After Dark - Wilkie Collins (affordable ebook reader .txt) 📗

terminated. As he folded it up and put it in his pocket, Lomaque sighed. This was a very rare expression of feeling with him. He leaned back in his chair, and beat his nails impatiently on the table. Suddenly there was a faint little tap at the room door, and eight or ten men—evidently familiars of the new French Inquisition—quietly entered, and ranged themselves against the wall.

Lomaque nodded to two of them. “Picard and Magloire, go and sit down at that desk. I shall want you after the rest are gone.” Saying this, Lomaque handed certain sealed and docketed papers to the other men waiting in the room, who received them in silence, bowed, and went out. Innocent spectators might have thought them clerks taking bills of lading from a merchant. Who could have imagined that the giving and receiving of Denunciations, Arrest-orders, and Death-warrants—the providing of its doomed human meal for the all-devouring guillotine—could have been managed so coolly and quietly, with such unruffled calmness of official routine?

“Now,” said Lomaque, turning to the two men at the desk, as the door closed, “have you got those notes about you?” (They answered in the affirmative.) “Picard, you have the first particulars of this affair of Trudaine; so you must begin reading. I have sent in the reports; but we may as well go over the evidence again from the commencement, to make sure that nothing has been left out. If any corrections are to be made, now is the time to make them. Read, Picard, and lose as little time as you possibly can.”

Thus admonished, Picard drew some long slips of paper from his pocket, and began reading from them as follows:

 

“Minutes of evidence collected concerning Louis Trudaine, suspected, on the denunciation of Citizen Superintendent Danville, of hostility to the sacred cause of liberty, and of disaffection to the sovereignty of the people. (1.) The suspected person is placed under secret observation, and these facts are elicited: He is twice seen passing at night from his own house to a house in the Rue de Clery. On the first night he carries with him money—on the second, papers. He returns without either. These particulars have been obtained through a citizen engaged to help Trudaine in housekeeping (one of the sort called Servants in the days of the Tyrants). This man is a good patriot, who can be trusted to watch Trudaine’s actions. (2.) The inmates of the house in the Rue de Clery are numerous, and in some cases not so well known to the Government as could be wished. It is found difficult to gain certain information about the person or persons visited by Trudaine without having recourse to an arrest. (3.) An arrest is thought premature at this preliminary stage of the proceedings, being likely to stop the development of conspiracy, and give warning to the guilty to fly. Order thereupon given to watch and wait for the present. (4.) Citizen Superintendent Danville quits Paris for a short time. The office of watching Trudaine is then taken out of the hands of the undersigned, and is confided to his comrade, Magloire.—Signed, PICARD. Countersigned, LOMAQUE.”

 

Having read so far, the police agent placed his papers on the writing-table, waited a moment for orders, and, receiving none, went out. No change came over the sadness and perplexity of Lomaque’s face. He still beat his nails anxiously on the writing-table, and did not even look at the second agent as he ordered the man to read his report. Magloire produced some slips of paper precisely similar to Picard’s and read from them in the same rapid, business-like, unmodulated tones:

 

“Affair of Trudaine. Minutes continued. Citizen Agent Magloire having been appointed to continue the surveillance of Trudaine, reports the discovery of additional facts of importance. (1.) Appearances make it probable that Trudaine meditates a third secret visit to the house in the Rue de Clery. The proper measures are taken for observing him closely, and the result is the implication of another person discovered to be connected with the supposed conspiracy. This person is the sister of Trudaine, and the wife of Citizen Superintendent Danville.”

 

“Poor, lost creature! ah, poor, lost creature!” muttered Lomaque to himself, sighing again, and shifting uneasily from side to side, in his mangy old leathern armchair. Apparently, Magloire was not accustomed to sighs, interruptions, and expressions of regret from the usually imperturbable chief agent. He looked up from his papers with a stare of wonder. “Go on, Magloire!” cried Lomaque, with a sudden outburst of irritability. “Why the devil don’t you go on?”—“All ready, citizen,” returned Magloire, submissively, and proceeded:

 

“(2.) It is at Trudaine’s house that the woman Danville’s connection with her brother’s secret designs is ascertained, through the vigilance of the before-mentioned patriot citizen. The interview of the two suspected persons is private; their conversation is carried on in whispers. Little can be overheard; but that little suffices to prove that Trudaine’s sister is perfectly aware of his intention to proceed for the third time to the house in the Rue de Clery. It is further discovered that she awaits his return, and that she then goes back privately to her own house. (3.) Meanwhile, the strictest measures are taken for watching the house in the Rue de Clery. It is discovered that Trudaine’s visits are paid to a man and woman known to the landlord and lodgers by the name of Dubois. They live on the fourth floor. It is impossible, at the time of the discovery, to enter this room, or to see the citizen and citoyenne Dubois, without producing an undesirable disturbance in the house and neighborhood. A police agent is left to watch the place, while search and arrest orders are applied for. The granting of these is accidentally delayed. When they are ultimately obtained, it is discovered that the man and the woman are both missing. They have not hitherto been traced. (4.) The landlord of the house is immediately arrested, as well as the police agent appointed to watch the premises. The landlord protests that he knows nothing of his tenants. It is suspected, however, that he has been tampered with, as also that Trudaine’s papers, delivered to the citizen and citoyenne Dubois, are forged passports. With these and with money, it may not be impossible that they have already succeeded in escaping from France. The proper measures have been taken for stopping them, if they have not yet passed the frontiers. No further report in relation to them has yet been received (5.) Trudaine and his sister are under perpetual surveillance, and the undersigned holds himself ready for further orders.—Signed, MAGLOIRE. Countersigned, LOMAQUE.”

 

Having finished reading his notes, Magloire placed them on the writing-table. He was evidently a favored man in the office, and he presumed upon his position; for he ventured to make a remark, instead of leaving the room in silence, like his predecessor Picard.

“When Citizen Danville returns to Paris,” he began, “he will be rather astonished to find that in denouncing his wife’s brother he had also unconsciously denounced his wife.”

Lomaque looked up quickly, with that old weakness in his eyes which affected them in such a strangely irregular manner on certain occasions. Magloire knew what this symptom meant, and would have become confused if he had not been a police agent. As it was, he quietly backed a step or two from the table, and held his tongue.

“Friend Magloire,” said Lomaque, winking mildly, “your last remark looks to me like a question in disguise. I put questions constantly to others; I never answer questions myself. You want to know, citizen, what our superintendent’s secret motive is for denouncing his wife’s brother? Suppose you try and find that out for yourself. It will be famous practice for you, friend Magloire—famous practice after office hours.”

“Any further orders?” inquired Magloire, sulkily.

“None in relation to the reports,” returned Lomaque. “I find nothing to alter or add on a revised hearing. But I shall have a little note ready for you immediately. Sit down at the other desk, friend Magloire; I am very fond of you when you are not inquisitive; pray sit down.”

While addressing this polite invitation to the agent in his softest voice, Lomaque produced his pocketbook, and drew from it a little note, which he opened and read through attentively. It was headed: “Private Instructions relative to Superintendent Danville,” and proceeded thus:

“The undersigned can confidently assert, from long domestic experience in Danville’s household that his motive for denouncing his wife’s brother is purely a personal one, and is not in the most remote degree connected with politics. Briefly, the facts are these: Louis Trudaine, from the first, opposed his sister’s marriage with Danville, distrusting the latter’s temper and disposition. The marriage, however, took place, and the brother resigned himself to await results—taking the precaution of living in the same neighborhood as his sister, to interpose, if need be, between the crimes which the husband might commit and the sufferings which the wife might endure. The results soon exceeded his worst anticipations, and called for the interposition for which he had prepared himself. He is a man of inflexible firmness, patience, and integrity, and he makes the protection and consolation of his sister the business of his life. He gives his brother-in-law no pretext for openly quarreling with him. He is neither to be deceived, irritated, nor tired out, and he is Danville’s superior every way—in conduct, temper, and capacity. Under these circumstances, it is unnecessary to say that his brother-in-law’s enmity toward him is of the most implacable kind, and equally unnecessary to hint at the perfectly plain motive of the denunciation.

“As to the suspicious circumstances affecting not Trudaine only, but his sister as well, the undersigned regrets his inability, thus far, to offer either explanation or suggestion. At this preliminary stage, the affair seems involved in impenetrable mystery.”

Lomaque read these lines through, down to his own signature at the end. They were the duplicate Secret Instructions demanded from him in the paper which he had been looking over before the entrance of the two police agents. Slowly, and, as it seemed, unwillingly, he folded the note up in a fresh sheet of paper, and was preparing to seal it when a tap at the door stopped him. “Come in,” he cried, irritably; and a man in traveling costume, covered with dust, entered, quietly whispered a word or two in his ear, and then went out. Lomaque started at the whisper, and, opening his note again, hastily wrote under his signature: “I have just heard that Danville has hastened his return to Paris, and may be expected back to-night.” Having traced these lines, he closed, sealed, and directed the letter, and gave it to Magloire. The police agent looked at the address as he left the room; it was “To Citizen Robespierre, Rue Saint-Honore.”

Left alone again, Lomaque rose, and walked restlessly backward and forward, biting his nails.

“Danville comes back to-night,” he said to himself, “and the crisis comes with him. Trudaine a conspirator! Bah! conspiracy can hardly be the answer to the riddle this time. What is?”

He took a turn or two in silence—then stopped at the open window, looking out on what little glimpse the street afforded him of the sunset sky. “This time five years,” he said, “Trudaine was talking to me on that bench overlooking the river; and Sister Rose was keeping poor hatchet-faced old Lomaque’s cup of coffee hot for him! Now I am officially bound to suspect them both; perhaps to arrest them; perhaps—I wish this job had fallen into other hands. I don’t want it—I don’t want it at any price!”

He returned to the writing-table and sat down to his papers, with the dogged air of a man determined to drive away vexing thoughts by dint of