813 - Maurice LeBlanc (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

way… in a lane running toward the open country, the third house on the right in the lane. She keeps a free school for backward children. Her grandmother, Mme. Ernemont, lives with her.”

“And, according to what you wrote to me, GeneviŽve Ernemont and Mrs. Kesselbach have become acquainted?”

“Yes. The girl went to ask Mrs. Kesselbach for a subscription for her school. They must have taken a liking to each other, for, during the past four days, they have been walking together in the Pare de Villeneuve, of which the garden of the Retreat is only a dependency.”

“At what time do they go out?”

“From five to six. At six o’clock exactly the young lady goes back to her school.”

“So you have arranged the thing?”

“For six o’clock to-day. Everything is ready.”

“Will there be no one there?”

“There is never any one in the park at that hour.”

“Very well. I shall be there. You can go.”

He sent him out through the door leading to the hall, and. returning to the waiting-room, called:

“The brothers Doudeville.”

Two young men entered, a little overdressed, keen-eyed and pleasant-looking.

“Good morning, Jean. Good morning, Jacques. Any news at the Prefecture?”

“Nothing much, governor.”

“Does M. Lenormand continue to have confidence in you?”

“Yes. Next to Gourel, we are his favorite inspectors. A proof is that he has posted us in the Palace Hotel to watch the people who were living on the first-floor passage at the time of Chapman’s murder. Gourel comes every morning, and we make the same report to him that we do to you.”

“Capital. It is essential that I should be informed of all that happens and all that is said at the Prefecture of Police. As long as Lenormand looks upon you as his men, I am master of the situation. And have you discovered a trail of any kind in the hotel?”

Jean Doudeville, the elder of the two, replied:

“The Englishwoman who occupied one of the bedrooms has gone.”

“That doesn’t interest me. I know all about her. But her neighbor, Major Parbury?”

They seemed embarrassed. At last, one of them replied:

“Major Parbury, this morning, ordered his luggage to be taken to the Gare du Nord, for the twelve-fifty train, and himself drove away in a motor. We were there when the train left. The major did not come.”

“And the luggage?”

“He had it fetched at the station.”

“By whom?”

“By a commissionaire,” so we were told.

“Then his tracks are lost?”

“Yes.”

“At last!” cried the prince, joyfully.

The others looked at him in surprise.

“Why, of course,” he said, “that’s a clue!”

“Do you think so?”

“Evidently. The murder of Chapman can only have been committed in one of the rooms on that passage. Mr. Kesselbach’s murderer took the secretary there, to an accomplice, killed him there, changed his clothes there; and, once the murderer had got away, the accomplice placed the corpse in the passage. But which accomplice? The manner of Major Parbury’s disappearance goes to show that he knows something of the business. Quick, telephone the good news to M. Lenormand or Gourel. The Prefecture must be informed as soon as possible. The people there and I are marching hand in hand.”

He gave them a few more injunctions, concerning their double role as police-inspectors in the service of Prince Sernine, and dismissed them.

Two visitors remained in the waiting-room. He called one of them in:

“A thousand pardons, Doctor,” he said. “I am quite at your orders now. How is Pierre Leduc?”

“He’s dead.”

“Aha!” said Sernine. “I expected it, after your note of this morning. But, all the same, the poor beggar has not been long…”

“He was wasted to a shadow. A fainting-fit; and it was all over.”

“Did he not speak?”

“No.”

“Are you sure that, from the day when the two of us picked him up under the table in that low haunt at Belleville, are you sure that nobody in your nursing-home suspected that he was the Pierre Leduc whom the police were looking for, the mysterious Pierre Leduc whom Mr. Kesselbach was trying to find at all costs?”

“Nobody. He had a room to himself. Moreover, I bandaged up his left hand so that the injury to the little finger could not be seen. As for the scar on the cheek, it is hidden by the beard.”

“And you looked after him yourself?”

“Myself. And, according to your instructions, I took the opportunity of questioning him whenever he seemed at all clear in his head. But I could never get more than an inarticulate stammering out of him.”

The prince muttered thoughtfully:

“Dead!… So Pierre Leduc is dead?… The whole Kesselbach case obviously turned on him, and now he disappears… without a revelation, without a word about himself, about his past…Ought I to embark on this adventure, in which I am still entirely in the dark? It’s dangerous… I may come to grief…”

He reflected for a moment and exclaimed:

“Ob, who cares? I shall go on for all that. It’s no reason, because Pierre Leduc is dead, that I should throw up the game. On the contrary! And the opportunity is too tempting! Pierre Leduc is dead! Long live Pierre Leduc!… Go, Doctor, go home. I shall ring you up before dinner.”

The doctor went out.

“Now, then, Philippe,” said Sernine to his last remaining visitor, a little gray-haired man, dressed like a waiter at a hotel, a very tenth-rate hotel, however.

“You will remember, governor,” Philippe began, “that last week, you made me go as boots to the H—tel des Deux-Empereurs at Versailles, to keep my eye on a young man.”

“Yes, I know… GŽrard BauprŽ. How do things stand with him?”

“He’s at the end of his resources.”

“Still full of gloomy ideas?”

“Yes. He wants to kill himself.”

“Is he serious?”

“Quite. I found this little note in pencil among his papers.”

“Ah!” said Sernine, reading the note. “He announces his suicide… and for this evening too!”

“Yes, governor, he has bought the rope and screwed the hook to the ceiling. Thereupon, acting on your instructions, I talked to him. He told me of his distress, and I advised him to apply to you: ‘Prince Sernine is rich,’ I said; ‘he is generous; perhaps he will help you.’”

“All this is first-rate. So he is coming?”

“He is here.”

“How do you know?”

“I followed him. He took the train to Paris, and he is walking up and down the boulevard at this minute. He will make up his mind from one moment to the other.”

Just then the servant brought in a card. The prince glanced at it and said to the man:

“Show M. Gerard BauprŽ in.”

Then, turning to Philippe:

“You go into the dressing-room, here; listen and don’t stir.”

Left alone, the prince muttered:

“Why should I hesitate? It’s fate that sends him my way…”

A few minutes later a tall young man entered. He was fair and slender, with an emaciated face and feverish eyes, and he stood on the threshold embarrassed, hesitating, in the attitude of a beggar who would like to put out his hand for alms and dares not.

The conversation was brief:

“Are you M. Gerard BauprŽ?”

“Yes… yes… that is my name.”

“I have not the honor…”

“It’s like this, sir… Some one told me…”

“Who?”

“A hotel servant… who said he had been in your service…”

“Please come to the point…”

“Well!…”

The young man stopped, taken aback and frightened by the haughty attitude adopted by the prince, who exclaimed:

“But, sir, there must be some…”

“Well, sir, the man told me that you were very rich… and very generous… And I thought that you might possibly…”

He broke off short, incapable of uttering the word of prayer and humiliation.

Sernine went up to him.

“M. GŽrard BauprŽ, did you not publish a volume of poetry called The Smile of Spring?”

“Yes, yes,” cried the young man, his face lighting up. “Have you read it?”

“Yes… Very pretty, your poems, very pretty… Only, do you reckon upon being able to live on what they will bring you?”

“Certainly… sooner or later…”

“Sooner or later? Later rather than sooner, I expect! And, meantime, you have come to ask me for the wherewithal to live?”

“For the wherewithal to buy food, sir.”

Sernine put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and, coldly:

“Poets do not need food, monsieur. They live on rhymes and dreams. Do as they do. That is better than begging for bread.”

The young man quivered under the insult. He turned to the door without a word.

Sernine stopped him:

“One thing more, monsieur. Have you no resources of any kind?”

“None at all.”

“And you are not reckoning on anything?”

“I have one hope left: I have written to one of my relations, imploring him to send me something. I shall have his answer to-day. It is my last chance.”

“And, if you have no answer, you have doubtless made up your mind, this very evening, to…”

“Yes, sir.”

This was said quite plainly and simply.

Sernine burst out laughing:

“Bless my soul, what a queer young man you are! And full of artless conviction, too! Come and see me again next year, will you? We will talk about all this… it’s so curious, so interesting… and, above all, so funny!… Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

And, shaking with laughter, with affected bows and gestures, he showed him the door.

“Philippe,” he said, admitting the hotel-servant, “did you hear?”

“Yes, governor.”

“Gerard BauprŽ is expecting a telegram this afternoon, a promise of assistance…”

“Yes, it’s his last hope.”

“He must not receive that telegram. If it comes, intercept it and tear it up.”

“Very well, governor.”

“Are you alone at your hotel?”

“Yes, with the cook, who does not sleep in. The boss is away.”

“Good. So we are the masters. Till this evening, at eleven. Be off.”

Prince Sernine went to his room and rang for his servant:

“My hat, gloves, and stick. Is the car there?”

“Yes, sir.”

He dressed, went out, and sank into a large, comfortable limousine, which took him to the Bois de Boulogne, to the Marquis and Marquise de Gastyne’s, where he was engaged for lunch.

At half-past two he took leave of his hosts, stopped in the Avenue Kleber, picked up two of his friends and a doctor, and at five minutes to three arrived at the Pare des Princes.

At three o’clock he fought a sword duel with the Italian Major Spinelli, cut his adversary’s ear in the first bout, and, at a quarter to four, took a bank at the Rue Cambon Club, from which he retired, at twenty minutes past five, after winning forty-seven thousand francs.

And all this without hurrying, with a sort of haughty indifference, as though the feverish activity that sent his life whizzing through a whirl of tempestuous deeds and events were the ordinary rule of his most peaceful days.

“Octave,” he said to his chaffeur, “go to Garches.”

And at ten minutes to six he alighted outside the old walls of the Pare de Villeneuve.

Although broken up nowadays and spoilt, the Villeneuve estate still retains something of the splendor which it knew at the time when the Empress Eugenie used to stay there. With its old trees, its lake and the leafy horizon of the woods of Saint-Cloud, the landscape has a certain melancholy grace.

An important part of the estate was made over to the Pasteur Institute. A smaller portion, separated from the other by the whole extent of the space reserved for the public, forms a property contained within the walls which is still fairly large, and which comprises the House of Retreat, with four isolated garden-houses standing around it.

“That is where Mrs. Kesselbach lives,” said the prince to himself,