[Henry Gastonard tells Paddy O’Connell of his visit to Madame Lea.]
Hôtel St. Paul, Paris,
October 24th, 1905.
Dear Paddy,--I had called upon Madame Lea before your letter reached
me. This was done at Jules Farman’s request, for, be sure, that which
you were thinking was not forgotten by a man so able.
I found Madame alone in a handsome apartment in the Avenue Kleber. She
is not changed a wit, is the same beautiful languorous creature that
we knew of old time.
I told you in my last letter that there is some talk of a
reconciliation between her and her husband. This I do not believe,
preferring the view that the Captain’s affections are temporarily
engaged elsewhere. A man who is kind toward his own failings generally
has some charity to spare for those of his wife. Possibly, the man is
merely a philosopher--I do not make myself his judge.
It is sufficient to say that Madame received me with great cordiality,
impressed upon me the fact that we were alone and bade me open my
heart to her. If I did not do this, be sure that my attitude was by no
means irresponsive. I had come to her house to learn if Madame Lea had
a secret, and, learning that, to obtain it from her if that were
possible. A false word would have ruined all. I realised that Mimi’s
very life might depend upon success or failure; nor was I unaware that
my own happiness might be won or lost in that very room.
We begin with a talk that was commonplace enough--her health and mine,
my departure from Paris, the absurdities of our last meeting--and so
to Mimi and my marriage by a natural sequence which diplomacy
demanded. I found her eloquent immediately when Mimi’s name was
mentioned. A woman will discuss a man’s love affair readily enough;
there is no surer passport to his confidence, perhaps to his heart.
And Lea d’Alençon, you will remember, speaks with little fluency upon
any other subject.
Imagine, Paddy, a considerable apartment furnished with all the
precarious grace of the Louis XV. period--but flauntingly modern and
garish in its tone. Say that the walls are panelled in silk of a deep
golden hue; put long mirrors wherever there are niches for them; place
clocks of many kinds upon the tables and in the angles--Cupids marking
the hour of the day; the Hesperides shouldering the golden apple;
“Father Time treading Gaea beneath his giant feet”--all the baubles
which are sold in the Rue de la Paix, and others which came God knows
whence.
The furniture itself was bought, I believe, at the last Exhibition. It
is fine but new, oh, so new!--and Lea’s gown of white and gold brocade
is caught up by it as a flower of bizarre magnificence suitable to so
bright a bed. As for Madame, her eyes are as black as ever, her hair
as splendid--but I think the sun has pencilled that pallid face and
that the years have not forgotten her. Not until I spoke of my
marriage did she betray her wonted energy--not until that moment did
the natural woman reveal itself.
“Why did you not tell me that you were in love with the girl when
first I saw you?” she asked. “I would have helped you, Henry--is not a
woman always willing to help a man in love?”
“That, my dear lady,” said I, “is an abstruse speculation. And I am in
no mood for argument. Do you not know what the papers are saying of my
wife?”
She posed languidly and watched me with some cunning.
“I am forgetting how to read English,” she said, “and, Henry, you have
forgotten how to teach me.”
This I passed by. Were Lea d’Alençon upon the scaffold, she would
open a flirtation with the executioner.
“The news is in your own journals,” I said, “and why not? Does Paris
wish to forget one whose picture had no second in last year’s Salon?
But I see that she does--and, Lea, you know the story as well as I do.
Let us abandon the preliminaries, God knows I have little heart to
begin at all.”
She shivered slightly, I knew not why; and for some while her thoughts
appeared to be voyaging afar. Presently she recollected herself and
addressed me seriously.
“Did you know the Count d’Antoine?”
“Absolutely, no.”
“Never met him while you were in Paris?”
“Never once--but remember my life. The Butte knows little of
society--if there is any democracy in this world, it is that of the
atelier and the conservatoire. At the Hôtel St. Paul I was merely an
English gentleman seeing Paris. Why should I meet the Count
d’Antoine----”
“But your wife----”
“Would you say that she knew him?”
She paused and bit her lip. I could imagine that her thoughts were
travelling again. From this moment, I cannot tell you why, I began to
suspect her. And, Paddy, remember what suspicion meant to me, the
hopes and fears of it, the straw upon the stream of a woman’s caprice,
the light upon the crest, to lose which were a torture.
“Would you say that Mimi knew the Count, Lea?”
She smiled now--a wan smile, not of jest, but of her own endeavour to
deceive.
“There were few pretty women whom the Count did not know----”
“Then you were among the number?”
“I met him twice at the house of the American, Madame Martin, and
again at the Austrian Embassy. A very handsome man, one of those who
bewitch women with the notion that they have a thousand stories, but
would never tell them. Oh, yes, I knew the Count.”
“And you believe it possible that Mimi knew him?”
“Everything is possible in Paris--did she not frequent the gardens?”
“It is a lie--she knows the West as a tourist from my own country. Her
home was on the mountain.”
“You say so, Henry--oh, forgive me, I am trying to help you. If she
did not know the Count, why did he go to her house?”
“The question I am here to ask you, Lea.”
“To ask me--am I a sorceress, Henry?”
“In so far as a sorceress is usually cleverer than her kind, yes.”
“Then you think--oh, but it is impossible, it is ridiculous.”
She laughed aloud, forcing herself to the mood as an instrument may be
forced by cleverness to a note of discord foreign to it. I perceived
now that she had brought me to her house for curiosity’s sake--not to
tell me what she knew, but to ascertain the extent of my own
suspicions. The discovery maddened me. I could have caught her arms,
and thrust her down, and compelled her to confess. The torture she put
upon me was as deliberate as the insult--and yet I suffered both for
Mimi’s sake.
“It is ridiculous,” she repeated, “the same folly which sends a man to
a woman when his trouble is a woman. I knew the Count; knew him as I
have told you. Would he speak of every chit the atelier or the cabaret
discovered for him? It is madness, Monsieur Henry. You know that I
cannot help you.”
“And yet you invite me to your house?”
“To offer you my sympathy, my friendship--to hear you tell me why you
did this thing; you, who could have a thousand friends among your own
people, to seek one out of the great caravanserai of irresponsibles,
to prate of her virtue, to fight for her, to marry her--is not a
woman’s curiosity justly provoked?”
“And for curiosity’s sake you sent for me to-day--pardon me. I shall
answer that question for you. There was something beyond curiosity,
Madame d’Alençon, there was fear.”
She opened her eyes in wild alarm at this. I had seen her angry
before, but never as she was angry now. There is something of the
tigress in every passionate woman--a good deal of it in Lea
d’Alençon. For a moment I could almost contemplate a second
tragedy--and I do believe, Paddy, had there been a weapon to her hand,
she would have struck me.
“Fear!” she cried, raising herself upon a frail arm, and making no
attempt to modulate the shrill echo of her alarm. “Of what, then, am I
afraid, Monsieur Gastonard?”
“You are afraid of discovery, Madame d’Alençon.”
She laid her head back upon the cushions, and laughed defiantly. I can
give you no better account of her speech and actions than to say that
they were those of an enraged woman whose breeding has no reserves of
self control. A washerwoman complaining at the tub, a virago at the
doors of a tavern had not been a spectacle less repulsive.
“Discovery, Monsieur Gastonard; a precious word, discovery! Are you
mad? Must I say that you have lost your reason? Discovery of whom, of
what--of the fact that all the world knows, that you married a
_noctambule_, and have been whining ever since for sympathy; that your
Jezebel is as old in her vices as she is young in years; that you were
the dupe, the victim of the _canaille_ of the Butte--must I say
this?--or shall I order you from my house; call my servants to protect
me? Shall I do that, Monsieur Gastonard?”
I kept my temper; the stake was, beyond all belief, momentous to me. A
false step would have put me outside her door; and remember how
premature I had been, how much the unwise agent of my own unwarranted
impulses.
“You are very angry with me,” I said; and added, “perhaps with reason.
Of course, I should not have put it in that way, though it is a method
which others will not hesitate to adopt----”
She turned at this--quickly, as one alarmed, and called to reason by
something which hitherto had escaped her reasoning.
“Others, Monsieur Gastonard?”
“Certainly--others. There is my friend, Jules Farman, of the Secret
Police. He knows much that neither of us might wish him to know. And
please do not forget that there are circumstances of this crime which
have set the whole world by the ears. There is not a policeman in
Paris or in London who will not move heaven and earth to get at the
truth. So we are all concerned in the matter--and if anyone of us has
been foolish, said or done something which might implicate us, now is
the time to set it right. I put this to you as a friend. Tell me why
you sent for me to-day, and if the confession is to your disadvantage,
I will accept your confidence as an atonement.”
There never was, Paddy, such a wild arrow shot in all this world
before, and never will be again, I do believe. Nothing but a dogged
faith in my own convictions could have bent such a bow. This woman had
sent for me; her manner sufficiently declared her embarrassment.
Unless she had something to offer me, my visit must end in her
discomfiture. Lea d’Alençon is not the woman to bring such an affront
upon herself. This I perceived, and in my mad desire for the truth
could have knelt at her very feet, and implored her to aid me. She
knew--the key was locked in the safe of her intrigues. My God! What a
torture to say as much, and to realise my own impotence!
Well, the shot was fired, and the target touched. She had listened to
me with her eyes wide open, and her mouth pursed up, as though anger
were held at bay a little while by reflection. When she spoke, her
voice had lost its shrill timbre of protest, and all its pleasing
qualities been regained.
“We are all foolish sometimes, Monsieur Gastonard. I was foolish when
I counted you among the number of my friends. Let us not speak of it.
You say that I brought you to my house because I know something. Very
well; I do know something, and you shall know it--the dead Count was
your wife’s lover; that is what I know, Monsieur Gastonard.”
“It is a lie,” said I. And I leaned back in my chair, and watched her
critically. “So poor a lie that so clever a woman as Madame Lea should
not have told it.”
She turned her eyes away from me, and continued her infamous story,
unabashed and unashamed.
“It is a lie,” I repeated--but her words held me to my chair as though
an unknown hand caught me by the throat. “Why do you tell me so
foolish a lie, Madame Lea?”
She rose and came across to me. The spell of her mendacity was broken.
“I tell it because I loved you,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes, it is the
truth, and no lie. I loved you, and you left me for this creature,
this _canaille_, this girl of the fêtes and the circus. Shall I keep
the truth from you now? She murdered the Count when he had no more
money, and his presence was an embarrassment. Do not his friends know
it--did not the Marquis de Saint Faur shut his door upon him for that
very reason?”
“I will ask the Marquis,” said I. But I could hardly speak the word
for trembling.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “ask him--but you will have far to go, for he is
at Corfu, upon his yacht.”
“I beg your pardon; he returned to Paris last night.”
It was as though I had struck her in the face. She stood there as some
marble figure of distress, motionless, with a fixed and unchanging
smile upon her lips.
“The Marquis has returned?”
“As I say--last night. I am going now to his house.”
I turned upon my heel, and left her. She had not moved from the place
when I passed out. I could see that a word would have unsealed her
lips and cast her, a mendicant for pity, at my feet. But I went
straight on to the hall and the street, and calling the first cab
which came to my view, I ordered the man to drive me to the house of
Monsieur le Marquis de Saint Faur.
He was not within--he is to see me to-night.
Ah, Paddy, If I could but know what he will say--if I could but be
sure that this foul lie will pass no human lips again!
The heart has gone out of me--I must watch and wait through the long
night--
Your friend,
Harry Gastonard.