THE FACE ON THE WALL
The morning of the inquiry found M. le Baron in Paris, in his old
rooms at the Montesquieu. He was in very good spirits, smiling and
buoyant, and not at all conscience-smitten over his desertion of his
servant in his hour of need. “It will be a not unwholesome lesson for
the little _fanfaron_,” he thought, “teaching him in the future to
keep a guard on his tongue and temper.” He foresaw, be it observed,
that certain issue, and felt no anxiety about it. But his face fell
somewhat to an added reflection: “I wonder if they have committed
_him_ for trial by now. Poor girl!” and he shrugged his shoulders with
a tiny sigh.
Having crossed by the night boat from Southampton, one might have
looked for a certain staleness in the Baron’s aspect. On the contrary,
he was as chirpy as a sparrow, having slept well throughout a pretty
bad crossing, and since had a refreshing tub and brush-up. He sat
down--though very late, with an excellent appetite--to his _petit
pain_ and rich coffee and _brioche_, and, having consumed them, took
snuff at short intervals for half an hour, and then prepared to go
out.
M. le Baron’s movements seemed carelessly casual, but he had, in fact,
a definite objective, and he made for it at his leisure. It lay on the
left bank of the river, in or near the district calling itself loosely
the Latin or Students’ Quarter. He crossed the river by the Pont des
Arts, and went straight down the Rue de Seine as far as the Rue de
Tournon, where he turned off in the direction of St. Sulpice. The
great bell up in the high tower was crashing and booming for a
funeral, and its enormous reverberations swayed like Atlantic rollers
across the fields of air. In all the world St. Sulpice bell is _the_
death-bell, so solemn, so deep, and so overwhelming it sounds. M. le
Baron paused to listen a moment. “Is it an omen?” thought he, “and am
I going to hear bad news?”
Somewhere at the back of the church, in a little street called the Rue
Bourbon-le-Château, he came to the shop of a small dealer in
prayer-books and holy pictures and pious images. It was a poor shop in
a faded district, and suggestive of scant returns and lean commons for
its inmates. A door, as gaunt and attenuated in appearance, stood open
to one side of the shop, and by this the visitor entered, with the
manner of one who knew the place. A flight of bare wooden stairs rose
before him, and up these he went, to the first, to the second floor,
where he paused, a little breathless, to knock on a door. “_Que
diable!_” cried a hoarse voice from within. “Who’s that?”
For answer the Baron turned the handle and presented himself. It was a
ragged, comfortless room he entered, frowzy, chill, without a carpet
and with dirty whitewashed walls. A table stood in the dingy window,
and at it was seated the solitary figure of a man--emaciated,
melancholy eyed--Ribault his name, a designer on the staff of the
_Petit Courrier des Dames_. Some of his work lay before him now: he
looked up from it with a startled exclamation, and rose to his feet.
Those were clad in list slippers: for the rest he wore a rusty
frock-coat, and at his neck a weeping black bow.
“M. le Baron!” he exclaimed, in wonder and welcome. “Who would have
thought to see you again!”
“Am I that sort, then?” answered Le Sage with a smile. “I am sorry I
left so poor an impression.”
“Ah, but what an impression!” cried the other fervently. “An angel of
goodness; a Samaritan; a comforter, and a healer in one!”
“Well, well, M. Ribault!” said the Baron. “You are still at the old
toil, I observe?”
“Always at it, Monsieur; but in my plodding, uninspired way--not like
my friend’s. Ah, he was a great artist was Jean.”
“Truly, he had a wonderful facility. Has he left you?”
“But for the grave, Monsieur. We had not otherwise been parted.”
Tears gathered in the poor creature’s eyes; he sighed, with a forlorn,
resigned gesture. Hearing his words, a shadow crossed the visitor’s
face. “That foreboding bell!” he muttered. He was genuinely
concerned, and not for one only reason. “You will tell me all about
it, perhaps, M. Ribault?” he said.
“He was never himself again after that accident,” answered the
designer. “All your tenderness, your care, your disinterested help
could do no more than earn for him a little respite from a sentence
already pronounced. He was virtually a dying man when you last left
him, Monsieur. The light of your healing presence withdrawn, the
shadow came out and was visible to me. Ah, but he would talk of you
often and often, and of how you had smoothed the bitter way for him.
He confided in you much: he told you his little history?”
“Something of it, Ribault.”
“It was the history of a brave man, Monsieur: of patient merit
eternally struggling against adversity; of conscious power having to
submit itself to necessity. There was that in him could he but have
indulged it--ah, if you had only seen!”
“Seen what, my poor friend?”
“Monsieur, he died in June; but before he died, he drew in pastel on
that wall, on that bare wall, a face that was like the fine blossom of
the aloe, crowning and vindicating with its immortal beauty the harsh
and thorny ugliness of those long necessitous years. It was his
testament, his swan-song. Less than its perfection would have made a
smaller artist; and it was produced by him from memory, as he sat
there dying in his chair.”
“From a memory of whom, Ribault?”
“I will tell you. One day, shortly before his death, there had come to
see him a step-brother of his, an Englishman, of whom I had never
heard nor he spoken. He had a lady with him, this brother, one of the
most beautiful you could picture, and her loveliness entered into
Jean’s heart. He could not forget it; he had no ease from it until his
art came to dispossess him of its haunting. I watched him at work; it
was marvellous: the wall broke into song and flower under my eyes.
That was the man, Monsieur; that was the man; it was his own soul
blossoming; and, having done what he must, he grew once more at peace.
Two days later he was dead.”
“I see no face on the wall, Ribault.”
“Alas, no, Monsieur! Alas, alas, no! When he returned, this strange
relation, this vandal, after his brother’s death, to arrange for the
funeral and dispose of his effects, he saw the drawing and he
denounced it. He did more: in his anger he seized a cloth, and, before
I could interpose, that miracle, that dream, was but a featureless
smudge upon the wall. And even then he would not be satisfied until
the last rainbow tints had vanished.”
The frown on M. le Baron’s brow was again darkening its habitual
placidity.
“What excuse had the man to offer for an act so outrageous?” he
demanded warmly.
The designer shrugged his shoulders. “What excuse but of the jealous
and coarse-grained! He said that the lady’s permission should have
been asked first; that anyhow the artist being dead it could not
matter, and that he had no idea of leaving the portrait there to
become the cynosure of common eyes. He was a hard man, Monsieur, and
we came to words.”
The visitor grunted. “M. Ribault, what was the name of this Goth?”
“It was the name of my friend, Monsieur.”
“What! Christian and surname the same?”
“Precisely one, Monsieur. They were _beaux-frères_, no more. With such
it may be.”
“Indubitably. And the lady’s name?”
“I could show you sooner than pronounce it. It was written by Jean
under the portrait.”
“But the portrait is lost!”
“Nevertheless, it is not altogether forgotten. Before it was destroyed
I had borrowed a camera from a friend and achieved a reproduction of
it. Alas, Monsieur! but a cold shadow of the original--a sadness, a
reflection, but, such as it is, a record I would not willingly let
perish.”
The Baron’s brow was smoother again; his eyes had recovered their good
humour.
“But this is interesting, my friend,” he said. “Might I be permitted
to see it?”
“Who sooner!” cried the designer. “Monsieur has only to command.”
He went to a cupboard, and presently produced from it a photograph
mounted on brown paper, which he presented to his visitor.
“You must not judge from it,” he said, “more than you would from the
shadow of an apple tree the colour of its blossom. But is it not a
beautiful face, Monsieur?”
“Beautiful, indeed,” answered Le Sage, profoundly pre-occupied. “And
did the brother know you had secured this transcript?” he asked
presently.
“Of a truth not, Monsieur. Sooner would I have died than tell him.”
“Ah!” For minutes longer the Baron stood absorbed in contemplation of
the photograph. Then suddenly he looked up.
“I want you to part with this to me, my friend.”
“Monsieur, it is yours. There is none to whom I would sooner confide
it.”
“You have the negative?”
“Truly, yes.”
“Keep it, and print no more from it for the present. Above all, keep
the knowledge of your possessing it from the Goth.”
Between wonder and sympathy the Frenchman acquiesced.
“No doubt he would want to destroy that too,” he said.
“Exactly,” answered Le Sage. “Now, listen, my friend. I have a
commission for you.”
It was a very handsome commission, the nature of which need not be
specified, since it was in effect merely a delicate acknowledgment of
a service rendered. And if the acknowledgment was out of all
proportion with the service, that was M. le Baron’s way, and one not
to be resented by a poor man who was also a reasonably proud man. So
the two parted very good friends, and the Baron went back to his
hotel, in high good humour with himself and all the world. On the
following night he was in London, ensconced in rooms in a private
hotel in Bloomsbury, where he learnt from the papers of the latest
startling development in what had come to be known as the “Wildshott
Murder Case.” “So,” he thought, “it works according to plan.”
He had managed to procure, while in Paris, a personal introduction
from a certain eminent official to a corresponding dignitary in the
Metropolis; but for the present he kept that in his pocket. There were
some smaller fry to be dealt with first: aids of the great approach.