Читать книгу Devil's Laughter: A Tale of Paris - John Hunter A.A. - Страница 8

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Gabrielle went from the Laroche mansion with a little money in her possession and very few clothes. She had not the faintest idea as to what she intended to do, and for the time being could not plan or think coherently. An omnibus took her towards the Bastille district, and a newspaper, purchased late in the evening, gave her some addresses of lodgings, one of which she secured.

She did this more or less mechanically. It was not until she was settled in her unaccustomed surroundings that the enormity of that which had happened was emphasized to her. Her despair was so tremendous that it shut out everything else, and bred in her, temporarily, something which almost amounted to self-loathing.

That she was not the child of Paul Laroche she now believed implicitly. Her mother’s letter told her so. The behaviour of Laroche himself confirmed it.

She did not con the matter carefully, as one who weighs a knotty problem. This was an impossibility. But flashes of dreadful thought bewildered her as she stumbled through the hours, her brain beaten down, her soul in torment.

It must be impossible that the mother she had loved so well could ever have been thus associated with the man who afterwards became Le Cagnard. Such a man must have had villainy deeply planted within him, and her mother would have perceived it.

So she argued, unaware of the ironic touch; unaware that Laroche himself appreciated the irony with a grim sardonic humour.

And while she argued, the doubt remained. Incredible, monstrous as it appeared, it yet might be that she was Le Cagnard’s daughter. In her veins might flow the blood of that devil whose name occasionally appeared in the news columns of the sensational press, the elusive omnipresent ruler of the Parisian underworld, the dealer in every kind of evil.

It was that thought that restrained her from communicating with any of her friends, that made it impossible that she should ever see Anton again. Anton was fine and clean; in her veins might run the blood of a father who was utterly vile.

For days she did not go out, and refused food, so that her landlady, a kindly soul whose husband worked in Les Halles, became concerned about her and talked of bringing a doctor. On the day her mother was buried she lay and cried and wished she could die. On the evening of that day she crept to the cemetery, long after the interment, and a gardener found her lying across the flowers and took her to her lodgings.

There was no peace in her heart or her mind, no rest at nights, no count of days—just a blank awful period of much suffering. She was like a stricken animal that had crept to some hole, with torment in its eyes and no sound on its lips.

During those days Dekker searched in vain for her.

A tremendously prosaic fact helped Gabrielle to recover, in some measure, her power of consecutive thought. At the end of her first week in her lodgings she had to pay her landlady, and this fact reminded her that her stock of money was very small, and that she must find some means by which she could increase it. Though this necessity by no means caused her to forget her troubles it at least provided some diversion from them, and she considered the problem of work.

It was a problem she was ill-fitted to solve. She could sing, and was a fair performer on the piano and violin. She was an accomplished ballroom dancer. All these had been concomitants of the education with which Laroche’s money had endowed her. But she could not work a typewriter; her knowledge of the needle was confined to fancywork.

Without any heart in her efforts, she began to look for work, one of the thousands of girls on the pavements, those girls she had hitherto seen from afar, and whose lot she had but dimly appreciated.

She sought employment in places where she would not be known, and failed to find it. The wages offered were terribly insignificant. More than once she ran out of the little offices to which advertisements had taken her, that she might evade the glances of the men who had advertised.

As the days passed Paris disillusioned her. The city which she had always looked upon as a great gay and lovable friend became a cold and repellent enemy, showing a pitiless face to the unfortunate and impoverished.

Though she did her best to avoid them, necessity occasionally took her into those quarters of the city with which she had been most familiar, so that she saw people she knew, places she had loved. The people she avoided—unwilling to face their curiosity, to endure their questions.

There was stirred up within her a frantic anxiety as to her future, and this anxiety helped to stay the numb despair following on Laroche’s disclosure. The period of her greatest tribulation served her in this way.

She turned at last to her needlework, and strove to sell it. She found a shop near the Gare de Lyon where the man said he would take all she cared to offer him, and paid her a terribly small price for it. She never saw her work in any of his windows, and did not know that he resold it to an establishment in the Opera quarter at many hundreds per cent profit.

Doing this needlework was like beating against the incoming tide of the sea. So intricate and delicate was it that it took a long time to complete a single piece, though she worked for hours at a stretch. The payment was so inadequate that she was unable to replenish her exchequer sufficiently to meet her weekly bills, so that week by week her little stock of money sank, and week by week she worked longer and longer hours in a frantic effort to maintain financial equilibrium.

When she nervously asked the shopkeeper for a better rate of payment he bluffed shrewdly. He was making very little profit. The work sold slowly. It would suit him admirably if she asked him to buy no more. She was too inexperienced to argue with him.

As she alighted from a tramcar in the Place de la Bastille that evening she became aware that she had attracted the attention of someone who sat at the upper window of a café on the corner of the Rue de la Roquette. She saw a pointing finger, a heavily jowled face which a flash of remembrance revealed to her as the face of Dekker, the Boer with the whip whom she had seen in the cabaret in Montparnasse.

She turned quickly away, but not before she had noticed the Boer’s companion, a flashily-dressed man who watched her with furtive peering eyes.

She crossed the Place. It seemed to her, as she hurried along the quiet street in which her lodgings were situated, that soft footsteps followed her, but when she glanced nervously over her shoulder the padding sound ceased, and she could see nothing but the shadows the old houses cast across the pavement.

She went up the narrow stairs to her room. As she drew the blinds of her window, she saw the flashily-dressed man standing in the light of a street lamp, on the opposite kerb, staring up at her. He drew back swiftly, and disappeared into the darkness that veiled the end of the street.