Part 49

"Merciful Heaven!" she murmured. "What is to become of me?"

The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and he had fired a charge of dynamite.

He questioned her almost stupidly--for a man in the comic mask does not readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning--or the lack of meaning--of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw--and the generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him--that the vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not matter that the man's suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman's blank amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on, although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God's earth; no wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?

"What is to become of me?" wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.

"Ma foi!" said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. "What's going to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute's time? Tiens!" he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman's shoulder. "Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. Voyons! All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel."

She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs. Ducksmith went straight up to the woman's haven, her bedroom.

Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony, which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a sight which for the moment paralyzed him.

Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr. Ducksmith's, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith's. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag, strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith's door. She opened it. He put his finger to his lips.

"Madame," he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking magnetism of his eyes, "if you value your happiness you will do exactly what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes' time the porter will come for them."

She looked at him with a scared face. "But what am I going to do?"

"You are going to revenge yourself on your husband."

"But I don't want to," she replied, piteously.

"I do," said he. "Begin, chère madame. Every moment is precious."

In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman obeyed him. He saw her start seriously on her task and then went downstairs, where he held a violent and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord and with a man in a green baize apron summoned from some dim lair of the hotel. After that he lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up and down the pavement. In ten minutes' time his luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith was placed upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling and tear-stained in the vestibule.

* * * * *

The man in the green baize apron knocked at Mr. Ducksmith's door and entered the room.

"I have come for the baggage of monsieur," said he.

"Baggage? What baggage?" asked Mr. Ducksmith, sitting up.

"I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol," said the porter in his stumbling English, "and of madame, and put them in a cab, and I naturally thought monsieur was going away, too."

"Going away!" He rubbed his eyes, glared at the porter, and dashed into his wife's room. It was empty. He dashed into Aristide's room. It was empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema, he rushed downstairs, the man in the green baize apron following at his heels.

Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at the door. Mr. Ducksmith turned upon his stupefied satellite.

"Where are they?"

"They must have gone already. I filled the cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol and madame have gone before to make arrangements."

"Where have they gone to?"

"In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with baggage but the railway station."

A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to the station.

There, in the salle d'attente, he found Aristide mounting guard over his wife's luggage. He hurled his immense bulk at his betrayer.

"You blackguard! Where is my wife?"