The Victorian Villains Megapack (70 page)

All through the meal she and the Doctor made and unmade fairy plans. They bobbed and bowed and pledged each other. Their faces ran over with smiles; their eyes scattered sparkles, as they projected the Doctor’s political honours and the lady’s drawing-room ovations.

“But you will not be a Red!” cried Anastasie.

“I am Left Centre to the core,” replied the Doctor.

“Madame Gastein will present us—we shall find ourselves forgotten,” said the lady.

“Never,” protested the Doctor. “Beauty and talent leave a mark.”

“I have positively forgotten how to dress,” she sighed.

“Darling, you make me blush,” cried he. “Yours has been a tragic marriage!”

“But your success—to see you appreciated, honoured, your name in all the papers, that will be more than pleasure—it will be heaven!” she cried.

“And once a week,” said the Doctor, archly scanning the syllables, “once a week—one good little game of baccarat?”

“Only once a week?” she questioned, threatening him with a finger.

“I swear it by my political honour,” cried he.

“I spoil you,” she said, and gave him her hand.

He covered it with kisses.

Jean-Marie escaped into the night. The moon swung high over Gretz. He went down to the garden end and sat on the jetty. The river ran by with eddies of oily silver, and a low monotonous song. Faint veils of mist moved among the poplars on the farther side. The reeds were quietly nodding. A hundred times already had the boy sat, on such a night, and watched the streaming river with untroubled fancy. And this perhaps was to be the last. He was to leave this familiar hamlet, this green, rustling country, this bright and quiet stream; he was to pass into the great city; his dear lady mistress was to move bedizened in saloons; his good, garrulous, kind-hearted master to become a brawling depu
ty; and both be lost for ever to Jean-Marie and their better selves. He knew his own defects; he knew he must sink into less and less consideration in the turmoil of a city life, sink more and more from the child into the servant. And he began dimly to believe the Doctor’s prophecies of evil. He could see a change in both. His generous incredulity failed him for this once; a child must have perceived that the Hermitage had completed what the absinthe had begun. If this were the first day, what would be the last? “If necessary, wreck the train,” thought he, remembering the Doctor’s parable. He looked round on the delightful scene; he drank deep of the charmed night-air, laden with the scent of hay. “If necessary, wreck the train,” he repeated. And he rose and returned to the house.

CHAPTER VI

A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, IN TWO PARTS

The next morning there was a most unusual outcry in the Doctor’s house. The last thing before going to bed, the Doctor had locked up some valuables in the dining-room cupboard; and behold, when he rose again, as he did about four o’clock, the cupboard had been broken open, and the valuables in question had disappeared. Madame and Jean-Marie were summoned from their rooms, and appeared in hasty toilets; they found the Doctor raving, calling the heavens to witness and avenge his injury, pacing the room barefooted, with the tails of his night-shirt flirting as he turned.

“Gone!” he said; “the things are gone, the fortune gone! We are paupers once more. Boy! What do you know of this? Speak up
, sir, speak up. Do you know of
it? Where are they?” He had him by the arm, shaking him like a bag, and the boy’s words, if he had any, were jolted forth in inarticulate murmurs. The Doctor, with a revulsion from his own violence, set him down again. He observed Anastasie in tears. “Anastasie,” he said, in quite an altered voice, “compose yourself, command your feelings. I would not have you give way to passion like the vulgar. This—this trifling accident must be lived down.—Jean-Marie, bring me my smaller medicine-chest. A gentle laxative is indicated.”

And he dosed the family all round, leading the way himself with a double quantity. The wretched Anastasie, who had never been ill in the whole course of her existence, and whose soul recoiled from remedies, wept floods of tears as she sipped, and shuddered, and protested, and then was bullied and shouted at until she sipped again. As for Jean-Marie, he took his portion down with stoicism.

“I have given him a less amount,” observed the Doctor, “his youth protecting him against emotion. And now that we have thus parried any morbid consequences, let us reason.”

“I am so cold,” wailed Anastasie.

“Cold!” cried the Doctor. “I give thanks to God that I am made of fierier material. Why, madam, a blow like this would set a frog into a transpiration. If you are cold, you can retire; and, by the way, you might throw me down my trousers. It is chilly for the legs.”

“Oh no!” protested Anastasie; “I will stay with you.”

“Nay, madam, you shall not suffer for your devotion,” said the Doctor. “I will myself fetch you a shawl.” And he went upstairs and returned more fully clad an
d with an armful of wraps for the shivering Anastasie. “And now,” he resumed, “to investigate this crime. Let us proceed by induction. Anastasie, do you know anything that can help us?” Anastasie knew nothing. “Or you, Jean-Marie?”

“Not I,” replied the boy steadily.

“Good,” returned the Doctor. “We shall now turn our attention to the material evidences. (I was born to be a detective; I have the eye and the systematic spirit.) First, violence has been employed. The door was broken open; and it may be observed, in passing, that the lock was dear indeed at what I paid for it: a crow to pluck with Master Goguelat. Second, here is the instrument employed, one of our own table-knives, one of our best, my dear; which seems to indicate no preparation on the part of the gang—if gang it was. Thirdly, I observe that nothing has been removed except the Franchard dishes and the casket; our own silver has been minutely respected. This is wily; it shows intelligence, a knowledge of the code, a desire to avoid legal consequences. I argue from this fact that the gang numbers persons of respectability—outward, of course, and merely outward, as the robbery proves. But I argue, second, that we must have been observed at Franchard itself by some occult observer, and dogged throughout the day with a skill and patience that I venture to qualify as consummate. No ordinary man, no occasional criminal, would have shown himself capable of this combination. We have in our neighbourhood, it is far from improbable, a retired bandit of the highest order of intelligence.”

“Good heaven!” cried the horrified Anastasie. “Henri, how can you?”

“My cherished one, this is a process of induction,” said the Doctor. “If any of my steps are unsound, correct me. You are silent? Then do not, I beseech you, be so vulgarly illogical as to revolt from my conclusion. We have now arrived,” he resumed, “at some idea of the composition of the gang—for
I incline to the hypothesis of more than one—and we now leave this room, which can disclose no more, and turn our attention to the court and garden. (Jean-Marie, I trust you are observantly following my various steps; this is an excellent piece of education for you.) Come with me to the door. No steps on the court; it is unfortunate our court should be paved. On what small matters hang the destiny of these delicate investigations! Hey! What have we here? I have led you to the very spot,” he said, standing grandly backward and indicating the green gate. “An escalade, as you can now see for yourselves, has taken place.”

Sure enough, the green paint was in several places scratched and broken; and one of the panels preserved the print of a nailed shoe. The foot had slipped, however, and it was difficult to estimate the size of the shoe, and impossible to distinguish the pattern of the nails.

“The whole robbery,” concluded the Doctor, “step by step, has been reconstituted. Inductive science can no further go.”

“It is wonderful,” said his wife. “You should indeed have been a detective, Henri. I had no idea of your talents.”

“My dear,” replied Desprez condescendingly, “a man of scientific imagination combines the lesser faculties; he is a detective just as he is a publicist or a general; these are but local applications of his special talent. But now,” he continued, “would you have me go further? Would you have me lay my finger on the culprits—or rather, for I cannot promise quite so much, point out to you the very house where they consort? It may be a satisfaction, at least it is all we are likely to get, since we are denied the remedy of law. I reach the further stage in this way. In order to fill my outline of the robbery, I require a man likely to be in the forest idling, I require a man of education, I require a man superior to considerations of morality. The three requisites all centre in Tentaillon’s boarders. They are painters, therefore they are
continually lounging in the forest. They are painters, therefore they are not unlikely to have some smattering of education. Lastly, because they are painters, they are probably immoral. And this I prove in two ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions of the law!”

“But you always say—at least, so I understood you”—said madame, “that these lads display no imagination whatever.”

“My dear, they displayed imagination, and of a very fantastic order too,” returned the Doctor, “when they embraced their beggarly profession. Besides—and this is an argument exactly suited to your intellectual level—many of them are English and American. Where else should we expect to find a thief?—And now you had better get your coffee. Because we have lost a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For my part, I shall break my fast with white wine. I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty today. I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery. And yet, you will bear me out, I supported the emotion nobly.”

The Doctor had now talked himself back into an admirable humour; and as he sat in the arbour and slowly imbibed a large allowance of white wine and picked a little bread and cheese with no very impetuous appetite, if a third of his meditations ran upon the missing treasure, the other two-thirds were more pleasingly busied in the retrospect of his detective skill.

About eleven Casimir arrived; he had caught an early train to Fontainebleau, and driven over, to save time; and now his cab was stabled at Tentaillon’s, and he remarked, studying his watch, that he could spare an hour and a half. He was much the man of business, decisively spoken, given to frowning in an intellectual manner. A
nastasie’s born brother, he did not waste much sentiment on the lady, gave her an English family kiss, and demanded a meal without delay.

“You can tell me your story while we eat,” he observed. “Anything good today, Stasie?”

He was promised something good. The trio sat down to table in the arbour, Jean-Marie waiting as well as eating, and the Doctor recounted what had happened in his richest narrative manner. Casimir heard it with explosions of laughter.

“What a streak of luck for you, my good brother,” he observed, when the tale was over. “If you had gone to Paris, you would have played dick-duck-drake with the whole consignment in three months. Your own would have followed; and you would have come to me in a procession like the last time. But I give you warning—Stasie may weep and Henri ratiocinate—it will not serve you twice. Your next collapse will be fatal. I thought I had told you so, Stasie? Hey? No sense?”

The Doctor winced and looked furtively at Jean-Marie; but the boy seemed apathetic.

“And then again,” broke out Casimir, “what children you are—vicious children, my faith! How could you tell the value of this trash? It might have been worth nothing, or next door.”

“Pardon me,” said the Doctor. “You have your usual flow of spirits, I perceive, but even less than your usual deliberation. I am not entirely ignorant of these matters.”

“Not entirely ignorant of anything ever I heard of,” interrupted Casimir, bowing, and raising his glass with a sort of pert politeness.

“At least,” resumed the Doctor, “I gave my mind to the subject—that you may be willing to believe—and I estimated that our capital would be doubled.” And he described the nature of the find.

“My word of honour!” said Casimir, “I half believe you! But much would depend on the quality of the gold.”

“The quality, my dear Casimir, was—” And the Doctor, in default of language, kissed his finge
r-tips.

“I would not take your word for it, my good friend,” retorted the man of business. “You are a man of very rosy views. But this robbery,” he continued—“this robbery is an odd thing. Of course I pass over your nonsense about gangs and landscape-painters. For me, that is a dream. Who was in the house last night?”

“None but ourselves,” replied the Doctor.

“And this young gentleman?” asked Casimir, jerking a nod in the direction of Jean-Marie.

“He too”—the Doctor bowed.

“Well; and, if it is a fair question, who is he?” pursued the brother-in-law.

“Jean-Marie,” answered the Doctor, “combines the functions of a son and stable-boy. He began as the latter, but he rose rapidly to the more honourable rank in our affections. He is, I may say, the greatest comfort in our lives.”

“Ha!” said Casimir. “And previous to becoming one of you?”

“Jean-Marie has lived a remarkable existence; his experience has been eminently formative,” replied Desprez. “If I had had to choose an education for my son, I should have chosen such another. Beginning life with mountebanks and thieves, passing onward to the society and friendship of philosophers, he may be said to have skimmed the volume of human life.”

“Thieves?” repeated the brother-in-law, with a meditative air.

The Doctor could have bitten his tongue out. He foresaw what was coming, and prepared his mind for a vigorous defence.

“Did you ever steal yourself?” asked Casimir, turning suddenly on Jean-Marie, and for the first time employing a single eyeglass which hung round his neck.