Читать книгу Devil's Laughter: A Tale of Paris - John Hunter A.A. - Страница 6

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It was the day after Calverley left Paris, and Tom Baring had decided to call on Gabrielle.

He hesitated over this decision for a little while, wondering whether he was being too precipitate, but reflected that it might be just possible that Gabrielle would be glad to see him, a piece of ingenuous egotism which instantly swept all his doubts away.

He was startled when he reached the Laroche mansion to see the black draperies which the Parisians use to distinguish a house of mourning, and it was with some diffidence that he approached the door.

Gabrielle had not mentioned that some member of her family was on the point of death. And she had been so gay and free from any sign of care. It must be some sudden calamity that had happened here. He felt he ought to go away without intruding upon this house of death, and was turning upon his heels when the great door opened and a servant appeared, evidently bound on some errand. He saw Baring stand there in obvious hesitation.

“You wish to see someone, Monsieur?”

Baring gave the man his card and asked if he might see Miss Laroche. The man glanced at it, and then, leaving Baring in the great shadowed hall of the house, went away. He returned in a few minutes, although to Baring it was as though he had waited for hours; the house was so quiet and breathless and still.

The servant was quiet-spoken, impersonal. “Monsieur Laroche presents his compliments, and asks me to inform Monsieur that there is no such person as Ma’m’selle Laroche.”

Baring stood for a moment without speaking. “Do you mean she is dead?” he asked, at last, in a shocked voice.

The man gestured indefinitely. “That is the message Monsieur Laroche conveys to Monsieur—that there is no such person. He has no daughter.”

Baring felt like catching him by the coat and shaking him into explicitness.

“Who is it that has died here?”

“It is Madame Laroche, Monsieur.”

“Then Mademoiselle——”

“Monsieur Laroche sends the message that there is no such person.”

“But I met her. It was in the company of her brother—Monsieur Anton Laroche. Perhaps I could see him.”

“I am sorry, Monsieur. Monsieur Anton is not at home this afternoon.”

“Then,” asked Baring quietly, “Monsieur Anton is a reality?”

The man’s face did not change. He made no reply.

Baring left. Gabrielle, of course, was not dead. But something dreadful had happened to her. The thought drummed in his head as he walked aimlessly along the tree-lined roads. Something had happened of which he, a stranger, would not be informed. Now if Calverley had been in Paris he would know the truth. But Calverley was hundreds of miles away, travelling to a region beyond the reach of telegrams and telephones, letters and messages, into the unknown.

Baring turned round, irresolute, longing to go back to the Avenue Malakoff and demand an explanation, knowing all the while that he had no right to do so, no justification for such a course. He was a stranger, a man Gabrielle had met at a dinner table, a dance, as she must have met hundreds of other men who had passed on and never seen her again.

He must not behave either foolishly or outrageously. After all, she might never think of him again.

The afternoon sunlight shone in two dust-laden beams through the windows of the library of the great house in the Avenue Malakoff. The edge of one of these shafts of light struck the hand of Paul Laroche as he sat at his desk, and brightened the crinkled folds of the letter he had taken from his wife’s deathbed.

Paul Laroche had read the letter many times. He clutched it now in his strong fingers as his eyes followed the lines of shaky writing that ran diagonally across the pages. It was the last message of the woman who had died hating him.

John.—I am dying. Something has happened to my heart. I have pretended to feel a little better, so that now I am alone and can write this to you. I want you to fetch Gabrielle from this house as soon as you have read this. I feel that I have no time to write either fully or carefully, but I want you to try and understand, to try and read in this letter all that I cannot put down.

You will remember my flight from Paris; how I sent for you, and you came to see me in the Tyrol; how you guessed that a dreadful thing had happened to me, of which I would then tell you nothing. That dreadful thing was a discovery made in such a fashion as to leave no doubt as to its truth. I found that my husband is a being known as Le Cagnard, who draws his wealth from all the worst of crimes known to humanity.

I cannot write now all the hideous details. I ran from this house in the hour I made the discovery. I should never have told you how much I love you, and have always loved you, but for that. I had to send for you all those years ago, because I am, after all, just a woman in love, and was then a woman who needed her lover desperately.

My strength is rapidly failing. One day you may learn everything and understand everything about my husband. I must hurry to tell you the truth about Gabrielle. Take her away when I am gone. She is not his child, but mine and yours, born of our love in those days in the Tyrol.

John, you have always been so wonderful and kind and patient. I know I can depend on you to believe this and do it for me. And if you can help Anton, my poor dear boy in whose veins flows his blood, do so, won’t you?

Betty.

The signature was hardly decipherable.

Laroche sat at the desk, hunched, shadowed, and looked towards the window. He did not see the richness of the room’s furnishings, the stretch of flowers and green beyond the window; but only broken images and wrecked dreams. In his slowly beating heart there was not so much anger as hate, bitter, cold, bleak hate, set like ice on a frozen sea, where the sun has never shone.

His viewpoint was clear; his emotional reflexes to the discovery clean-cut, but extraordinary.

First and foremost came that cold set hatred—hatred of the wife who had given her great love to another man, and who, dying, had snatched from him the daughter he loved. For Laroche had loved his daughter. He loved his son.

He saw them moving in a different sphere from himself. He sat in the shadows of his own crimes’ making and saw his son and his daughter walking in sunshine. He might wade thigh deep in life’s gutters, but they should tread the pathways of the stars.

That had always been his intention. It was that alone which had made Elizabeth Laroche stay with him—the fact that he did not intend that Anton should ever know the truth, that he intended to make of Anton a man.

In the staccato sentences of his wife’s letter he could read much. He calculated that all through the silent years since the discovery there had been increasing and increasing strain, fear walking on the heels of fear; a mother’s anxious eyes searching for signs of Le Cagnard in the character of Anton, her boy; a mother’s fierce and selfless love gradually achieving the determination that, at the last, at any rate, Gabrielle should go from under his hand.

Sitting there amid the ruins of his dreams, Paul Laroche chuckled the quiet chuckle of Le Cagnard, mirthless, joyless.

She, this dead woman who had hated him so, who had found comfort in another man’s arms; this pale-faced thing with her scornful eyes and her ice-cold reserve; she had thought to free Gabrielle from him.

She had failed, but in failing had struck him deeply; for, in a few scrawled words, with the hand of death heavy on the pen, she had wiped away years of pride in the growing beauty of Gabrielle, had wiped away his hopes and his ambitions; had slain the curiously fervent love he had for the girl.

She was not of his flesh. She was a stranger to him. She was not Gabrielle Laroche. She was a nameless woman with a pretty face who had fed from his riches. There only remained Anton.

He saw Anton fleetingly, tall, and straight, not long from his service in the army, the finest type of Frenchman, eager and quick, alive. Anton... his son... whom he would make into a great man, with a great man’s ideals; and, in doing so, would wipe out Le Cagnard and his crimes, the crimes which haunted and pursued him down the rapid sloping pathway of his awful life... would wipe them out....

For Anton he was prepared to continue what he deemed, in his distorted fashion, to be the great sacrifice of himself and his soul. For Anton he would continue to pile up wealth from the anterooms of hell which that wealth increased and multiplied. Men should still die as Dupont had died, women should still sink to the gutters, that Anton might march on, not knowing, proud, clean.

But the girl.... He no longer thought of her as Gabrielle. She was with the dead woman in his thoughts, something to hate. The dead were dead. Even Le Cagnard could not reach out and hurt the cold white thing in the great shadowed bedroom overhead. But Le Cagnard could hurt the girl....

He looked out through the window near which he sat, as this thought came to him, and thought of the man he had seen approach the house, whose card lay on the desk before him.

A personable young Englishman, a lover, perhaps, come to call upon the dead woman’s daughter. That’s how he thought of Gabrielle now—no child of his—the dead woman’s daughter.

The words of the letter danced and blurred and burned before his eyes “... a being called Le Cagnard...” “... the worst of crimes....” He thought of all the years of bitter contempt, the searing glances, the cold aloofness, the drawing of skirts as he passed... unclean.... She had used that word once to him... unclean.... And he was the father of Anton.

He had made his decision when he sent the message that drove Baring away—as he would drive anyone away who might befriend the girl—who might come between her and him.

It was a decision made coldly and with remorseless determination. His own flesh and blood, Anton, should go on and upward.... But hers should skulk with him in the shadows. If he were unclean, so should be the girl she had borne to another man. If he went down to the depths, so should this child who had taken his love and his wealth.

There should be no great stroke, no sudden action. That would be too swift, too merciful, unworthy of Le Cagnard, unsatisfying to the stricken heart of Paul Laroche.

But from this moment, and he swore it grimly, silently, the hand of Le Cagnard would be on the shoulder of the girl called Gabrielle, the shadow of Le Cagnard would lie all across her, until it engulfed her, until she was swallowed in its darkness—until her soul was lost, like his.