I
I was sitting in front of Thibaud’s Café one evening when I saw
Lewishon, whom I had not met for years.
Thibaud’s Café I must tell you first, is situated on Coconut Square,
Noumea. Noumea has a bad name, but it is not at all a bad place if you
are not a convict, neither is New Caledonia, take it altogether, and
that evening, sitting and smoking and listening to the band, and
watching the crowd and the dusk taking the flame trees, it seemed to
me for a moment that Tragedy had withdrawn, that there was no such
place as the Isle Nou out there in the harbour, and that the musicians
making the echoes ring to the “Sambre et Meuse” were primarily
musicians, not convicts.
Then I saw Lewishon crossing the Square by the Liberty Statue, and
attracted his attention. He came and sat by me, and we smoked and
talked whilst I tried to realise that it was fifteen years since I had
seen him last, and that he hadn’t altered in the least—in the dusk.
“I’ve been living here for years,” said he. “When I saw you last in
’Frisco, I was about to take up a proposition in Oregon. I didn’t,
owing to a telegram going wrong. That little fact changed my whole
life. I came to the Islands instead and started trading, then I came
to live in New Caledonia—I’m married.”
“Oh,” I said, “is that so?”
Something in the tone of those two words, “I’m married,” struck me as
strange.
We talked on indifferent subjects, and before we parted I promised to
come over and see him next day at his place, a few miles from the
town. I did, and I was astonished at what I saw.
New Caledonia, pleasant as the climate may be, is not the place one
would live in by choice. At all events it wasn’t in those days when
the convicts were still coming there from France. The gangs of
prisoners shepherded by warders armed to the teeth, the great barges
filled with prisoners that ply every evening when work is over between
the harbour quay and the Isle Nou, the military air of the place and
the fretting regulations, all these things and more robbed it of its
appeal as a residential neighbourhood. Yet the Lewishons lived there,
and what astonished me was the evidence of their wealth and the fact
that they had no apparent interests at all to bind them to the place.
Mrs. Lewishon was a woman of forty-five or so, yet her beauty had
scarcely begun to fade. I was introduced to her by Lewishon on the
broad verandah of their house, which stood in the midst of gardens
more wonderful than the gardens of La Mortola.
A week or so later, after dining with me in the town, he told me the
story of his marriage, one of the strangest stories I ever heard, and
this is it, just as he told it:
“The Pacific is the finest place in the world to drop money in. You
see it’s so big and full of holes that look like safe investments. I
started, after I parted with you, growing cocoanut trees in the Fijis.
It takes five years for a cocoanut palm to grow, but when it’s grown
it will bring you in an income of eighteen pence or so a year,
according as the copra prices range. I planted forty thousand young
trees, and at the end of the fourth year a hurricane took the lot.
That’s the Pacific. I was down and out, and then I struck luck. That’s
the Pacific again. I got to be agent for a big English firm here in
Noumea, and in a short time I was friends with everyone from Chardin
the governor right down. Chardin was a good sort, but very severe. The
former governor had been lax, so the people said, letting rules fall
into abeyance like the rule about cropping the convicts’ hair and
beards to the same pattern. However that may have been, Chardin had
just come as governor, and I had not been here more than a few months
when one day a big white yacht from France came and dropped anchor in
the harbour, and a day or two after a lady appeared at my office and
asked for an interview.
“She had heard of me through a friend, she said, and she sought my
assistance in a most difficult matter. In plain English she wanted me
to help in the escape of a convict.
“I was aghast. I was about to order her out of the office, when
something—something—something, I don’t know what, held my tongue and
kept me from rising for a moment, whilst with the cunning, which
amounts to magic, of a desperate woman in love, she managed to calm my
anger. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘and I should have been surprised if
you had taken the matter calmly, but will you listen to me, and when
you have heard me out, tell me if you would not have done what I have
done to-day?’
“I could not stop her, and this is what she told me:
“Her name was Madame Armand Duplessis, her maiden name had been
Alexandre. She was the only child of Alexandre, the big sugar refiner,
and at his death she found herself a handsome young girl with a
fortune of about twenty million francs and nothing between her and the
rogues of the world but an old maiden aunt given to piety and
guileless as a rabbit. However, she managed to escape the sharks and
married an excellent man, a Captain in the Cavalry and attached to St.
Cyr. He died shortly after the marriage, and the young widow, left
desolate and without a child to console her, took up living again with
her aunt, or rather the aunt came to live with her in the big house
she occupied on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
“About six months after she met Duplessis. I don’t know how she met
him, she didn’t say, but anyhow he wasn’t quite in the same circle as
herself. He was a clerk in La Fontaine’s Bank, and only drawing a few
thousand francs a year, but he was handsome and attractive and young,
and the upshot of it was they got married.
“She did not know anything of his past history and he had no family in
evidence, nothing to stand on at all but his position at the bank; but
she did not mind, she was in love and she took him on trust and they
got married. A few months after marriage a change came over Duplessis;
he had always been given rather to melancholy, but now an acute
depression of spirits came on him for no reason apparently; he could
not sleep, his appetite failed, and the doctors, fearing consumption,
ordered him a sea voyage. When he heard this prescription he laughed
in such a strange way that Madame Duplessis, who had been full of
anxiety as to his bodily condition, became for a moment apprehensive
as to this mental state. However, she said nothing, keeping her fears
hidden and busying herself in preparations for the voyage.
“It chanced that just at that moment a friend had a yacht to dispose
of, an eight hundred ton auxiliary-engined schooner, _La Gaudriole_.
It was going cheap, and Madame Duplessis, who was a good business
woman, bought it, reckoning to sell it again when the voyage was over.
“A month later they left Marseilles.
“They visited Greece and the Islands; then, having touched at
Alexandria, they passed through the Canal, came down the Red Sea and
crossed the Indian Ocean. They touched at Ceylon, and whilst there
Madame Duplessis suggested that instead of going to Madras, as they
had intended, they should go into the Pacific by way of the Straits of
Malacca. Duplessis opposed this suggestion at first, then he fell in
with it. More than that, he became enthusiastic about it. A weight
seemed suddenly to have been lifted from his mind, his eyes grew
bright and the melancholy that all the breezes of the Indian Ocean had
not blown away suddenly vanished.
“Two days later they left Ceylon, came through the Straits of Malacca
and by way of the Arafura Sea and Torres Straits into the Pacific. The
Captain of the yacht had suggested the Santa Cruz islands as their
first stopping place, but one night Duplessis took his wife aside and
asked her would she mind their making for New Caledonia instead. Then
he gave his reason.
“He said to her: ‘When you married me I told you I had no family; that
was not quite the truth. I have a brother. He is a convict serving
sentence in Noumea. I did not tell you because the thing was painful
to me as death.’
“You can fancy her feelings, struck by a bombshell like that, but she
says nothing and he goes on telling her the yarn he ought to have told
her before they were married.
“This brother, Charles Duplessis, had been rather a wild young scamp;
he lived in the Rue du Mont Thabor, a little street behind the Rue St.
Honoré in Paris, and he made his money on the Stock Exchange. Then he
got into terrible trouble. He was accused of a forgery committed by
another man, but could not prove his innocence. Armand was certain of
his innocence but could do nothing, and Charles was convicted and sent
to New Caledonia.
“Well, Madame Duplessis sat swallowing that fact, and when he’d done
speaking, she sat swallowing some more as if her throat was dry. Then
she says to Armand:
“‘Your brother is innocent, then,’ she says.
“‘As innocent as yourself,’ he answers her, ‘and it is the knowledge
of all this that has caused my illness and depression.
“‘Before I was married I was forgetting it all, but married to the
woman I love, rich, happy, with enviable surroundings, Charles came
and knocked at my door, saying: “Remember me in your happiness.”’
“‘But can we do nothing for him?’ asked Madame Duplessis.
“‘Nothing,’ replied Armand, ‘unless we can help him to escape.’
“Then he went on to tell her how he had not wanted to come on this
long voyage at first, feeling that there was some fate in the
business, and that it would surely bring him somehow or another to
Noumea; then, how the idea had come to him at Ceylon that he might be
able to help Charles to escape.
“She asked him had he any plan, and he replied that he had not and
that it was impossible to make any plan till he reached Noumea and
studied the place and its possibilities.
“Well, there was the position the woman found herself in, and a nice
position it was. Think of it, married only a short time and now
condemned to help a prisoner to escape from New Caledonia, for, though
she could easily have refused, she felt compelled to the business both
for the sake of her husband and the sake of his brother, an innocent
man wrongfully convicted.
“She agreed to help in the attempt like the high spirited woman she
was, and a few days later they raised the New Caledonia reef and the
Noumea lighthouse that marks the entrance to the harbour.
“Madame Duplessis had a big acquaintance in Paris, especially among
the political and military people, and no sooner had the yacht berthed
than the Governor and chief people who knew her name, began to show
their attentions, tumbling over themselves with invitations to dinners
and parties.
“That, again, was a nice position for her, having to accept the
hospitality of the people she had come to betray, so to speak, but she
had to do it: it was the only way to help her husband along in his
scheme, and leaving the yacht, she took up her residence in a house
she rented on the sea road; you may have seen it, a big white place
with green verandahs, and there she and her husband spent their time
whilst the yacht was being overhauled.
“They gave dinners and parties and went to picnics; they regularly
laid themselves out to please, and then, one night, Armand came to his
wife and said that he had been studying all means of escape from
Noumea, and he had found only one. He would not say what it was, and
she was content not to poke into the business, leaving him to do the
plotting and planning till the time came when she could help.
“Armand said that before he could do anything in the affair he must
first have an interview with Charles. They were hand in glove with the
Governor, and it was easy enough to ask to see a prisoner, but the
bother was the name of Duplessis, for Charles had been convicted and
exported under that name. The Governor had never noticed Charles, and
the name of Duplessis was in the prison books and forgotten. It would
mean raking the whole business up and claiming connection with a
convict, still it had to be done.
“Next day Armand called at the Governor’s house and had an interview.
He told the Governor that a relation named Charles Duplessis was
amongst the convicts and that he very much wanted to have an interview
with him.
“Now the laws at that time were very strict, and the Governor, though
pretty lax in some things as I’ve said, found himself up against a
stiff proposition, and that proposition was how to tell Armand there
was nothing doing.
“‘I am sorry,’ said the Governor, ‘but what you ask is impossible,
Monsieur Duplessis; a year ago it would have been easy enough, but
since the escape of Benonini and that Englishman Travers, the orders
from Paris have forbidden visitors: any message you would like me to
send to your relation shall be sent, but an interview—no.’
“Then Armand played his ace of trumps. He confessed, swearing the
Governor to secrecy, that Charles was his brother; he said that
Charles had in his possession a family secret that it was vital to
obtain. He talked and talked, and the upshot was that the Governor
gave in.
“Charles would be brought by two warders to the house on the Sea Road
after dark on the following day, the interview was to take place in a
room with a single door and single window. One warder was to guard the
door on the outside, the other would stand below the window. The whole
interview was not to last longer than half an hour.