Читать книгу Castles in the Air - Baroness Orczy - Страница 9

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When I turned the corner of the street and came is sight of the squalid house where I lodged, I felt like a being from another world. Twenty thousand francs—a fortune!—was waiting for me inside those dingy walls. Yes, twenty thousand, for by now I had fully made up my mind. I had two documents concealed beneath the floor of my bedroom—one so like the other that none could tell them apart. One of these I would restore to the lovely being who had offered me ten thousand francs for it, and the other I would sell to my first and uncouth client for another ten thousand francs!

Four hundred! Bah! Ten thousand shall you pay for the treaty, my friend of the Danish or Russian Secret Service! Ten thousand!—it is worth that to you!

In that happy frame of mind I reached the front door of my dingy abode. Imagine my surprise on being confronted with two agents of police, each with fixed bayonet, who refused to let me pass.

“But I lodge here,” I said.

“Your name?” queried one of the men. “Hector Ratichon,” I replied. Whereupon they gave me leave to enter.

It was very mysterious. My heart beat furiously. Fear for the safety of my precious papers held me in a death-like grip. I ran straight to my room, locked the door after me, and pulled the curtains together in front of the window. Then, with hands that trembled as if with ague, I pulled aside the strip of carpet which concealed the hiding-place of what meant a fortune to me.

I nearly fainted with joy; the papers were there—quite safely. I took them out and replaced them inside my coat.

Then I ran up to see if Theodore was in. I found him in bed. He told me that he had left the office whilst my visitors were still with me, as he felt terribly sick. He had been greatly upset when, about an hour ago, the maid-of-all-work had informed him that the police were in the house, that they would allow no one—except the persons lodging in the house—to enter it, and no one, once in, would be allowed to leave. How long these orders would hold good Theodore did not know.

I left him moaning and groaning and declaring that he felt very ill, and I went in quest of information. The corporal in command of the gendarmes was exceedingly curt with me at first, but after a time he unbent and condescended to tell me that my landlord had been denounced for permitting a Bonapartiste club to hold its sittings in his house. So far so good. Such denunciations were very frequent these days, and often ended unpleasantly for those concerned, but the affair had obviously nothing to do with me. I felt that I could breathe again. But there was still the matter of the consigne. If no one, save the persons who lodged in the house, would be allowed to enter it, how would M. Charles Saurez contrive to call for the stolen document and, incidentally, to hand me over the ten thousand francs I was hoping for? And if no one, once inside the house, would be allowed to leave it, how could I meet Mlle. Geoffroy to-morrow at two o’clock in my office and receive ten thousand francs from her in exchange for the precious paper?

Moreover the longer the police stayed in this house and poked their noses about in affairs that concerned hardworking citizens like myself—why—the greater the risk would be of the matter of the stolen document coming to light.

It was positively maddening.

I never undressed that night, but just lay down on my bed, thinking. The house was very still at times, but at others I could hear the tramp of the police agents up and down the stairs and also outside my window. The latter gave on a small, dilapidated back garden which had a wooden fence at the end of it. Beyond it were some market gardens belonging to a M. Lorraine. It did not take me very long to realize that that way lay my fortune of twenty thousand francs. But for the moment I remained very still. My plan was already made. At about midnight I went to the window and opened it cautiously. I had heard no noise from that direction for some time, and I bent my ear to listen.

Not a sound! Either the sentry was asleep, or he had gone on his round, and for a few moments the way was free. Without a moment’s hesitation I swung my leg over the sill.

Still no sound. My heart beat so fast that I could almost hear it. The night was very dark. A thin mist-like drizzle was falling; in fact the weather conditions were absolutely perfect for my purpose. With utmost wariness I allowed myself to drop from the window-ledge on to the soft ground below.

If I was caught by the sentry I had my answer ready: I was going to meet my sweetheart at the end of the garden. It is an excuse which always meets with the sympathy of every true-hearted Frenchman. The sentry would, of course, order me back to my room, but I doubt if he would ill-use me; the denunciation was against the landlord, not against me.

Still not a sound. I could have danced with joy. Five minutes more and I would be across the garden and over that wooden fence, and once more on my way to fortune. My fall from the window had been light, as my room was on the ground floor; but I had fallen on my knees, and now, as I picked myself up, I looked up, and it seemed to me as if I saw Theodore’s ugly face at his attic window. Certainly there was a light there, and I may have been mistaken as to Theodore’s face being visible. The very next second the light was extinguished and I was left in doubt.

But I did not pause to think. In a moment I was across the garden, my hands gripped the top of the wooden fence, I hoisted myself up—with some difficulty, I confess—but at last I succeeded. I threw my leg over and gently dropped down on the other side.

Then suddenly two rough arms encircled my waist, and before I could attempt to free myself a cloth was thrown over my head, and I was lifted up and carried away, half suffocated and like an insentient bundle.

When the cloth was removed from my face I was half sitting, half lying, in an arm-chair in a strange room which was lighted by an oil lamp that hung from the ceiling above. In front of me stood M. Arthur Geoffroy and that beast Theodore.

M. Arthur Geoffroy was coolly folding up the two valuable papers for the possession of which I had risked a convict ship and New Caledonia, and which would have meant affluence for me for many days to come.

It was Theodore who had removed the cloth from my face. As soon as I had recovered my breath I made a rush for him, for I wanted to strangle him. But M. Arthur Geoffroy was too quick and too strong for me. He pushed me back into the chair.

“Easy, easy, M. Ratichon,” he said pleasantly; “do not vent your wrath upon this good fellow. Believe me, though his actions may have deprived you of a few thousand francs, they have also saved you from lasting and biting remorse. This document, which you stole from M. de Marsan and so ingeniously duplicated, involved the honour of our King and our country, as well as the life of an innocent man. My sister’s fiancé would never have survived the loss of the document which had been entrusted to his honour.”

“I would have returned it to Mademoiselle to-morrow,” I murmured.

“Only one copy of it, I think,” he retorted; “the other you would have sold to whichever spy of the Danish or Russian Governments happened to have employed you in this discreditable business.”

“How did you know?” I said involuntarily.

“Through a very simple process of reasoning, my good M. Ratichon,” he replied blandly. “You are a very clever man, no doubt, but the cleverest of us is at times apt to make a mistake. You made two, and I profited by them. Firstly, after my sister and I left you this afternoon, you never made the slightest pretence of making inquiries or collecting information about the mysterious theft of the document. I kept an eye on you throughout the evening. You left your office and strolled for a while on the quays; you had an excellent dinner at the Restaurant des Anglais; then you settled down to your coffee and liqueur. Well, my good M. Ratichon, obviously you would have been more active in the matter if you had not known exactly where and when and how to lay your hands upon the document, for the recovery of which my sister had offered you ten thousand francs.”

I groaned. I had not been quite so circumspect as I ought to have been, but who would have thought—

“I have had something to do with police work in my day,” continued M. Geoffroy blandly, “though not of late years; but my knowledge of their methods is not altogether rusty and my powers of observation are not yet dulled. During my sister’s visit to you this afternoon I noticed the blouse and cap of a commissionnaire lying in a bundle in a corner of your room. Now, though M. de Marsan has been in a burning fever since he discovered his loss, he kept just sufficient presence of mind at the moment to say nothing about that loss to any of the Chancellerie officials, but to go straight home to his apartments in the Rue Royale and to send for my sister and for me. When we came to him he was already partly delirious, but he pointed to a parcel and a letter which he had brought away from his office. The parcel proved to be an empty box and the letter a blank sheet of paper; but the most casual inquiry of the concierge at the Chancellerie elicited the fact that a commissionaire had brought these things in the course of the morning. That was your second mistake, my good M. Ratichon; not a very grave one, perhaps, but I have been in the police, and somehow, the moment I caught sight of that blouse and cap in your office, I could not help connecting it with the commissionnaire who had brought a bogus parcel and letter to my future brother-in-law a few minutes before that mysterious and unexplained altercation took place in the corridor.”

Again I groaned. I felt as a child in the hands of that horrid creature who seemed to be dissecting all the thoughts which had run riot through my mind these past twenty hours.

“It was all very simple, my good M. Ratichon,” now concluded my tormentor still quite amiably. “Another time you will have to be more careful, will you not? You will also have to bestow more confidence upon your partner or servant. Directly I had seen that commissionnaire’s blouse and cap, I set to work to make friends with M. Theodore. When my sister and I left your office in the Rue Daunou, we found him waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. Five francs loosened his tongue: he suspected that you were up to some game in which you did not mean him to have a share; he also told us that you had spent two hours in laborious writing, and that you and he both lodged at a dilapidated little inn, called the ‘Grey Cat,’ in Passy. I think he was rather disappointed that we did not shower more questions, and therefore more emoluments, upon him. Well, after I had denounced this house to the police as a Bonapartiste club, and saw it put under the usual consigne, I bribed the corporal of the gendarmerie in charge of it to let me have Theodore’s company for the little job I had in hand, and also to clear the back garden of sentries so as to give you a chance and the desire to escape. All the rest you know. Money will do many things, my good M. Ratichon, and you see how simple it all was. It would have been still more simple if the stolen document had not been such an important one that the very existence of it must be kept a secret even from the police. So I could not have you shadowed and arrested as a thief in the usual manner! However, I have the document and its ingenious copy, which is all that matters. Would to God,” he added with a suppressed curse, “that I could get hold equally easily of the Secret Service agent to whom you, a Frenchman, were going to sell the honour of your country!”

Then it was that—though broken in spirit and burning with thoughts of the punishment I would mete out to Theodore—my full faculties returned to me, and I queried abruptly:

“What would you give to get him?”

“Five hundred francs,” he replied without hesitation. “Can you find him?”

“Make it a thousand,” I retorted, “and you shall have him.”

“How?”

“Will you give me five hundred francs now,” I insisted, “and another five hundred when you have the man, and I will tell you?”

“Agreed,” he said impatiently.

But I was not to be played with by him again. I waited in silence until he had taken a pocket-book from the inside of his coat and counted out five hundred francs, which he kept in his hand.

“Now—” he commanded.

“The man,” I then announced calmly, “will call on me for the document at my lodgings at the hostelry of the ‘Grey Cat’ to-morrow morning at nine o’clock.”

“Good,” rejoined M. Geoffroy. “We shall be there.”

He made no demur about giving me the five hundred francs, but half my pleasure in receiving them vanished when I saw Theodore’s bleary eyes fixed ravenously upon them.

“Another five hundred francs,” M. Geoffroy went on quietly, “will be yours as soon as the spy is in our hands.”

I did get that further five hundred of course, for M. Charles Saurez was punctual to the minute, and M. Geoffroy was there with the police to apprehend him. But to think that I might have had twenty thousand—!

And I had to give Theodore fifty francs on the transaction, as he threatened me with the police when I talked of giving him the sack.

But we were quite good friends again after that until— But you shall judge.