Читать книгу Devil's Laughter: A Tale of Paris - John Hunter A.A. - Страница 5

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Elizabeth Laroche, wife of Paul Laroche, mother of Anton and Gabrielle, lay dying in the great and luxurious bedroom which overlooked the Avenue Malakoff. While the man who called himself Le Cagnard sat in audience on the Butte Montmartre, death came on slow and stealthy feet to the palace his wealth had built in the most exclusive quarter of Paris.

Gabrielle, back from Valentin’s, her happy memories of Baring temporarily effaced, sat near the head of the bed, her hand on the hand of her mother. Anton stood at the foot of the bed, his friends of the Café Procope forgotten. A doctor quietly directed the orderly and silent movements of a highly-trained nurse.

There was little hope, as he explained. The seizure had been sudden and devastating. Before dawn, he thought, a change might come—but it would be the change from life to death. Meantime there was this coma which might, or might not, be dispelled before the end.

He pondered, as he looked down on the unconscious woman whom his skill could not assist in any way. The most eminent in his profession in Paris, he had been the Laroche family physician from the time Paul Laroche brought back from England the young and beautiful girl who, an elderly woman now, lay dying before him. He had attended at the birth of Anton and of Gabrielle.

All of the family secrets were in his safe keeping—save, so far as he knew, one, and that one the deepest and most inexplicable of them all.

He had known years, the first years of the marriage and while Anton was a tiny boy, when a great and wonderful happiness had resided in the Laroche mansion. And then—it was nearly a year before Gabrielle was born—something had happened which slew that happiness as with a two-edged sword. What; the doctor did not know, nor could try to guess.

Its genesis had been marked by the disappearance of Madame Laroche, alone, from Paris. She returned to bring Gabrielle into the world, but even the birth of her daughter had not improved matters. He knew that all through the childhood of Gabrielle, Monsieur and Madame Laroche had maintained a vast pretence, obviously for the benefit of their children.

They lived in the same house, moved in the same circle, but in private they treated each other with the aloofness of strangers—madame even displaying a repugnance for Laroche which amounted to loathing; Laroche himself sardonically content to be isolated, hard, and unmoved by his wife’s scorn.

The marriage had been a mistake. The doctor was sure of that. This Englishwoman should never have married a Frenchman. She should have stayed at home and mated with the rather cold and precise John Calverley who occasionally called, and for whom she had an undoubted affection.

A movement of the patient interrupted his thoughts and he leaned over her. Her eyes were partly open, and her lips were moving. He had almost to touch them with his ear before he understood the words they uttered.

“The light—hurts. But leave it on. Is that Anton? Anton!”

The young man came round and dropped to his knees. His mother’s shaking hand felt for and found his head.

“You poor boy,” she breathed. “You poor boy.” There were tears on her cheeks.

She lay for a little while breathing slowly, and only herself and her Maker saw the pictures which passed before her closed eyes; of the girl who danced with young John Calverley and waited in vain for him to speak; of the coming to England of the romantic and wealthy Paul Laroche, of infatuation and hasty marriage, her subsequent heartache for Calverley suppressed and dismissed by her loyalty to the husband who seemed so obviously to worship her.

And then the discovery, and blind and agonized flight, days and nights spent on the dungeon floors of despair, until Calverley came to her in the valley in the Austrian Tyrol where she was hiding from the husband she saw now as a monster.

While the dying woman saw these pictures Paul Laroche slipped into the room. A manservant downstairs had apprised him of his wife’s condition and he crept to the doctor’s side and asked a quiet question. The doctor replied in a whisper, using technical terms. Laroche gathered that his wife had had a stroke of some kind, and had been found lying on the floor between her bathroom and bedroom.

Madame Laroche was moving restlessly. She spoke in a sobbing voice.

“Poor Anton! Poor Anton! His shadow is across you. But Gabrielle is free... my Gabrielle. Where is Gabrielle?”

Her voice lifted. Her eyes opened. At that moment Laroche stepped forward, behind the kneeling Anton, so that she looked up and saw him with the light behind him, a shapeless darkness stooping over Anton with a grey, unrecognizable smudge for a face.

She screamed, and so died.

Laroche straightened himself. He was very calm, though pale and with strained eyes. The only living person who knew his secret was dead. He was about to turn away when a folded paper slipped from the coverlet of the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it.

Scrawled on it in a shaking hand which still betrayed his wife’s writing was a name—John Calverley.