“THERE is a man at the door, madam. He says that he is a Ludsey man, and that he worked for Captain Rames during the election.”
It was midday. Cynthia had her hat on and was at the moment buttoning her gloves.
“Tell him that Captain Rames is at the House of Commons now, and that he will be back at home by five,” she said.
“The man asked for you,” said the footman.
“For me? Did he give a name?”
“No. But he said that you would know him.”
Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
“Very well, Howard. Show him in.”
Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They usually came with the same request—the loan of their fare home, where they had relations to look after them; and they were usually impostors, who had not so much as seen the spire of St. Anne’s Church. But, on the other hand, there was always a possibility that the case might be genuine, and Cynthia made it a rule to see them. She had already got her purse out of her bag when the door was opened. But she dropped it when she saw her visitor.
“M. Poizat,” she cried, and she held out her hand to him.
M. Poizat, however, did not take it.
“You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name.”
M. Poizat shook his head.
“Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?”
“Of course.”
“You are very kind.”
Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old, small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added, the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.
“Why am I very kind to receive you?” Cynthia asked gently.
M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.
“Then you do not know what has happened to me?”
“No! Sit down and tell me.”
But M. Poizat remained standing.
“I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I have no longer a wife. All is gone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris—the Jobert case.”
“Of course.”
“But you have not followed it in detail.”
“No.”
The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case could not be opened since a fictitious action by claimants, whom Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested and prosecuted.
“You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money? How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was examined upon these questions by the juge d’instruction week after week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:
“‘It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial; but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France from the Mediterranean to the Channel.’ That is what she said. No one believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh. Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her crime.
“‘La Grande Clothilde,’ they named her. What blague would she have ready for the Cour d’Assizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie of hers ruined me.”
“Ruined you?” cried Cynthia.
“Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a woman in the dock snatching at any defence or delay; she tells a story so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head in a foreign country for thirty years.”
“Yes, but if the story is a lie?” cried Cynthia.
“Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fictitious fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true,” said M. Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled attitude, with his knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be hit at. “I am amazed,” he said. “It seems that one has never quite finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody else. We take in the Petit Parisien. I read the trial in the evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal. Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years, looks upon me as a stranger.”
Cynthia’s face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.
“Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly after all these years, and has snatched you back,” she said slowly, as if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken. “Quick! Tell me!”
She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat’s face, and fear growing in them more and more visibly.
“You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey. You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who claimed to know me.”
“Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner,” cried Cynthia, with a rising excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection. Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster which had overtaken her little visitor.
“He remembered that he had seen you—Wait! Now I have it—In a long corridor, in Metz, in ’71.”
M. Poizat nodded.
“The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner—it’s so you call him?—he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went to see the Marshal Bazaine.”
“Yes,” replied Cynthia. “And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the Germans for the betrayal of Metz.”
“That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde Jobert’s hands. But details of her story were true.”
“For instance?” asked Cynthia.
“That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the Germans and Bazaine.”
“That was true?”
“Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no longer any house.”
He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably. She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.
“I think you had better come back at five,” she said, “and tell my husband your story.”
“But of course he knows it already,” cried M. Poizat.
Cynthia shook her head.
“He would have spoken of it to me if he had.”
M. Poizat, however, was equally positive.
“But it is in the Ludsey newspapers. Captain Rames takes them in, and reads them of course.”
“Of course,” said Cynthia.
“Then he must know. Such news is not tucked away in the corner of a local paper. No, indeed. It was printed on the first page.”
“Still you had better see him,” said Cynthia. She rose as she spoke, and she spoke a trifle absently, as though her thoughts had been suddenly diverted from the consideration of M. Poizat’s calamity. “Come back at five. He will advise you.”
She rang the bell. She was in a hurry now to get rid of the little Frenchman. Something much more important to her had occurred than the revelations of La Grande Clothilde. Doubts had flashed into her mind—doubts which she was in torture to resolve. As soon as Poizat’s back was turned she went quickly into her husband’s study. Upon a side-table, carelessly heaped, with their wrappers still gummed about them, she counted a dozen of the local papers of Ludsey. They took two a week, one of each political complexion. It was six weeks then since Harry Rames had taken the trouble to glance at a newspaper from his own constituency.
She stripped off the wrappers to make sure. Then she turned to the calendar upon the top of his writing-table. Six weeks just took her back to the date when Harry Rames had emptied the House with a speech, and had brought home the tragic news of Colonel Challoner’s death.
Harry’s omission on the surface was trivial enough. But to Cynthia it was significant and disquieting. For it was not in accordance with the deliberate prudence which used to mark the conduct of his political career. To nurse the constituency, to be familiar with its events and its needs, to respond to it, this had been his first care. Now for six weeks he neglected even to inform himself about it. And the omission did not stand alone.
“He will be home at five,” Cynthia argued, “he who made it a rule to sit in the House however dull the course of public business.”
Often of late he had left the House as soon as questions were over and the usual vote taken upon the suspension of the eleven-o’clock rule, and had only returned thither upon the stroke of eleven on the chance of coming in for a division. Cynthia remembered, too, how indifferent he had been, on the day after he had made his failure, to the criticisms which the failure had evoked. Mr. Devenish had put in some biting and effective work in his reply, which should have been gall and wormwood to the ambitious Harry Rames. But he had not seemed to mind. The newspapers which supported the Government too had not spared him. Conceit and presumption were the least of his failings. The Piccadilly News had published a cartoon of him as Humpty Dumpty. Yet he had remained unmoved, though Cynthia had cried her eyes red over the castigation.
Certainly some change had come over him, she reflected, and once more she was conscious of fear and a sinking heart. For the story which she had heard this morning from M. Poizat linked itself up in her mind with the warning of Mr. Benoliel. Poizat’s history was not quite an illustration of the warning. That she recognized. Mr. Benoliel had bidden her beware of latent tendencies of character, latent cravings and ambitions, taking their origin from the years in which she had had no share. It was a definite act which had sprung into being in the case of M. Poizat. Still Poizat’s disaster was a proof of the clutch of finished things, and of the continuity of life; was an instance that to turn over the new page and begin to write afresh as she and Harry Rames had proposed to do, is beyond man’s reach. Two lines of verse, gathered she knew not whence, rang in her brain and would not be silenced:
|
“Our past deeds follow us from afar |
After a year’s respite Cynthia was again afraid. Mr. Benoliel was magnified by her fears into the semblance of a prophet of old.
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