paris had been so long dead and buried even the most ghoulish gossip should respect his poor remains and not disinter them merely to demonstrate that the Past can never wholly die!

Had he, then, some enemy of old hidden under one of those sleek surfaces?

An excellent visual memory reviewed successively the physical characteristics of Messieurs Monk, Phinuit and de Lorgnes, and their chauffeur Jules; with the upshot that Duchemin could have sworn that he had never before known any of these.

And Madame la Comtesse? In respect of that one memory again drew a blank, but remained unsatisfied. When one thought of her some remote, faint chord of reminiscence thrilled and hummed, but never recognisably. Not that there was anything remarkable in this: if one cared to look for them, the world was thronged with women such as she, handsome, spirited, well-groomed animals endued with some little distinction of manner, native or acquired, with every appeal to the senses and more or less, generally spurious, to the intelligence. They made the theatre possible in France, leavened the social life of the half-world, fluttered conspicuously and often disastrously through circles of more sedate society, had their portraits in every Salon, their photographs in every issue of the fashionable journals. Some made history, others fiction: either would be insufferably dull lacking their influence. But they were as much alike as so many peas, out of their several shells, and the man who saw one inevitably remembered all.

Setting aside then the theory of positive personal animus, what other reason could there be for the effort to fasten upon Duchemin suspicion of identity with the late Lone Wolf?

A sinister consideration, if any, and one, Duchemin suspected, not unconnected with the much-talked-about jewels of Madame de Montalais...

But it was absurd to believe that persons fostering a design of such nature would so deliberately and obviously advertise their purpose!

Cheerfully admitting that he was an imbecile to think of such a thing, Duchemin set his mental alarm for six the following morning, rose at that hour, and by eight had tramped the five miles between Nant and the nearest railway station, Combe-Redonde; where he despatched a code telegram to London, requesting any information it might have or be able to obtain concerning Mr. Whitaker Monk of New York and the several members of his party; the said information to be forwarded in code to await the arrival of Andre Duchemin at the Hôtel du Commerce, Millau.

And then, partly to kill time, partly to get himself in trim for to-morrow's trip, which he meant to make strictly in character as the pedestrian tourist, he walked round three sides of a square in returning to Nant--by way, that is, of Sauclières and the upper valley of the Dourbie.

In the rich sunshine that fell from a cloudless sky--even the twin peaks that stood sentinel over Nant had shamelessly put off their yashmaks for the day--the rain-fresh world was sweet to see; and Duchemin found himself consuming leagues with heels strangely light; or he thought their lightness strange until he discovered the buoyance of his heart, which wasn't strange at all. He knew too well the cause of that; and had given over fretting about the inevitable. The sum of his philosophy was now: _What must be, must_ .It would have been difficult to be unhappy in the knowledge that one retained still the capacity to love generously, honourably, expecting nothing, exacting nothing, regretting nothing, not even in anticipation of the ultimate, inevitable heartache.

Toward mid-afternoon a solitary mischance threw a passing shadow upon his content. As he trudged along the river road, on the last lap of his journey--Nant almost in sight--he heard a curious, intermittent rumble on a steep hillside whose foot was skirted by the road, and sought its cause barely in time to leap for life out of the path of a great boulder that, dislodged from its bed, possibly by last night's deluge, was hurtling downhill with such momentum that it must have crushed Duchemin to a pulp had he been less alert.

Striking the road with an impact that left a deep, saucer-shaped dent, with one final bound the huge stone, amid vast splashings, found its last resting place in the river.

Duchemin moved out of the way of the miniature avalanche that followed, and for some minutes stood reviewing with a truculent eye the face of the hillside. But nothing moved thereon, it was quite bare of good cover, little more than a slant of naked earth and shale, dotted manywhere with boulders, cousins to that which sought his life--none, however, so large. If human agency had moved it, the stone had come from the high skyline of the hill; and by the time one could climb to this last, Duchemin was sure, there would be nobody there to find.

The remainder of the afternoon was wasted utterly on the terrasse of the Café de l'Univers, with the château ever in view, wishing it were convenable to make one's duty call without more delay. But it wasn't; not to wait a decent interval would be self-betraying, since Duchemin had no longer any immediate intention of moving on from Nant; finally, he rather hoped to get news at Millau that would strengthen a prayer to Eve de Montalais to be sensible and remove her jewels to a place of safe-keeping before it was too late.

Millau, however, disappointed. At the end of a twenty-mile walk on a day of suffocating heat, Duchemin plodded wearily into the Hôtel du Commerce, engaged a room for the night, and was given a telegram from London which rewarded decoding to some such effect as this:

"MONK AMERICAN INDEPENDENT MEANS GOOD REPUTE NO INFORMATION AS TO OTHERS HAVE ASKED SURÉTÉ CONCERNING LORGNES WOULD GIVE SOMETHING TO KNOW WHAT MISCHIEF YOU ARE MEDDLING WITH THIS TRIP AND WHY THE DEUCE YOU MUST."

Few things are better calculated to curdle the milk of human kindness than to find that one's fellow-man has meanly contrived to keep his reputation fair when one is satisfied it should be otherwise. Duchemin used bitter language in strict confidence with himself, disliked his dinner and, after conscientiously loathing the sights of Millau for an hour or two, sought his bed in the devil's own humour.

Though he waited till eleven of the following forenoon, there was no supplementary telegram: London evidently meant him to understand that the Surété in Paris had communicated nothing to the discredit of Monsieur le Comte de Lorgnes and his consort.

Enquiry of the administration of the Hôtel de Commerce elicited the information that the Monk party had stopped there on the night of the storm, doubled back in the morning to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, returning for midday déjeuner, and had then proceeded for Paris, just like any other well-behaved company of tourists.

There was nothing more to be done but go back to Nant and--what made it even more disgusting--nothing to be done there except ... wait...