The Quest: A Romance

Ste. Marie gave a sigh of relief.

"Yes, yes," said he. "Ducrot is as good a name as another. The gentleman has more than one, it appears. Monsieur, the hundred-franc note is yours." The gentleman from Marseille took it with a slightly trembling hand, and began to bow himself towards the door, as if he feared that his host would experience a change of heart, but Ste. Marie checked him, saying —

"One moment.

"I was thinking," said he, "that you would perhaps not care to present yourself to your – employer, M. Ducrot, immediately: not for a few days, at least, in view of the fact that certain actions of mine will show him your mission has – well, miscarried. It would perhaps be well for you not to communicate with M. Ducrot. He might be displeased with you."

"Monsieur," said the gentleman with the beard, "you speak with acumen and wisdom. I shall neglect to report myself to M. Ducrot – who, I repeat, is a pig."

"And," pursued Ste. Marie, "the individual on the bench across the street?"

"It is not necessary that I meet that individual either!" said the Marseillais hastily. "Monsieur, I bid you adieu!" He bowed again, a profound, a scraping bow, and disappeared through the door.

Ste. Marie crossed to the window and looked down upon the pavement below. He saw his visitor emerge from the house and slip rapidly down the street towards the Rue Vavin. He glanced across into the Gardens, and the spy still sat there on his bench, but his head lay back and he slept – the sleep of the unjust. One imagined that he must be snoring, for an incredibly small urchin in a blue apron stood on the path before him, and watched with the open mouth of astonishment.

Ste. Marie turned back into the room and began to tramp up and down, as was his way in a perplexity or in any time of serious thought. He wished very much that Richard Hartley were there to consult with. He considered Hartley to have a judicial mind – a mind to establish, out of confusion, something like logical order, and he was very well aware that he himself had not that sort of mind at all. In action he was sufficiently confident of himself, but to construct a course of action he was afraid, and he knew that a misstep now, at this critical point, might be fatal – turn success into disaster.

He fell to thinking of Captain Stewart (alias M. Ducrot), and he longed most passionately to leap into a fiacre at the corner below, to drive at a gallop across the city to the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, to fall upon that smiling hypocrite in his beautiful treasure-house, to seize him by the withered throat and say —

"Tell me what you have done with Arthur Benham before I tear your head from your miserable body!"

Indeed, he was far from sure that this was not what it would come to, in the end; for he reflected that he had not only a tremendous accumulation of evidence with which to face Captain Stewart, but also a very terrible weapon to hold over his head – the threat of exposure to the old man who lay slowly dying in the Rue de l'Université! A few words in old David's ear, a few proofs of their truth, and the great fortune for which the son had sold his soul (if he had any left to sell) must pass for ever out of his reach, like gold seen in a dream.

This is what it might well come to, he said to himself. Indeed, it seemed to him at that moment far the most feasible plan, for to such accusations, such demands as that, Captain Stewart could offer no defence. To save himself from a more complete ruin he would have to give up the boy, or tell what he knew of him. But Ste. Marie was unwilling to risk everything on this throw without seeing Richard Hartley first, and Hartley was not to be had until evening.

He told himself that, after all, there was no immediate hurry, for he was quite sure the man would be compelled to keep to his bed for a day or two. He did not know much about epilepsy, but he knew that its paroxysms were followed by great exhaustion, and he felt sure that Stewart was far too weak in body to recuperate quickly from any severe call upon his strength. He remembered how light that burden had been in his arms the night before, and then an uncontrollable shiver of disgust went over him as he remembered the sight of the horribly twisted and contorted face, felt again the shaking thumping head as it beat against his shoulder. He wondered how much Stewart knew, how much he would be able to remember, of the events of the evening before, and he was at a loss there because of his unfamiliarity with epileptic seizures. Of one thing, however, he was almost certain, and that was that the man could scarcely have been conscious of who were beside him when the fit was over. If he had come at all to his proper senses, before the ensuing slumber of exhaustion, it must have been after Mlle. Nilssen and himself had gone away.

Upon that he fell to wondering about the spy and the gentleman from Marseille (he was a little sorry that Hartley could not have seen the gentleman from Marseille), but he reflected that the two were, without doubt, acting upon old orders, and that the latter had probably been stalking him for some days before he found him at home.

He looked at his watch and it was half-past twelve. There was nothing to be done, he considered, but wait – get through the day somehow; and so, presently, he went out to lunch. He went up the Rue Vavin to the Boulevard Montparnasse, and down that broad thoroughfare to Lavenue's, on the busy Place de Rennes, where the cooking is the best in all this quarter, and can indeed hold up its head without shame in the face of those other more widely famous restaurants, across the river, frequented by the smart world and by the travelling gourmet.

He went through to the inner room, which is built like a raised loggia round two sides of a little garden, and which is always cool and fresh in summer. He ordered a rather elaborate lunch and thought that he sat a very long time at it, but when he looked again at his watch only an hour and a half had gone by. It was a quarter-past two. Ste. Marie was depressed. There remained almost all of the afternoon to be got through, and Heaven alone could say how much of the evening, before he could have his consultation with Richard Hartley. He tried to think of some way of passing the time, but although he was not usually at a loss, he found his mind empty of ideas. None of his common occupations recommended themselves to him. He knew that whatever he tried to do he would interrupt it with pulling out his watch every half-hour or so and cursing the time because it lagged so slowly. He went out to the terrasse for coffee, very low in his mind.

But half an hour later, as he sat behind his little marble-topped table, smoking and sipping a liqueur, his eyes fell upon something across the square which brought him to his feet with a sudden exclamation. One of the big electric trams that ply between the Place St. Germain-des-Prés and Clamart, by way of the Porte de Versailles and Vanves, was dragging its unwieldy bulk round the turn from the Rue de Rennes into the boulevard. He could see the sign-board along the impériale: "Clamart – St. Germain-des-Prés" with "Issy" and "Vanves" in brackets between.

Ste. Marie clinked a franc upon the table, and made off across the place at a run. Omnibuses from Batignolles and Menilmontant got in his way, fiacres tried to run him down, and a motor-car in a hurry pulled up just in time to save his life, but Ste. Marie ran on, and caught the tram before it had completed the negotiation of the long curve and gathered speed for its dash down the boulevard. He sprang upon the step, and the conductor reluctantly unfastened the chain to admit him. So he climbed up to the top and seated himself, panting. The dial high on the façade of the Gare Montparnasse said ten minutes to three.

He had no definite plan of action. He had started off in this headlong fashion upon the spur of a moment's impulse, and because he knew where the tram was going. Now, embarked, he began to wonder if he was not a fool. He knew every foot of the way to Clamart, for it was a favourite half-day's excursion with him to ride there in this fashion, walk thence through the beautiful Meudon wood across to the river, and, from Bellevue or Bas-Meudon, take a Suresnes boat back into the city. He knew, or thought he knew, just where lay the house, surrounded by garden and half-wild park, of which Olga Nilssen had told him; he had often wondered whose it was as the tram rolled along the length of its high wall. But he knew also that he could do nothing there, single-handed and without excuse or preparation. He could not boldly ring the bell, demand speech with Mlle. Coira O'Hara, and ask her if she knew any thing of the whereabouts of young Arthur Benham, whom a photographer had suspected of being in love with her. He certainly could not do that. And there seemed to be nothing else that – Ste. Marie broke off this somewhat despondent course of reasoning with a sudden little voiceless cry. For the first time it occurred to him to connect the house on the Clamart road and Mlle. Coira O'Hara and young Arthur Benham. – It will be remembered that the man had not yet had time to arrange his suddenly acquired mass of evidence in logical order and to make deductions from it. – For the first time he began to put two and two together. Stewart had hidden away his nephew: this nephew was known to have been much enamoured of the girl Coira O'Hara: Coira O'Hara was said to be living (with her father? probably) in the house on the outskirts of Paris, where she was visited by Captain Stewart. Was not the inference plain enough – sufficiently reasonable? It left, without doubt, many puzzling things to be explained? – perhaps too many; but Ste. Marie sat forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming, his face tense with excitement.

Was young Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?

He said the words almost aloud, and he became aware that the fat woman with a live fowl at her feet, and the butcher's boy on his other side, were looking at him curiously. He realised that he was behaving in an excited manner, and so sat back and lowered his eyes. But over and over within him the words said themselves, over and over, until they made a sort of mad foolish refrain —

"Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road? Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?" He was afraid that he would say it aloud once more, and he tried to keep a firm hold upon himself.

The tram swung into the Rue de Sevres, and rolled smoothly out the long uninteresting stretch of the Rue Lecourbe, far out to where the houses became scattered, where mounds and pyramids of red tiles stood alongside the factory where they had been made, where an acre of little glass hemispheres in long straight rows winked and glistened in the afternoon sun – the forcing beds of some market gardener; out to the Porte de Versailles at the city wall, where a group of customs officers sprawled at ease before their little sentry-box, or loafed over to inspect ah incoming tram.

A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red capped, red trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old grey church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycée beyond. The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking protest to the movement, and the butcher's boy got down too, so that Ste. Marie was left alone upon the impérialesave for a snuffy old gentleman in a pot-hat, who sat in a corner buried behind the day's Droits de l'Homme.

Ste. Marie moved forward once more, and laid his arms upon the iron rail before him. They were coming near. They ran past plum and apple orchards, and past humble little detached villas, each with a bit of garden in front and an acacia or two at the gate posts. But presently, on the right, the way began to be bordered by a high stone wall, very long, behind which showed the trees of a park, and among them, far back from the wall, beyond a little rise of ground, the gables and chimneys of a house could be made out. The wall went on for perhaps a quarter of a mile in a straight sweep, but halfway the road swung apart from it to the left, dipped under a stone rail way bridge, and so presently ended at the village of Clamart.

As the tram approached the beginning of that long stone wall it began to slacken speed, and there was a grating noise from underneath, and presently it came to an abrupt halt. Ste. Marie looked over the guard-rail and saw that the driver had left his place and was kneeling in the dust beside the car, peering at its underworks. The conductor strolled round to him after a moment and stood indifferently by, remarking upon the strange vicissitudes to which electrical propulsion was subject. The driver, without looking up, called his colleague a number of the most surprising and, it is to be hoped, unwarranted names, and suddenly began to burrow under the tram, wriggling his way after the manner of the serpent, until nothing could be seen of him but two unrestful feet. His voice though muffled was still tolerably distinct. It cursed in an unceasing staccato, and with admirable ingenuity, the tram, the conductor, the sacred dog of an impediment which had got itself wedged into one of the trucks, and the world in general.

Ste. Marie, sitting aloft, laughed for a moment, and then turned his eager eyes upon what lay across the road. The halt had taken place almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of the park wall which ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he could see the other wing, which led inward from the road at something like a right angle, but was presently lost to sight because of a sparse and unkempt patch of young trees and shrubs, well-nigh choked with undergrowth, which extended for some distance from the park wall backward along the roadside towards Vanves. Whoever owned that stretch of land had seemingly not thought it worth while to cultivate it, or to build upon it, or even to clear it off.

Ste. Marie's first thought as his eye scanned the two long stretches of wall, and looked over their tops to the trees of the park and the far-off gables and chimneys of the house, was to wonder where the entrance to the place could be, and he decided that it must be on the side opposite to the Clamart tram-line. He did not know the smaller roads hereabouts, but he guessed that there must be one somewhere beyond, between the Route de Clamart and the Fort d'Issy; and he was right. There is a little road between the two: it sweeps round in a long curve, and ends near the tiny public garden in Issy, and it is called the rue Barbés.

His second thought was that this unkempt patch of trees and brush offered excellent cover for any one who might wish to pass an observant hour alongside that high stone wall – for any one who might desire to cast a glance over the lie of the land, to see at closer range that house of which so little could be seen from the Route de Clamart, to look over the wall's coping into park and garden.

The thought brought him to his feet with a leaping heart, and before he realised that he had moved he found himself in the road beside the halted tram. The conductor brushed past him, mounting to his place, and from the platform he beckoned, crying out —

"En voiture, monsieur! En voiture!" Again something within Ste. Marie that was not his conscious direction acted for him, and he shook his head. The conductor gave two little blasts upon his horn, the tram wheezed and moved forward. In a moment it was on its way, swinging along at full speed towards the curve in the line that bore to the left and dipped under the railway bridge. Ste. Marie stood in the middle of that empty road, staring after it until it had disappeared from view.

CHAPTER XIV

IN THE GARDEN

Ste. Marie had acted upon an impulse of which he was scarcely conscious at all, and when he found himself standing alone in the road and watching the Clamart tram disappear under the railway bridge, he called himself hard names and wondered what he was to do next. He looked before and behind him, and there was no living soul in sight. He bent his eyes again upon that unkempt patch of young trees and undergrowth, and once more the thought forced itself to his brain that it would make excellent cover for one who wished to observe a little – to reconnoitre.

He knew that it was the part of wisdom to turn his back upon this place, to walk on to Clamart or return to Vanves, and mount upon a homeward-bound tram. He knew that it was the part of folly, of madness even, to expose himself to possible discovery by some one within the walled enclosure. What though no one there were able to recognise him, still the sight of a man prowling about the walls, seeking to spy over them, might excite an alarm that would lead to all sorts of undesirable complications. Dimly Ste. Marie realised all this, and he tried to turn his back and walk away, but the patch of little trees and shrubbery drew him with an irresistible fascination. Just a little look along that unknown wall! he said to himself; just the briefest of all brief reconnaissances, the merest glance beyond the masking screen of wood growth, so that in case of sudden future need he might have the lie of the place clear in his mind; for without any sound reason for it he was somehow confident that this walled house and garden were to play an important part in the rescue of Arthur Benham. It was once more a matter of feeling. The rather woman-like intuition which had warned him that O'Hara was concerned in young Benham's disappearance, and that the two were not far from Paris, was again at work in him, and he trusted it as he had done before.

He gave a little nod of determination, as one who, for good or ill, casts a die, and he crossed the road. There was a deep ditch, and he had to climb down into it and up its farther side, for it was too broad to be jumped. So he came into the shelter of the young poplars and elms and oaks. The underbrush caught at his clothes, and the dead leaves of past seasons crackled underfoot, but after a little space he came to somewhat clearer ground, though the saplings still stood thick about him and hid him securely.

He made his way inward along the wall, keeping a short distance back from it, and he saw that after twenty or thirty yards it turned again at a very obtuse angle away from him, and once more ran on in a long straight line. Just beyond this angle he came upon a little wooden door thickly studded with nails. It was made to open inward, and on the outside there was no knob or handle of any kind, only a large keyhole of the simple old-fashioned sort. Slipping up near to look, Ste. Marie observed that the edges of the keyhole were rusty, but scratched a little through the rust with recent marks, so the door, it seemed, was sometimes used. He observed another thing. The ground near by was less encumbered with trees than at any other point, and the turf was depressed with many wheel marks – broad marks such as are made only by the wheels of a motor-car. He followed these tracks for a little distance and they wound in and out among the trees and, beyond the thin fringe of wood, swept away in a curve towards Issy, doubtless to join the road which he had already imagined to lie somewhere beyond the enclosure.

Beyond the more open space about this little door the young trees stood thick together again, and Ste. Marie pressed cautiously on. He stopped now and then to listen, and once he thought that he heard from within the sound of a woman's laugh, but he could not be sure. The slight change of direction had confused him a little, and he was uncertain as to where the house lay. The wall was twelve or fifteen feet high, and from the level of the ground he could of course see nothing over it but tree-tops. He went on for what may have been a hundred yards, but it seemed to him very much more than that, and he came to a tall gnarled cedar-tree which stood almost against the high wall. It was half dead but its twisted limbs were thick and strong, and by force of the tree's cramped position they had grown in strange and grotesque forms. One of them stretched across the very top of the stone wall, and, with the wind's action, it had scraped away the coping of tiles and bottle-glass, and had made a little depression there to rest in.

Ste. Marie looked up along this natural ladder, and temptation smote him sorely. It was so easy and so safe! There was enough foliage left upon the half-dead tree to screen him well, but whether or no it is probable that he would have yielded to the proffered lure. There seems to have been more than chance in Ste. Marie's movements upon this day. There seems to have been something like the hand of Fate in them, as doubtless there is in most things, if one but knew.

He left his hat and stick behind him under a shrub, and he began to make his way up the half-bare branches of the gnarled cedar. They bore him well, without crack or rustle, and the way was very easy. No ladder made by man could have offered a much simpler ascent. So mounting slowly and with care, his head came level with the top of the wall. He climbed to the next branch, a foot higher, and rested there. The drooping foliage from the upper part of the cedar-tree, which was still alive, hung down over him and cloaked him from view, but through its aromatic screen he could see as freely as through the window curtain in the Rue d'Assas.

The house lay before him, a little to the left, and perhaps a hundred yards away. It was a disappointing house to find in that great enclosure, for though it was certainly neither small nor trivial, it was as certainly far from possessing anything like grandeur. It had been in its day a respectable unpretentious square structure of three stories, entirely without architectural beauty, but also entirely without the ornate hideousness of the modern villas along the Route de Clamart. Now, however, the stucco was gone in great patches from its stone walls, giving them an unpleasantly diseased look, and long neglect of all decent care had lent the place the air almost of desertion. Anciently the grounds before the house had been laid out in the formal fashion, with a terrace and geometrical lawns, and a pool and a fountain, and a rather fine long vista between clipped larches; but the same neglect which had made shabby the stuccoed house had allowed grass and weeds to grow over the gravel paths, underbrush to spring up and to encroach upon the geometrical turf plots, the long double row of clipped larches to flourish at will or to die, or to fall prostrate and lie where they had fallen.

So all the broad enclosure was a scene of heedless neglect, a riot of unrestrained and wanton growth, where should have been decorous and orderly beauty. It was a sight to bring tears to a gardener's eyes, but it had a certain untamed charm of its own, for all that. The very riot of it, the wanton prodigality of untouched natural growth, produced an effect that was by no means all disagreeable.

An odd and whimsical thought came into Ste. Marie's mind, that thus must have looked the garden and park round the castle of the Sleeping Beauty when the Prince came to wake her.

But sleeping beauties and unkempt grounds went from him in a flash when he became aware of a sound which was like the sound of voices. Instinctively he drew farther back into the shelter of his aromatic screen. His eyes swept the space below him, from right to left, and could see no one. So he sat very still, save for the thunderous beat of a heart which seemed to him like drum beats when soldiers are marching, and he listened – "all ears" as the phrase goes.

The sound was in truth a sound of voices. He was presently assured of that, but for some time he could not make out from which direction it came. And so he was the more startled when quite suddenly there appeared from behind a row of tall shrubs two young people, moving slowly together up the untrimmed turf in the direction of the house.

The two young people were Mlle. Coira O'Hara and Arthur Benham, and upon the brow of this latter youth there was no sign of dungeon pallor, upon his free moving limbs no ball and chain. There was no apparent reason why he should not hasten back to the eager arms in the Rue de l'Université if he chose to – unless indeed his undissembling attitude towards Mlle. Coira O'Hara might serve as a reason. The young man followed at her heel with much the manner and somewhat the appearance of a small dog, humbly conscious of unworthiness, but hopeful nevertheless of an occasional kind word or pat on the head.