Chapter I

I was sitting in front of Thibaud’s Café one evening when I saw Lewishon, whom I had not met for years.

Thibaud’s Café I must tell you first, is situated on Coconut Square, Noumea. Noumea has a bad name, but it is not at all a bad place if you are not a convict, neither is New Caledonia, take it altogether, and that evening, sitting and smoking and listening to the band, and watching the crowd and the dusk taking the flame trees, it seemed to me for a moment that Tragedy had withdrawn, that there was no such place as the Isle Nou out there in the harbour, and that the musicians making the echoes ring to the “Sambre et Meuse” were primarily musicians, not convicts.

Then I saw Lewishon crossing the Square by the Liberty Statue, and attracted his attention. He came and sat by me, and we smoked and talked whilst I tried to realise that it was fifteen years since I had seen him last, and that he hadn’t altered in the least—in the dusk.

“I’ve been living here for years,” said he. “When I saw you last in ’Frisco, I was about to take up a proposition in Oregon. I didn’t, owing to a telegram going wrong. That little fact changed my whole life. I came to the Islands instead and started trading, then I came to live in New Caledonia—I’m married.”

“Oh,” I said, “is that so?”

Something in the tone of those two words, “I’m married,” struck me as strange.

We talked on indifferent subjects, and before we parted I promised to come over and see him next day at his place, a few miles from the town. I did, and I was astonished at what I saw.

New Caledonia, pleasant as the climate may be, is not the place one would live in by choice. At all events it wasn’t in those days when the convicts were still coming there from France. The gangs of prisoners shepherded by warders armed to the teeth, the great barges filled with prisoners that ply every evening when work is over between the harbour quay and the Isle Nou, the military air of the place and the fretting regulations, all these things and more robbed it of its appeal as a residential neighbourhood. Yet the Lewishons lived there, and what astonished me was the evidence of their wealth and the fact that they had no apparent interests at all to bind them to the place.

Mrs. Lewishon was a woman of forty-five or so, yet her beauty had scarcely begun to fade. I was introduced to her by Lewishon on the broad verandah of their house, which stood in the midst of gardens more wonderful than the gardens of La Mortola.

A week or so later, after dining with me in the town, he told me the story of his marriage, one of the strangest stories I ever heard, and this is it, just as he told it:

“The Pacific is the finest place in the world to drop money in. You see it’s so big and full of holes that look like safe investments. I started, after I parted with you, growing cocoanut trees in the Fijis. It takes five years for a cocoanut palm to grow, but when it’s grown it will bring you in an income of eighteen pence or so a year, according as the copra prices range. I planted forty thousand young trees, and at the end of the fourth year a hurricane took the lot. That’s the Pacific. I was down and out, and then I struck luck. That’s the Pacific again. I got to be agent for a big English firm here in Noumea, and in a short time I was friends with everyone from Chardin the governor right down. Chardin was a good sort, but very severe. The former governor had been lax, so the people said, letting rules fall into abeyance like the rule about cropping the convicts’ hair and beards to the same pattern. However that may have been, Chardin had just come as governor, and I had not been here more than a few months when one day a big white yacht from France came and dropped anchor in the harbour, and a day or two after a lady appeared at my office and asked for an interview.

“She had heard of me through a friend, she said, and she sought my assistance in a most difficult matter. In plain English she wanted me to help in the escape of a convict.

“I was aghast. I was about to order her out of the office, when something—something—something, I don’t know what, held my tongue and kept me from rising for a moment, whilst with the cunning, which amounts to magic, of a desperate woman in love, she managed to calm my anger. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘and I should have been surprised if you had taken the matter calmly, but will you listen to me, and when you have heard me out, tell me if you would not have done what I have done to-day?’

“I could not stop her, and this is what she told me:

“Her name was Madame Armand Duplessis, her maiden name had been Alexandre. She was the only child of Alexandre, the big sugar refiner, and at his death she found herself a handsome young girl with a fortune of about twenty million francs and nothing between her and the rogues of the world but an old maiden aunt given to piety and guileless as a rabbit. However, she managed to escape the sharks and married an excellent man, a Captain in the Cavalry and attached to St. Cyr. He died shortly after the marriage, and the young widow, left desolate and without a child to console her, took up living again with her aunt, or rather the aunt came to live with her in the big house she occupied on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.

“About six months after she met Duplessis. I don’t know how she met him, she didn’t say, but anyhow he wasn’t quite in the same circle as herself. He was a clerk in La Fontaine’s Bank, and only drawing a few thousand francs a year, but he was handsome and attractive and young, and the upshot of it was they got married.

“She did not know anything of his past history and he had no family in evidence, nothing to stand on at all but his position at the bank; but she did not mind, she was in love and she took him on trust and they got married. A few months after marriage a change came over Duplessis; he had always been given rather to melancholy, but now an acute depression of spirits came on him for no reason apparently; he could not sleep, his appetite failed, and the doctors, fearing consumption, ordered him a sea voyage. When he heard this prescription he laughed in such a strange way that Madame Duplessis, who had been full of anxiety as to his bodily condition, became for a moment apprehensive as to this mental state. However, she said nothing, keeping her fears hidden and busying herself in preparations for the voyage.

“It chanced that just at that moment a friend had a yacht to dispose of, an eight hundred ton auxiliary-engined schooner, _La Gaudriole_. It was going cheap, and Madame Duplessis, who was a good business woman, bought it, reckoning to sell it again when the voyage was over.

“A month later they left Marseilles.

“They visited Greece and the Islands; then, having touched at Alexandria, they passed through the Canal, came down the Red Sea and crossed the Indian Ocean. They touched at Ceylon, and whilst there Madame Duplessis suggested that instead of going to Madras, as they had intended, they should go into the Pacific by way of the Straits of Malacca. Duplessis opposed this suggestion at first, then he fell in with it. More than that, he became enthusiastic about it. A weight seemed suddenly to have been lifted from his mind, his eyes grew bright and the melancholy that all the breezes of the Indian Ocean had not blown away suddenly vanished.

“Two days later they left Ceylon, came through the Straits of Malacca and by way of the Arafura Sea and Torres Straits into the Pacific. The Captain of the yacht had suggested the Santa Cruz islands as their first stopping place, but one night Duplessis took his wife aside and asked her would she mind their making for New Caledonia instead. Then he gave his reason.

“He said to her: ‘When you married me I told you I had no family; that was not quite the truth. I have a brother. He is a convict serving sentence in Noumea. I did not tell you because the thing was painful to me as death.’

“You can fancy her feelings, struck by a bombshell like that, but she says nothing and he goes on telling her the yarn he ought to have told her before they were married.

“This brother, Charles Duplessis, had been rather a wild young scamp; he lived in the Rue du Mont Thabor, a little street behind the Rue St. Honoré in Paris, and he made his money on the Stock Exchange. Then he got into terrible trouble. He was accused of a forgery committed by another man, but could not prove his innocence. Armand was certain of his innocence but could do nothing, and Charles was convicted and sent to New Caledonia.

“Well, Madame Duplessis sat swallowing that fact, and when he’d done speaking, she sat swallowing some more as if her throat was dry. Then she says to Armand:

“‘Your brother is innocent, then,’ she says.

“‘As innocent as yourself,’ he answers her, ‘and it is the knowledge of all this that has caused my illness and depression.

“‘Before I was married I was forgetting it all, but married to the woman I love, rich, happy, with enviable surroundings, Charles came and knocked at my door, saying: “Remember me in your happiness.”’

“‘But can we do nothing for him?’ asked Madame Duplessis.

“‘Nothing,’ replied Armand, ‘unless we can help him to escape.’

“Then he went on to tell her how he had not wanted to come on this long voyage at first, feeling that there was some fate in the business, and that it would surely bring him somehow or another to Noumea; then, how the idea had come to him at Ceylon that he might be able to help Charles to escape.

“She asked him had he any plan, and he replied that he had not and that it was impossible to make any plan till he reached Noumea and studied the place and its possibilities.

“Well, there was the position the woman found herself in, and a nice position it was. Think of it, married only a short time and now condemned to help a prisoner to escape from New Caledonia, for, though she could easily have refused, she felt compelled to the business both for the sake of her husband and the sake of his brother, an innocent man wrongfully convicted.

“She agreed to help in the attempt like the high spirited woman she was, and a few days later they raised the New Caledonia reef and the Noumea lighthouse that marks the entrance to the harbour.

“Madame Duplessis had a big acquaintance in Paris, especially among the political and military people, and no sooner had the yacht berthed than the Governor and chief people who knew her name, began to show their attentions, tumbling over themselves with invitations to dinners and parties.

“That, again, was a nice position for her, having to accept the hospitality of the people she had come to betray, so to speak, but she had to do it: it was the only way to help her husband along in his scheme, and leaving the yacht, she took up her residence in a house she rented on the sea road; you may have seen it, a big white place with green verandahs, and there she and her husband spent their time whilst the yacht was being overhauled.

“They gave dinners and parties and went to picnics; they regularly laid themselves out to please, and then, one night, Armand came to his wife and said that he had been studying all means of escape from Noumea, and he had found only one. He would not say what it was, and she was content not to poke into the business, leaving him to do the plotting and planning till the time came when she could help.

“Armand said that before he could do anything in the affair he must first have an interview with Charles. They were hand in glove with the Governor, and it was easy enough to ask to see a prisoner, but the bother was the name of Duplessis, for Charles had been convicted and exported under that name. The Governor had never noticed Charles, and the name of Duplessis was in the prison books and forgotten. It would mean raking the whole business up and claiming connection with a convict, still it had to be done.

“Next day Armand called at the Governor’s house and had an interview. He told the Governor that a relation named Charles Duplessis was amongst the convicts and that he very much wanted to have an interview with him.

“Now the laws at that time were very strict, and the Governor, though pretty lax in some things as I’ve said, found himself up against a stiff proposition, and that proposition was how to tell Armand there was nothing doing.

“‘I am sorry,’ said the Governor, ‘but what you ask is impossible, Monsieur Duplessis; a year ago it would have been easy enough, but since the escape of Benonini and that Englishman Travers, the orders from Paris have forbidden visitors: any message you would like me to send to your relation shall be sent, but an interview—no.’

“Then Armand played his ace of trumps. He confessed, swearing the Governor to secrecy, that Charles was his brother; he said that Charles had in his possession a family secret that it was vital to obtain. He talked and talked, and the upshot was that the Governor gave in.

“Charles would be brought by two warders to the house on the Sea Road after dark on the following day, the interview was to take place in a room with a single door and single window. One warder was to guard the door on the outside, the other would stand below the window. The whole interview was not to last longer than half an hour.