"I thought it inadvisable to tell you this before," he said after a
pause, "but now that you have got wind of it I may as well tell you the
rumours--or rather the chief one. The rest don't matter. The Baronne
de Coudron was known to be extremely rich, yet a few years ago she was
quite poor. She bought the Chateau d'Uzerche recently. How and where
she suddenly got the money is a mystery that has puzzled everybody, and
rumours have been afloat that she obtained it by means which could lead
her to penal servitude. But of course nobody knows anything definite--
so nobody dares do more than insinuate."
"The gendarmes seemed to know something definite," I said.
"Yes, and much use they made of it! Paulton is most likely safely back
in England by now."
"They can arrest him there of course."
"They can--but will they? Do you think officials capable of being
hoodwinked as these gendarmes were, will have acumen enough to catch a
clever man like Paulton? We must admit that he is clever."
The more I saw of Faulkner, the more I grew to like him. Singularly
undemonstrative in ordinary conversation, he recalled to my mind a
blacksmith's forge that is covered and banked up with cold, wet coal,
but that burns so fiercely within. What had first attracted me to the
lad had been his amazing coolness in the face of death, a coolness that
amounted to indifference. I could picture him under fire, calmly
rolling a cigarette and telling others what to do. Yet he was not a
soldier. Like myself he was merely an idler. Leaving out the Houghton
Park incident, I have myself only once been under fire. It was not on a
battlefield, though not far from one--the field of Tewkesbury. It was
during a big rabbit shoot, when two of the guns fired straight at me
simultaneously, and the rabbit they killed rolled over on to my feet,
dead.
My conduct was not heroic on that occasion I am afraid. With one bound
I sprang behind a big elm, and, from that position of safety, hurled
vituperation at my unintentional assailants, ordering them to desist.
It took me some moments to convince myself I had not been hit, but the
shock to my system was, I confess, considerable.
From the theatre we strolled through the big doors into the Salles de
jeux. I tossed a hundred-franc note on the rouge and left it there.
Red came up six times, and I gathered up my winnings.
The ball clicked again the seventh time, and black came up!
An old man with fingers like claws, and horribly long and dirty nails,
introduced himself, engaged me in conversation, and ended by trying to
induce me to partake in his infallible system for winning at roulette!
What a lot of rubbish has been written about the Rooms at Monte! The
first time I went there--when I was quite a youth--I expected to find a
sort of Aladdin's palace, myriad glittering lights everywhere,
gorgeously-dressed women sparkling with diadems and precious stones.
Instead, I sauntered into a series of large, lofty, heavily-gilded rooms
with an atmosphere one could cut with a knife, in which were several
long tables with people sitting round them, quite common-looking people,
and anything but smart; the majority of the women were bloused and
skirted tourists. One might have mistaken the scene for a number of
board-meetings in progress simultaneously, but for the fact that in the
centre of each table sat men in funereal black who, at intervals, droned
monotonously through their noses--
"_Messieurs, faites vos jeux_."