The fact that he was being watched had a curious effect on Laurence
Vanderlyn. It roused in him the fighting instinct which he had had to
keep in leash the whole of that terrible first day of repression, save
during the moments when he had been confronted with the head of the
detective department at the Prefecture of Police.
As at last he walked on, now choosing deliberately quiet and solitary
streets, the footsteps of his unknown companion echoed loudly behind
him, and he allowed himself, for the first time since the night before,
the cruel luxury of recollection. For the first time, also, he forced
himself to face the knowledge that any hour might bring as unexpected a
development as had been the prolonged presence of Pargeter in Paris. He
realised that he must, if possible, be prepared, forearmed, with the
knowledge of what had occurred after he had left the darkened railway
carriage at Dorgival. News travels slowly in provincial France, yet,
even so, the fact that the dead body of a woman had been found in a
first-class carriage of the Paris demi-rapide must soon have become
known, and made its way into the local press.
Out of the past there came to Vanderlyn the memory of an old-fashioned
reading-room frequented by him long years before when he was studying in
Paris.
The place had been pointed out to him by one of the professors at the
Sorbonne as being by far the best lending library on the left side of
the Seine; and there, in addition to the ordinary reading-room, was an
inner room, where, by paying a special fee, one could see all the
leading provincial papers.
In some such sheet,--for in France every little town has its own
newspaper,--would almost certainly appear the first intimation of so
sinister and mysterious a discovery as the finding of a woman's dead
body in the Paris train.
Vanderlyn wondered if the library--the Bibliothèque Cardinal was its
name--still existed. If yes, there was every chance that he might find
there what was vital to him to know, both in order to rid himself of the
obsessing vision which he saw whenever he shut his tired eyes, and also
that he might be prepared for any information suddenly forwarded to
Pargeter from the Prefecture of Police.
The next morning Vanderlyn was scarcely surprised to see the man who had
shadowed him the night before lying in wait for him before the house.
The American measured the other's weary face and stout figure, and then
he began quietly walking up the now deserted arcades of the Rue de
Rivoli; with a certain grim amusement, he gradually increased his pace,
and when at last he turned into the great court of the Louvre, and stood
for a moment at the base of the Gambetta Monument, he assured himself
that he had out-distanced his pursuer.
Striding quickly across the most historic of Paris bridges, he threaded
the narrow, tortuous thoroughfares dear to every lover of old Paris,
till he reached the Place St. Sulpice. There, forming one of the corners
of the square, was the house wherein was housed the Bibliothèque
Cardinal, looking exactly as Vanderlyn remembered its having looked
twenty years before. Even the huge leather-bound books in the windows
seemed to be the same as in the days when the future American
diplomatist had been, if not a merry-hearted, then a most enthusiastic
student, making eager acquaintance with "The Quarter."
He walked into the shop, and recognised, in the stout, middle-aged woman
sitting there, the trim young bourgeoise to whom he had often handed a
fifty centime piece in those days which seemed so distant as almost to
belong to another life.
"Have you still a provincial paper room?" he asked, in a low tone.
"Yes," said the dame du comptoir, suavely, "but we have to charge a
franc for admission."
Vanderlyn smiled. "It used to be fifty centimes," he said.
"Ah! Monsieur, that was long ago! There are ten times as many provincial
papers now as then!"
He put the piece of silver on the counter. As he did so, he heard the
door of the shop quietly open, and, with a disagreeable feeling of
surprise, he saw the man, the detective he believed he had shaken off,
come up unobtrusively to where he was standing.
Vanderlyn hesitated----Then he reminded himself that what he was about
to do belonged to the part he had set himself to play: "Well, Madame,"
he said, "I will go through into your second reading-room and glance
over the papers;" he forced himself to add, "I am anxious to find news
of a person who has disappeared--who has, I fear, met with an accident."
The detective asked a question of the woman; he spoke in a low voice,
but Vanderlyn heard what he said--that is, whether there was any other
way out of the two reading-rooms except through the shop. On the woman's
replying in the negative, he settled himself down and opened an
illustrated paper.
Vanderlyn began systematically going through the provincial papers of
the towns at which he knew the train was to stop after he had left it at
Dorgival; and after the first uneasy quarter of an hour he forgot the
watcher outside, and became absorbed in his task. To his mingled
disappointment and relief, he found nothing.
It was of course possible that on the discovery of a dead body in a
Paris train, the matter would at once be handed over to the Paris
police; that would mean, in this case, that a body so found would be
conveyed to the Morgue.
The thought that this might be so made Vanderlyn's heart quail with
anguish and horror, and yet, if such a thing were within the bounds of
possibility, had he not better go to the Morgue alone and now, rather
than later in the company of Tom Pargeter?
As he passed out of the reading-room into the book-shop, and so into the
square, he understood for the first time, how it was that he had made so
foolish a mistake concerning the detective. The latter at once entered a
fiacre which had evidently been waiting for him, and, as Vanderlyn
plunged into the labyrinth of narrow streets leading from the Place St.
Sulpice to Notre Dame, he could hear the cab crawling slowly behind him.
Well, what matter? This visit to the Morgue was also in the picture--in
the picture, that is, of Laurence Vanderlyn, the kindly friend of Tom
Pargeter, helping in the perplexing, the now agonising, search for Mrs.
Pargeter.
But when at last he came in sight of the sinister triangular building
which crouches, toad-like, under the shadow of the great Cathedral,
Vanderlyn's heart failed him for the first time. If Peggy were indeed
lying there exposed to the careless, morbid glances of idle sightseers
to whom the Morgue is one of the sights of Paris, he felt that he could
not trust himself to go in and look at her.
He stood still for a few moments, and then, as he was about to turn on
his heel, he saw coming towards him from out of the door of the Morgue a
figure which struck a note of tragedy in the bright morning sunshine. It
was Madame de Léra, her eyes full of tears, her heart oppressed by the
sights she had just seen.
"There are three poor people there," she said, in a low voice, "two men
and a woman, but not, thank God! our friend. I wonder if it is possible
that we are mistaken--that there was no accident, Monsieur Vanderlyn?
But then, if so, where is she--why has she not written to me?"
He shook his head with a hopeless gesture, afraid to speak lest he
should be tempted to share with her his agony and complicated suspense.
"If she were a Catholic," added Madame de Léra pitifully, "I should be
inclined to think--to hope--that she had gone to a convent; but--but for
her there was no such place of refuge from temptation----" her voice as
she uttered the last word became almost inaudible; more firmly she
added, "Is it not possible that she may have gone to England, to her
child?"
"No," said Vanderlyn, dully, "she has not done that."
He took her to her door, and then, as he had promised Tom Pargeter to
do, went to the Avenue du Bois, there to spend with Margaret Pargeter's
husband another term of weary waiting and suspense.
* * * * *
That second day, of which the closing hours were destined to bring to
Laurence Vanderlyn the most dramatic and dangerous moments connected
with the whole tragic episode of Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance, wore
itself slowly, uneventfully away.
Tom Pargeter, alternating between real anxiety, and an angry suspicion
that his wife was in very truth only hiding from him, poured into the
ears of this man, whom he now regarded rather as his friend than his
wife's, every theory which might conceivably account for Peggy's
disappearance. He took note of every suggestion made to him by the
members of the now intensely excited and anxious household, for Margaret
Pargeter's gentle personality and thoughtful kindness had endeared her
to her servants.
When Plimmer, her staid maid, evolved the idea that Mrs. Pargeter, on
her way to the station, might have stopped to see some friend, and,
finding that friend ill, have remained to nurse her,--the suggestion so
seized hold of Pargeter's imagination that he insisted on spending the
afternoon in making a tour of his own and his wife's acquaintances. To
Vanderlyn's anger and pain, the only result of this action on his part
was that Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance became known to a large circle,
and that more than one of the evening papers contained a garbled
reference to the matter.
Meanwhile, or so Pargeter complained, the officials of the Prefecture of
Police remained curiously inactive. They were quite certain, so they
told the anxious husband, of ultimately solving the mystery, but it was
doubtful if any news could be procured before the next day, for they
were now directing their researches to the environs of Paris--a new
theory now evolved being that Mrs. Pargeter, having hired a motor cab to
drive her to Marly-le-Roi, had met with an accident or sinister
misadventure on the way thither.