A SIGHT OF THE ABYSS
When Didier was in his own home again he saw that Françoise was in a
state of great uneasiness.
"Why did you leave the house so early without letting me know?"
"You were asleep and I didn't want to disturb you."
"How pale you are! You are still suffering. You are concealing something
from me, Didier. You have received bad news."
"No, dearest, I assure you----"
The servant came into the room with a letter addressed to him. He took
it from her, and went and shut himself in the study, stating that he
must get rid of his correspondence which was in arrears. Obviously he
wanted to be alone. Françoise realized it, and was greatly distressed.
As soon as he was in the study, he placed his head in his hands and
endeavored to think. His mind was a blank. The shock had been too much
for him. He was stunned by it.
He stared at the letter on the table before him without opening it. It
bore the Nice postmark. Suddenly he caught hold of it and feverishly,
with shaking hands, tore it open. It was not until he had made several
attempts that he could read it:
_My Dear Captain_,
_I am of opinion that it is absolutely necessary for us to have an
interview. You need not be uneasy, for I do not bear you any ill-will on
account of our recent meeting. As soon as you recognized me you did the
proper thing. I might have entered into conversation with you there and
then, but a discussion in the street, even at ten o'clock at night, is
never very safe, and it is desirable that what we have to say to you
should, as far as possible, be said among ourselves. My friends are
here. I do not hide from you that they also will be delighted to see you
again. It is at the shop of one of them, Monsieur Toulouse, secondhand
clothes dealer, at the corner of the Rue Basse, in the old town, that I
make an appointment with you for five o'clock to-day. We shall wait for
you until six o'clock, and if you do not put in an appearance, we shall
be entitled to presume that our letter has gone astray, and we shall
write to Madame d'Haumont, taking the necessary precautions to insure,
this time, that our letter reaches its destination._
The letter was signed "The Parisian."
Strange to say the letter came as a relief to Didier. He would meet the
danger face to face. He would know exactly what to fear and what to
hope; whether he was to live and for how long.
He gave no thought of the danger to which he might be exposed by keeping
the appointment. Either his enemies and himself would "come to an
understanding," or they would murder him, and in any event they would be
rendering him a service.
When he had mapped out his plan of campaign, he felt sufficiently
himself for the time being to deceive Françoise by word and manner and
look.
He went to her and told her that he felt much better: he had been
suffering since the previous night from an attack of malarial fever
which he thought he had long since shaken off. He first caught it during
one of his visits, many years before, to a marshy district in the
tropics. His words in no way allayed his wife's misgivings.
In the afternoon she stole through the passage to the room which Didier
used as a study. It possessed a glazed door, the curtain of which was
not properly drawn. And she saw Didier with his eyes fixed on an
envelope which she recognized, by the seal on it, as one which she had
seen in his hands on the night before his duel with Count de Gorbio. His
head was slightly turned towards her, and there was a look of infinite
sadness on his face such as she had never seen before.
It was not for his own fate that the unhappy man was moved to pity, but
for her fate--the fate which he had brought on her in a moment of
lover's cowardice. He called himself a villain and held himself in
horror. He would have to die. He would have to rescue her from the shame
of her marriage with him. Yes, he would keep the appointment.
At that moment he raised his head, and he seemed to hear a mysterious
voice which said in a low whisper: "Don't go!"
The window which looked out on to the grounds was open. He thought he
saw a dark form holding on to the window. He half rose to his feet, his
heart beating like the clapper of a bell.
"Chéri-Bibi!"
Was it a dream? He found the strength to stand up; and he moved closer
to the window with arms outstretched to the dark form. And he heard once
more:
"Don't go!" And the dark form leaped into the room.
Françoise, hidden behind the curtain, watched, affrighted, the
incomprehensible spectacle of that hideous human monstrosity, the sight
of which alone would have made little children fly in terror, clasped in
her husband's arms.
What was the meaning of that embrace? By what unfathomable mystery did
Didier, her husband, her hero, hold to his heart this formidable brute
who came to visit him by the path peculiar to robbers and murderers?
A last flicker of light caused the bandit's face to loom into sight so
dramatically that Françoise opened her mouth to cry aloud in horror,
but her very horror stifled the cry, and she fell her length on the
floor.
She did not lose consciousness. In the next room a muffled whisper bore
witness that the conversation was continuing between the two friends.
But she could not hear what was said. In her ears rang a buzzing sound,
which seemed to be a messenger of madness.
She managed to drag herself to her room and to stretch herself on the
bed.
Chéri-Bibi, in the study, cut short Didier's desire for an explanation
of how he came to be there. It was not a question of explaining his
presence, but of knowing what the Nut was going to do in view of the
danger which threatened him. Here the bandit found himself up against a
rock.
Nothing that he could say to dissuade the Nut from keeping the
appointment which the Parisian had made in so barefaced a manner altered
his resolution. He would not swerve from his opinion that he must try a
policy of conciliation, and the prospect which was guilelessly opened up
to him by Chéri-Bibi, who proposed to get rid at the earliest
moment--that very evening if necessary--of the miscreants who were
threatening him, was not one likely to make him change his mind.
Notwithstanding his ten years in a penal settlement, it was difficult
for him to treat seriously an idea, put forward so definitely, for the
suppression of these human obstacles. Thus he was not content to implore
his old comrade from the inferno to refrain from any intervention in the
formidable business, he put it to him as a peremptory command.
At the outset he had welcomed the almost natural appearance of
Chéri-Bibi as an unexpected help which Providence had vouchsafed him in
the hour of adversity, but after a few minutes' talk the artlessness of
his friend's project struck him with dismay, and led him almost to
regret that, in circumstances in which all might yet perhaps be saved by
the display of tact and resource, he should meet again a protector of
such savage zeal that human life seemed to mean little or nothing to
him.
Seeing him in such a pitiful frame of mind, Chéri-Bibi expressed his
shame of what he called his lack of pluck, and, somewhat vexed, no
longer concealed from him that he had already taken it upon himself to
remove the commonest of his enemies from his path.
"Whom do you mean?" asked Didier in a voice strained with anxiety.
"The Caid. The man whose dead body was found at Mont Boron. It made
quite a stir. I did it," returned Chéri-Bibi frankly.
Didier shuddered, refusing, however, to believe his own ears.
"But my wife and I were at Mont Boron that evening, and not far from the
very spot."
"Exactly. His presence prevented you from kissing each other."
"And you killed him!"
"Don't take on like that. You had nothing to do with it. It was his own
fault. Pull yourself together. He had no right to creep over the
parapet. He was already mangled and disfigured, I assure you, when I
finished him off to prevent him from molesting you."
"It's awful!"
"Not a bit of it. There's no need to exaggerate. And then, you know, he
wasn't there for any good purpose."
"Oh, Chéri-Bibi! . . . Chéri-Bibi, your friendship is a fearful
thing."
"Is it really! . . . Yes, my friendship is a fearful thing, but not for
you, I hope. You will never know all that I have done to make your life
a success, and for your happiness."
"Yes, I do know. I owe everything to you."
"I won't deny it. That's why, since I am responsible for your happiness,
I won't allow anyone to lay hands upon it."
Then, in language which bore witness to a certain acquaintance with the
polite world, the convict spoke to him with an almost lyrical
sensibility of the wedding ceremony, at which he had been present, at a
distance so as not to be recognized, but sufficiently near to keep an
eye on those miscreants and thwart their schemes.
When Didier learned from Chéri-Bibi that he had again escaped from
prison on the heels of the Parisian and his gang, and hastened after
them to Europe solely to keep them under observation and prevent them
from meeting him; when he learned that Chéri-Bibi had brought with him
Yoyo transformed into a dental-surgeon; when he was told of the part
played by M. Hilaire, to whom he already owed a great deal, in mounting
guard during many days over him and his honeymoon; and when he learned
that the fisherman who one evening took him and his wife for a row in
his boat was no other than Chéri-Bibi--Chéri-Bibi, his guardian angel,
his tutelary saint, who was always on the alert, now acting secretly and
now crushing everything before him--Didier was at a loss to express his
surprise and gratitude as well as his consternation at the evidence of
so many dangers from which he had escaped at a time when he believed
that they had been dispelled for ever.
He clasped the bandit's hand in his own trembling hand, and his emotion
arose as much from a feeling of gratitude as from the discovery that
when he believed that his bark had put off for Cythera he had been
sailing over the abyss.
"You would never have known anything about all this if those swine had
given me another couple of days," ended Chéri-Bibi with a profound
sigh.
Captain d'Haumont grasped the significance of those words. He quivered
all over. A nice conversation! And such a meeting!
To have on the one hand Françoise, who lived but for his love, and on
the other Chéri-Bibi, who had escaped from the devil!
But the latter had not come to receive the Nut's thanks and speeches.
The moment that he was certain that he would never manage to convince
him, he quickly disappeared. He departed as he came, by the window, over
the roofs, and through the great, heavy, sweeping clouds in which his
huge form seemed to swell.