After breakfast next morning Shorland expressed to M. Barre his
intention of going to see Gabrielle Rouget. He was told that he must not
go alone; a guard would be too conspicuous and might invite trouble; he
himself would bear him company.
The hot January day was reflected from the red streets, white houses,
and waxen leaves of the tropical foliage with enervating force. An
occasional ex-convict sullenly lounged by, touching his cap as he
was required by law; a native here and there leaned idly against a
house-wall or a magnolia tree; ill-looking men and women loitered in the
shade. A Government officer went languidly by in full uniform--even the
Governor wore uniform at all times to encourage respect--and the cafes
were filling. Every hour was “absinthe-hour” in Noumea, which had
improved on Paris in this particular. A knot of men stood at the door
of the Cafe Voisin gesticulating nervously. One was pointing to a notice
posted on the bulletin-board of the cafe announcing that all citizens
must hold themselves in readiness to bear arms in case the rumoured
insurrection among the natives proved serious. It was an evil-looking
company who thus discussed Governor Rapont’s commands. As the two
passed in, Shorland noticed that one of the group made a menacing action
towards Alencon Barre.
Gabrielle was talking to an ex-convict as they entered. Her face looked
worn; there was a hectic spot on each cheek and dark circles round the
eyes. There was something animal-like about the poise of the head and
neck, something intense and daring about the woman altogether. Her
companion muttered between his teeth: “The cursed English spy!”
But she turned on him sharply: “Go away, Gaspard, I have business. So
have you--go.” The ex-convict slowly left the cafe still muttering.
“Well, Gabrielle, how are your children this morning? They look gloomy
enough for the guillotine, eh?” said M. Barre.
“They are much trouble, sometimes--my children.”
“Last night, for instance.”
“Last night. But monsieur was unwise. We do not love the English here.
They do not find it comfortable on English soil, in Australia--my
children! Not so comfortable as Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon.
Criminal kings with gold are welcome; criminal subjects without
gold--ah, that is another matter, monsieur. It is just the same.
They may be gentlemen--many are; if they escape to Australia or go
as liberes, they are hunted down. That is English, and they hate the
English--my children.”
Gabrielle’s voice was directed to M. Barre, but her eyes were on
Shorland.
“Well, Gabrielle, all English are not inhospitable. My friend here, we
must be hospitable to him. The coals of fire, you know, Gabrielle. We
owe him some thing for yesterday. He wishes to speak to you. Be careful,
Gabrielle. No communist justice, Citizen Gabrielle.” M. Barre smiled
gaily.
Gabrielle smiled in reply, but it was not a pleasant smile, and she
said: “Treachery, M. Barre--treachery in Noumea? There is no such thing.
It is all fair in love and war. No quarter, no mercy, no hope. All is
fair where all is foul, M. Barre.”
M. Barre shrugged his shoulders pleasantly and replied: “If I had my way
your freedom should be promptly curtailed, Gabrielle. You are an active
citizen, but you are dangerous, truly.”
“I like you better when you do not have your way. Yet my children do
not hate you, M. Barre. You speak your thought, and they know what to
expect. Your family have little more freedom in France than my children
have here.”
M. Barre looked at her keenly for an instant, then, lighting a
cigarette, he said: “So, Gabrielle, so! That is enough. You wish to
speak to M. Shorland--well!” He waved his hand to her and walked away
from them. Gabrielle paused a moment, looking sharply at Blake Shorland,
then she said: “Monsieur will come with me?”
She led the way into another room, the boudoir, sitting-room,
breakfast-room, library, all in one. She parted the curtains at the
window, letting the light fall upon the face of her companion, while
hers remained in the shadow. He knew the trick, and moved out of the
belt of light. He felt that he was dealing with a woman of singular
astuteness, with one whose wickedness was unconventional and intrepid.
To his mind there came on the instant the memory of a Rocky Mountain
lioness that he had seen caged years before; lithe, watchful,
nervously powerful, superior to its surroundings, yet mastered by those
surroundings--the trick of a lock, not a trick of strength. He thought
he saw in Gabrielle a woman who for a personal motive was trying to
learn the trick of the lock in Noumea, France’s farthest prison. For
a moment they looked at each other steadily, then she said: “That
portrait--let me see it.”
The hand that she held out was unsteady, and it looked strangely white
and cold. He drew the photograph from his pocket and handed it to her. A
flush passed across her face as she looked at it, and was followed by a
marked paleness. She gazed at the portrait for a moment, then her lips
parted and a great sigh broke from her. She was about to hand it back
to him, but an inspiration seemed to seize her, and she threw it on the
floor and put her heel upon it. “That is the way I treated him,” she
said, and she ground her heel into the face of the portrait. Then she
took her foot away. “See, see,” she cried, “how his face is scarred and
torn! I did that. Do you know what it is to torture one who loves you?
No, you do not. You begin with shame and regret. But the sight of your
lover’s agonies, his indignation, his anger, madden you and you get the
lust of cruelty. You become insane. You make new wounds. You tear
open old ones. You cut, you thrust, you bruise, you put acid in the
sores--the sharpest nitric acid; and then you heal with a kiss of
remorse, and that is acid too--carbolic acid, and it smells of death.
They put it in the room where dead people are. Have you ever been to the
Morgue in Paris? They use it there.”
She took up the portrait. “Look,” she said, “how his face is torn! Tell
me of him.”
“First, who are you?”
She steadied herself. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I am his friend, Blake Shorland.”
“Yes, I remember your name.” She threw her hands up with a laugh, a
bitter hopeless laugh. Her eyes half closed, so that only light
came from them, no colour. The head was thrown back with a defiant
recklessness, and then she said: “I was Lucile Laroche, his wife--Luke
Freeman’s wife.”
“But his wife died. He identified her in the Morgue.”
“I do not know why I speak to you so, but I feel that the time has come
to tell all to you. That was not his wife in the Morgue. It was his
wife’s sister, my sister whom my brother drowned for her money--he made
her life such a misery! And he did not try to save her when he knew she
meant to drown herself. She was not bad; she was a thousand times better
than I am, a million times better than he was. He was a devil. But he
is dead now too.... She was taken to the Morgue. She looked like me
altogether; she wore a ring of mine, and she had a mark on her shoulder
the same as one on mine; her initials were the same. Luke had never
seen her. He believed that I lay dead there, and he buried her for me. I
thought at the time that it would be best I should be dead to him and to
the world. And so I did not speak. It was all the same to my brother. He
got what was left of my fortune, and I got what was left of hers. For I
was dead, you see--dead, dead, dead!”
She paused again. Neither spoke for a moment. Shorland was thinking what
all this meant to Clare Hazard and Luke Freeman.
“Where is he? What is he doing?” she said at length. “Tell me. I was--I
am--his wife.”
“Yes, you were--you are--his wife. But better if you had been that woman
in the Morgue,” he said without pity. What were this creature’s feelings
to him? There was his friend and the true-souled Clare.
“I know, I know,” she replied. “Go on!”
“He is well. The man that was born when his wife lay before him in the
Morgue has found another woman, a good woman who loves him and--”
“And is married to her?” interrupted Gabrielle, her face taking on again
a shining whiteness. But, as though suddenly remembering something,
she laughed that strange laugh which might have come from a soul
irretrievably lost. “And is married to her?”
Blake Shorland thought of the lust of cruelty, of the wounds, and the
acids of torture. “Not yet,” he said; “but the marriage is set for the
twenty-six of this month.”
“How I could spoil all that!”
“Yes, you could spoil all that. But you have spoiled enough already.
Don’t you think that if Luke Freeman does marry, you had better be dead
as you have been this last five years? To have spoiled one life ought to
be enough to satisfy even a woman like you.”
Her eyes looked through Blake Shorland’s eyes and beyond them to
something else; and then they closed. When they opened again, she said:
“It is strange that I never thought of his marrying again. And now I
want to kill her--just for the moment. That is the selfish devil in me.
Well, what is to be done, monsieur? There is the Morgue left. But then
there is no Morgue here. Ah, well, we can make one, perhaps--we can make
a Morgue, monsieur.”
“Can’t you see that he ought to be left the rest of his life in peace?”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Well, then!”
“Well--and then, monsieur? Ah, you did not wish him to marry me. He told
me so. ‘A fickle foreigner,’ you said. And you were right, but it was
not pleasant to me. I hated you then, though I had never spoken to you
nor seen you; not because I wanted him, but because you interfered.
He said once to me that you had told the truth in that. But--and then,
monsieur?”
“Then continue to efface yourself. Continue to be the woman in the
Morgue.”
“But others know.”
“Yes, Henri Durien knows and M. Barre suspects.”
“So, you see.”
“But Henri Durien is a prisoner for life; he cannot hear of the marriage
unless you tell him. M. Barre is a gentleman: he is my friend; his
memory will be dead like you.”
“For M. Barre, well! But the other--Henri. How do you know that he is
here for life? Men get pardoned, men get free, men--get free, I tell
you.”
Shorland noticed the interrupted word. He remembered it afterwards all
too distinctly enough.
“The twenty-sixth, the twenty-sixth,” she said.
Then a pause, and afterwards with a sudden sharpness: “Come to me on the
twenty-fifth, and I will give you my reply, M. Shorland.”
He still held the portrait in his hand. She stepped forward. “Let me see
it again,” she said.
He handed it to her: “You have spoiled a good face, Gabrielle.”
“But the eyes are not hurt,” she replied; “see how they look at one.”
She handed it back.
“Yes, kindly.”
“And sadly. As though he still remembered Lucile. Lucile! I have not
been called that name for a long time. It is on my grave-stone, you
know. Ah, perhaps you do not know. You never saw my grave. I have. And
on the tombstone is written this: By Luke to Lucile. And then beneath,
where the grass almost hides it, the line: I have followed my Star to
the last. You do not know what that line means; I will tell you. Once,
when we were first married, he wrote me some verses, and he called them,
‘My Star, Lucile.’ Here is a verse--ah, why do you not smile, when I
say I will tell you what he wrote? Chut! Women such as I have memories
sometimes. One can admire the Heaven even if one lives in--ah, you know!
Listen.” And with a voice that seemed far away and not part of herself
she repeated these lines:
“In my sky of delight there’s a beautiful Star;
‘Tis the sun and the moon of my days;
And the doors of its glory are ever ajar,
And I live in the glow of its rays.
‘Tis my winter of joy and my summer of rest,
‘Tis my future, my present, my past;
And though storms fill the East and the clouds haunt the West,
I shall follow my Star to the last.”
“There, that was to Lucile. What would he write to Gabrielle--to Henri’s
Gabrielle? How droll--how droll!” Again she laughed that laugh of
eternal recklessness.
It filled Shorland this time with a sense of fear. He lost sight of
everything--this strange and interesting woman, and the peculiar nature
of the events in which he was sharing, and saw only Clare Hazard’s
ruined life, Luke Freeman’s despair, and the fatal 26th of January, so
near at hand. He could see no way out of the labyrinth of disgrace. It
unnerved him more than anything that had ever happened to him, and he
turned bewildered towards the door. He saw that while Gabrielle lived,
a dead misfortune would be ever crouching at the threshold of Freeman’s
home, that whether the woman agreed to be silent or not, the hurt to
Clare would remain the same. With an angry bitterness in his voice that
he did not try to hide he said: “There is nothing more to be done now,
Gabrielle, that I can see. But it is a crime--it is a pity!”
“A pity that he did not tell the truth on the gravestone--that he did
not follow his star to the last, monsieur? How droll! And you should see
how green the grass was on my grave! Yes, it is a pity.”
But Shorland, heavy at heart, looked at her and said nothing more. He
wondered why it was that he did not loathe her. Somehow, even in her
shame, she compelled a kind of admiration and awe. She was the wreck of
splendid possibilities. A poisonous vitality possessed her, but through
it glowed a daring and a candour that belonged to her before she became
wicked, and that now half redeemed her in the eyes of this man, who knew
the worst of her. Even in her sin she was loyal to the scoundrel for
whom she had sacrificed two lives, her own and another’s. Her brow might
flush with shame of the mad deed that turned her life awry, and of the
degradation of her present surroundings; but her eyes looked straight
into those of Shorland without wavering, with the pride of strength if
not of goodness.
“Yes, there is one thing more,” she said. “Give me that portrait to
keep--until the 25th. Then you may take it--from the woman in the
Morgue.”
Shorland thought for a moment. She had spoken just now without sneering,
without bravado, without hardness. He felt that behind this woman’s
outward cruelty and varying moods there was something working that
perhaps might be trusted, something in Luke’s interest. He was certain
that this portrait had moved her deeply. Had she come to that period of
reaction in evil when there is an agonised desire to turn back towards
the good? He gave the portrait to her.