convinced that the right, indeed the only, thing had been done, and yet
much troubled and depressed.
Pichon _pere_ was a short, squat, powerfully built man, verging on
sixty, whose thick, dark grizzled hair, sturdy limbs, and hard hands, on
which the muscles showed like cords, spoke of endurance and strength; he
was, indeed, noted in the neighborhood for those qualities. His sons
resembled him slightly, and each other closely, as was natural, for they
were twins. They were heavy, lumpish fellows, and they made but an
ungracious return to the attempted civilities of the stranger, to whom
the offer of their mother to show him his room was a decided relief. As
he rose to follow the woman, Paul de Senanges lifted his small valise
with difficulty from the floor, on which he had placed it on entering
the house, and carried it out of the room in both his arms. The
brothers followed these movements with curiosity, and, when the door
closed behind their mother and the stranger, their eyes met.
* * * * *
Twenty-four hours had passed away, and nothing new had occurred at the
Maison Alix. The servants had not expressed any curiosity respecting the
departure of the citizen Glaire, no domiciliary visit had taken place,
and Berthe and her father were discussing the propriety of Prosper's
venturing, on the pretext of an excursion in another direction, a visit
to the isolated and quiet dwelling of the master-mason. No signal had
yet arrived. It was agreed that after the lapse of another day, if their
tranquillity remained undisturbed, Prosper Alix should visit Paul de
Senanges. Berthe, who was silent and preoccupied, retired to her own
room early, and her father, who was uneasy and apprehensive, desperately
anxious for the promised communication from the Marquis, was relieved by
her absence.
The moon was high in the dark sky, and her beams were flung across the
polished oak floor of Berthe's bedroom, through the great window with
the stone balcony, when the girl, who had gone to sleep with her lover's
name upon her lips in prayer, awoke with a sudden start, and sat up in
her bed. An unbearable dread was upon her; and yet she was unable to
utter a cry, she was unable to make another movement. Had she heard a
voice? No, no one had spoken, nor did she fancy that she heard any
sound. But within her, somewhere inside her heaving bosom, something
said, "Berthe!"
And she listened, and knew what it was. And it spoke, and said:
"I promised you that, living or dead, I would come to you again. And I
have come to you; but not living."
She was quite awake. Even in the agony of her fear she looked around,
and tried to move her hands, to feel her dress and the bedclothes, and
to fix her eyes on some familiar object, that she might satisfy herself,
before this racing and beating, this whirling and yet icy chilliness of
her blood should kill her outright, that she was really awake.
"I have come to you; but not living."
What an awful thing that voice speaking within her was! She tried to
raise her head and to look toward the place where the moonbeams marked
bright lines upon the polished floor, which lost themselves at the foot
of the Japanese screen. She forced herself to this effort, and lifted
her eyes, wild and haggard with fear, and there, the moonbeams at his
feet, the tall black screen behind him, she saw Paul de Senanges. She
saw him; she looked at him quite steadily; she rose, slowly, with a
mechanical movement, and stood upright beside her bed, clasping her
forehead with her hands, and gazing at him. He stood motionless, in the
dress he had worn when he took leave of her, the light-colored
riding-coat of the period, with a short cape, and a large white cravat
tucked into the double breast. The white muslin was flecked, and the
front of the riding-coat was deeply stained, with blood. He looked at
her, and she took a step forward--another--then, with a desperate
effort, she dashed open the railing and flung herself on her knees
before him, with her arms stretched out as if to clasp him. But he was
no longer there; the moonbeams fell clear and cold upon the polished
floor, and lost themselves where Berthe lay, at the foot of the screen,
her head upon the ground, and every sign of life gone from her.
* * * * *
"Where is the citizen Glaire?" asked Prosper Alix of the _citoyenne_
Pichon, entering the house of the master-mason abruptly, and with a
stern and threatening countenance. "I have a message for him; I must see
him."
"I know nothing about him," replied the _citoyenne_, without turning in
his direction, or relaxing her culinary labors. "He went away from here
the next morning, and I did not trouble myself to ask where; that is his
affair."
"He went away? Without letting me know! Be careful, _citoyenne_; this is
a serious matter."
"So they tell me," said the woman with a grin, which was not altogether
free from pain and fear; "for you! A serious thing to have a _suspect_
in your house, and palm him off on honest people. However, he went away
peaceably enough when he knew we had found him out, and that we had no
desire to go to prison, or worse, on his account, or yours."
She was strangely insolent, this woman, and the listener felt his
helplessness; he had brought the young man there with such secrecy, he
had so carefully provided for the success of concealment.
"Who carried his valise?" Prosper Alix asked her suddenly.
"How should I know?" she replied; but her hands lost their steadiness,
and she upset a stew-pan; "he carried it here, didn't he? and I suppose
he carried it away again."
Prosper Alix looked at her steadily--she shunned his gaze, but she
showed no other sign of confusion; then horror and disgust of the woman
came over him.
"I must see Pichon," he said; "where is he?"
"Where should he be but at the wall? he and the boys are working there,
as always. The citizen can see them; but he will remember not to detain
them; in a little quarter of an hour the soup will be ready."
The citizen did see the master-mason and his sons, and after an
interview of some duration he left the place in a state of violent
agitation and complete discomfiture. The master-mason had addressed to
him these words at parting:
"I assert that the man went away at his own free will; but if you do not
keep very quiet, I shall deny that he came here at all--you cannot prove
he did--and I will denounce you for harboring a _suspect_ and
_ci-devant_ under a false name. I know a De Senanges when I see him as
well as you, citizen Alix; and, wishing M. Paul a good journey, I hope
you will consider about this matter, for truly, my friend, I think you
will sneeze in the sack before I shall."
* * * * *
"We must bear it, Berthe, my child," said Prosper Alix to his daughter
many weeks later, when the fever had left her, and she was able to talk
with her father of the mysterious and frightful events which had
occurred. "We are utterly helpless. There is no proof, only the word of
these wretches against mine, and certain destruction to me if I speak.
We will go to Spain, and tell the Marquis all the truth, and never
return, if you would rather not. But, for the rest, we must bear it."
"Yes, my father," said Berthe submissively, "I know we must; but God
need not, and I don't believe He will."
The father and the daughter left France unmolested, and Berthe "bore it"
as well as she could. When better times come they returned, Prosper Alix
an old man, and Berthe a stern, silent, handsome woman, with whom no one
associated any notions of love or marriage. But long before their return
the traditions of the Croix Rousse were enriched by circumstances which
led to that before-mentioned capital bargain made by the father of the
Giraudier of the present. These circumstances were the violent death of
Pichon and his two sons, who were killed by the fall of a portion of the
great boundary-wall on the very day of its completion, and the
discovery, close to its foundation, at the extremity of Pichon's
_terre_, of the corpse of a young man attired in a light-colored
riding-coat, who had been stabbed through the heart.
Berthe Alix lived alone in the Chateau de Senanges, under its restored
name, until she was a very old woman. She lived long enough to see the
golden figure on the summit of the "Holy Hill," long enough to forget
the bad old times, but not long enough to forget or cease to mourn the
lover who had kept his promise, and come back to her; the lover who
rested in the earth which once covered the bones of the martyrs, and who
kept a place for her by his side. She has filled that place for many
years. You may see it, when you look down from the second gallery of the
bell-tower at Fourvieres, following the bend of the outstretched golden
arm of Notre Dame.
The chateau was pulled down some years ago, and there is no trace of its
former existence among the vines.
Good times, and bad times, and again good times have come for the Croix
Rousse, for Lyons, and for France, since then; but the remembrance of
the treachery of Pichon & Sons, and of the retribution which at once
exposed and punished their crime, outlives all changes. And once, every
year, on a certain summer night, three ghostly figures are seen, by any
who have courage and patience to watch for them, gliding along by the
foot of the boundary-wall, two of them carrying a dangling corpse, and
the other, implements for mason's work and a small leather valise.
Giraudier, _pharmacien_, has never seen these ghostly figures, but he
describes them with much minuteness; and only the _esprits forts_ of the
Croix Rousse deny that the ghosts of Pichon & Sons are not yet laid.
THE PHANTOM FOURTH.
They were three.
It was in the cheap night-service train from Paris to Calais that I
first met them.
Railways, as a rule, are among the many things which they do _not_ order
better in France, and the French Northern line is one of the worst
managed in the world, barring none, not even the Italian _vie ferrate_.
I make it a rule, therefore, to punish the directors of, and the
shareholders in, that undertaking to the utmost within my limited
ability, by spending as little money on their line as I can help.
It was, then, in a third-class compartment of the train that I met the
three.
Three as hearty, jolly-looking Saxon faces, with stalwart frames to
match, as one would be likely to meet in an hour's walk from the
Regent's Park to the Mansion House.
One of the three was dark, the other two were fair. The dark one was the
senior of the party. He wore an incipient full beard, evidently in
process of training, with a considerable amount of grizzle in it.
The face of one of his companions was graced with a magnificent flowing
beard. The third of the party, a fair-haired youth of some twenty-three
or four summers, showed a scrupulously smooth-shaven face.
They looked all three much flushed and slightly excited, and, I must
say, they turned out the most boisterous set of fellows I ever met.
They were clearly gentlemen, however, and men of education, with
considerable linguistic acquirements; for they chatted and sang, and
declaimed and "did orations" all the way from Paris to Calais, in a
slightly bewildering variety of tongues.
Their jollity had, perhaps, just a little over-tinge of the slap-bang
jolly-dog style in it; but there was so much heartiness and good-nature
in all they said and in all they did, that it was quite impossible for
any of the other occupants of the carriage to vote them a nuisance; and
even the sourest of the officials, whom they chaffed most unmercifully
and unremittingly at every station on the line, took their punishment
with a shrug and a grin. The only person, indeed, who rose against them
in indignant protestation was the head-waiter at the Calais station
refreshment-room, to whom they would persist in propounding puzzling
problems, such as, for instance, "If you charge two shillings for
one-and-a-half-ounce slice of breast of veal, how many fools will it
take to buy the joint off you?"--and what _he_ got by the attempt to
stop their chaff was a caution to any other sinner who might have felt
similarly inclined.
As for me, I could only give half my sense of hearing to their
utterings, the other half being put under strict sequester at the time
by my friend O'Kweene, the great Irish philosopher, who was delivering
to me, for my own special behoof and benefit, a brilliant, albeit
somewhat abstruse, dissertation on the "visible and palpable outward
manifestations of the inner consciousness of the soul in a trance;"
which occupied all the time from Paris to Calais, full eight hours, and
which, to judge from my feelings at the time, would certainly afford
matter for three heavy volumes of reading in bed, in cases of inveterate
sleeplessness--a hint to enterprising publishers.
My friend O'Kweene, who intended to stay a few days at Calais, took
leave of me on the pier, and I went on board the steamer that was to
carry us and the mail over to Dover.
Here I found our trio of the railway-car, snugly ensconced under an
extemporized awning, artfully constructed with railway-rugs and
greatcoats, supported partly against the luggage, and partly upon
several oars, purloined from the boats, and turned into tent-poles for
the nonce--which made the skipper swear wofully when he found it out
some time after.
The three were even more cheery and boisterous on board than they had
been on shore. From what I could make out in the dark, they were
discussing the contents of divers bottles of liquor; I counted four dead
men dropped quietly overboard by them in the course of the hour and a
half we had to wait for the arrival of the mail-train, which was late,
as usual on this line.
At last we were off, about half-past two o'clock in the morning. It was
a beautiful, clear, moonlit night, so clear, indeed, that we could see
the Dover lights almost from Calais harbor. But we had considerably more
than a capful of wind, and there was a turgent ground-swell on, which
made our boat--double-engined, and as trim and tidy a craft as ever sped
across the span from shore to shore--behave rather lively, with sportive
indulgence in a brisk game of pitch-and-toss that proved anything but
comfortable to most of the passengers.
When we were steaming out of Calais harbor, our three friends, emerging
from beneath their tent, struck up in chorus Campbell's noble song, "Ye
Mariners of England," finishing up with a stave from "Rule, Britannia!"
But, alas for them! however loudly their throats were shouting forth the
sway proverbially held by Albion and her sons over the waves, on this
occasion at least the said waves seemed determined upon ruling these
particular three Britons with a rod of antimony; for barely a few
seconds after the last vibrating echoes of the "Britons never, never,
never shall be slaves!" had died away upon the wind, I beheld the three
leaning lovingly together, in fast friendship linked, over the rail,
conversing in deep ventriguttural accents with the denizens of Neptune's
watery realm.
We had one of the quickest passages on record--ninety-three minutes'
steaming carried us across from shore to shore. When we were just on the
point of landing, I heard the dark senior of the party mutter to his
companions, in a hollow whisper and mysterious manner, "He is gone
again;" to which the others, the bearded and the smooth-shaven,
responded in the same way, with deep sighs of evident relief, "Ay,
marry! so he is at last."
This mysterious communication roused my curiosity. Who was the party
that was said to be gone at last? Where had he come from? where had he
been hiding, that _I_ had not seen him? and where was he gone to now? I
determined to know; if but the opportunity would offer, to screw, by
cunning questioning, the secret out of either of the three.
Fate favored my design.
For some inscrutable reason, known only to the company's officials, we
cheap-trainers were not permitted to proceed on our journey to London
along with the mail, but were left to kick our heels for some two hours
at the Dover station.
I went into the refreshment-room to look for my party; I had a notion I
should find them where the Briton's unswerving and unerring instinct
would be most likely to lead them. It turned out that I was right in my
conjecture. There they were, seated round a table with huge bowls of
steaming tea and monster piles of buttered toast and muffins spread on
the festive board before them. Ay, indeed, there they were; but _quantum
mutati ab illis_! how strangely changed from the noisy, rollicking set I
had known them in the railway-car and on board the steamer, ere yet the
demon of sea-sickness had claimed them for his own! How ghastly sober
they looked now, to be sure! And how sternly and silently bent upon
devoting themselves to the swilling of the Chinese shrub infusion and to
the gorging of indigestible muffins. It was quite clear to me that it
would have been worse than folly to venture upon addressing them while
thus absorbed in absorbing. So I resolved to await a more favorable
opening, and went out meanwhile to walk on the platform.
A short time I was left in solitary possession of the promenade; then I
became suddenly aware that another traveller was treading the same
ground with me--it was the dark elderly leader of the three. I glanced
at him as he passed me under one of the lamps. He looked pale and sad.
The furrowed lines on his brow bespoke deliberation deep and pondering
profound. All the infinite mirth of the preceding few hours had departed
from him, leaving him but a wretched wreck of his former reckless self.
"A fine night, sir," I said to break the ice--"for the season of the
year," I added by way of a saving clause, to tone down the absoluteness
of the assertion.
He looked at me abstractedly, merely reechoing my own words, "A fine
night, sir, for the season of the year."
"Why look ye so sad now, who were erst so jolly?" I bluntly asked,
determined to force him into conversation.
"Ay, indeed, why so sad now?" he replied, looking me full in the face;
then, suddenly clasping my arm with a spasmodic grip, he continued
hurriedly, "I think I had best confide our secret to you. You seem a man
of thought. I witnessed and admired the patient attention with which you
listened to your friend's abstruse talk in the railway-car. Maybe you
can find the solution of a mystery which defies the ponderings of our
poor brains--mine and my two friends."
Then he proceeded to pour into my attentive ear this gruesome tale of
mystery:
"We three--that is, myself, yon tall bearded Briton," pointing to the
glass door of the refreshment-room, "whose name is Jack Hobson, and
young Emmanuel Topp, junior partner in a great beer firm, whom you may
behold now at his fifth bowl of tea and his seventh muffin--are
teetotallers----"
"Teetotallers!" I could not help exclaiming. "Lord bless me! that is
certainly about the last thing I should have taken you for, either of
you."
"Well," he replied with some slight confusion, "at least, we _were
total_ teetotallers, though I admit we can now only claim the character
of partial abstainers. The fact is, when, about a fortnight ago, we were
discussing the plan of our projected visit to the great Paris
Exhibition, Topp suggested that while in France we should do as the
French do, to which Jack Hobson assented, remarking that the French knew
nothing about tea, and that a Frenchman's tea would be sure to prove an
Englishman's poison. So we resolved to suspend the pledge during our
visit to France.
"It was on the second day after our arrival in Paris. We were dining in
a private cabinet at Desire Beaurain's, one of the leading restaurants
on the fashionable side of the Montmartre--Italiens Boulevard. Our
dinner was what an Irishman might call a most 'illigant' affair. We had
sipped several bottles of Sauterne, and tasted a few of Tavel, and we
were just topping the entertainment with a solitary bottle of champagne,
when I became suddenly aware of the presence of another party in the
room--a _fourth man_--who sat him down at our table, and helped himself
liberally to our liquor. From what I ascertained afterward from Jack
Hobson and Emmanuel Topp, the intruder's presence became revealed to
them also, either about the same time or a little later. What was he
like? I cannot tell. His figure and face remained indistinct
throughout--phantom-like. His features seemed endowed with a stronge
weird mobility that would defyingly elude the fixing grasp of our eager
eyes. Now, and to my two companions, he would look marvellously like me;
then, to me, he would stalk and rave about in the likeness of Jack
Hobson; again, he would seem the counterfeit of Emmanuel Topp; then he
would look like all the three of us put together; then like neither of
us, nor like anybody else. Oh, sir, it was a woful thing to be haunted
by this phantom apparition. Yet the strangest part of the affair was
that neither of us seemed to feel a whit surprised at the dread
presence; that we quietly and uncomplainingly let him drink our wine,
and actually give orders for more; that we never objected, in fact, to
any of his sayings and doings. What seemed also strange was that the
waiter, while yet receiving and executing his orders, was evidently
pretending to ignore his presence. But then, as I dare say you know as
well as I do, French waiters are _such_ actors!
"Well, to resume, there he was, this fourth man, seated at our table and
feasting at our expense. And the pranks that he would play us--they were
truly stupendous. He began his little game by ordering in half-a-dozen
of champagne. And when the waiter seemed slightly doubtful and
hesitating about executing the order, Topp, forsooth, must put in his
oar, and indorse the command, actually pretending that _I_, who am now
speaking to you, and who am the very last man in the world likely to
dream of such a preposterous thing, had given the order, and that I was
a jolly old brick, and the best of boon companions. Surprise at this
barefaced assertion kept me mute, and so, of course, the champagne was
brought in, and I thought the best thing to do under the circumstances
was to have my share of it at least; and so I had--my fair share; but,
bless you, it was nothing to what that fourth man drank of it. In fact,
the amount of liquor _he_ would swill on this and on the many subsequent
occasions he intruded his presence upon us, was a caution.
"We paid our little bill without grumbling, though the presence of the
fourth man at our table had added rather heavily to the _addition_, as
they call bills at French restaurants.