Читать книгу The Town of Tombarel - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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If this is a mixed-up sort of story, it is because I must tell it in a roundabout way. There is a certain amount of coincidence in it; but, were it not for coincidence, there could be no drama of life. For its accuracy of detail I have mainly the word of my friend, Tombarel, Mayor of Creille. There is also the potential voucher of Brother Sylvain, of the Cistercian Monastery on the Island of St. Honorat, which lies in the Bay of Cannes, hidden behind the Island of Ste. Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask languished for so many years in his bastioned cell.

I exhibited Tombarel’s portrait in the Royal Academy—I am, as I have told you, an Associate of that whatever-you-like-to-call-it body—and sold it; for painters have to live, just like plumbers and politicians and bookmakers and other such toilers, whose right to a comfortable existence not even a Bolshevik would dispute. But I made a replica, which Tombarel presented to the Mairie of Creille where it hangs in a sixteenth-century council chamber, in the sixteenth-century town hall; forming one side of the grey-arcaded square, cobble-paved, with a well-head in the middle of it, which I have often found to be the most untroubled spot on earth. This gift won me the real intimacy of Tombarel.

He was an inexhaustible mine of Provençal legends; he knew—God knows how, for he had long since retired from his dreadful trade, and had settled down for good and all in his mountain vineyard—the intimate history of what we might call the country-side, but what is really the mysterious hinterland of the Department of the Alpes Maritimes, which is as remote from the fringe of the Riviera as Greenland is from India’s coral strand.

We met sometimes in my villa at Cannes overlooking the sea, or beneath the straggling cedar in front of his funny pink Provençal farmhouse, and now and then half-way. Once I asked him to lunch with me at a sunny restaurant on the tip of Cap Ferrat, over a tureen of bouillabaisse and a bottle of little white wine of Bellet.

It was then that our talk drifted to St. Honorat.

“The monastery is full of the most interesting people,” said he. “There is one, a full-fledged Father—not a lay brother—who was once a camelot on the Paris boulevards—a half-starved good-for-nothing who sold little toy dogs and blown-out cocks that squeaked on the pavement.” He told me a story of considerable interest, but it has nothing to do with the one I want to tell.

“Perhaps the most singular man in the monastery,” Tombarel went on, “is the Frère Sylvain. He is—I don’t know—although nominally a good Catholic I am not conversant with hierophant gradations”—the southerner in Tombarel loved now and then to mouth sonorous phrases—“at some half-way stage in his training to become a Father. He will vouch for the truth of my story. In fact, it is his history that I am going to relate.”

“But,” said I, “the Cistercians of St. Honorat are a silent order.”

He waved an ineffectual, artistic hand.

“They have their dispensations. Besides, the frères converses have not taken their vows of silence. I, Tombarel, can arrange. Don’t be afraid ... What was I saying?” Interruptions sometimes disconcerted him. “Ah! First I must tell you the history of a painter.”

“But what has Frère Sylvain to do with a painter?” I interrupted again.

His forefinger touched a bushy eyebrow.

“Ah! That’s what you are going to see, my dear Fontenay. Frère Sylvain had a great deal to do with it. Voilà ... You must throw your mind back over twenty years. There was a young man studying art in Paris.”

One hand, stretched out across the table set by the open window in the glass-walled restaurant, commanded my attention. The other swept his moustache and white pointed beard. I have never met so great a master of the spoken narrative as Tombarel.

“Tiens,” said he with a knitting of noble brows above dark eyes. “He must be now about your age. You are of the Beaux-Arts—like him. His name was Patignon—Jules Patignon.”

I clapped my head in my hands. The name beat foolishly at it.

“He was in Marien’s studio.”

“So was I. Good Lord,” I cried, “I remember him! Of course. Do you know, my dear Tombarel, that I’m prepared to accept anything extraordinary you may say about Patignon.”

I hadn’t thought of him for some years. Jules Patignon, indeed, was my contemporary. A brilliant fellow. His surety of line made me sick with envy. Then, somehow, he went to the devil. One day, years ago, when, silly war accidents compelling me to live in a fog-free climate, I had established myself on my sunny Mediterranean crag, Jules Patignon turned up, down and out, incredibly dirty, abject in disrepair and self-disrespect. He pitched a piteous tale. He had a glib tongue, thickened, as it were, by alcohol. He told me, I think, that he had been sketching in Tunis, that six months’ work had been burned in a fire which consumed his mud hut on the edge of the desert, and that now his resources were exhausted to such a pitch that he could not afford the necessary outfit of artist’s materials wherewith to start afresh. I lent him a thousand francs and he vanished into eternity.

Well, that is coincidence number one. From my memory I could check all that Tombarel told me of his early brilliance and of his later decay. I had seen him in his decay—a shuffling, shifty, long, bony man with beastly bits of hair all over his face. A man with the clothes of a scarecrow. A man with hungry, wolfish eyes.

According to Tombarel he had been born in New York, the son of a French father and an Irish mother, Patignon père being an obscure cook in a small hotel, and his mother, a little drab of a servant. This was news to me. In my day art students never worried themselves about one another’s antecedents or social position. They were pleasant human beings or they were not. I remember that I counted Patignon among the less pleasant. We met chiefly at Marien’s studio, where he lived an apparently decent life—I don’t think I ever met him outside the studio—and astounded us by his wild brilliance. During the long interval between the end of my student life in Paris and his sudden apparition in Cannes, I doubt whether I had ever concerned myself with the possibility of his existence. He was but a shape of the past, scarcely an acquaintance; still less, a friend. Half my lifetime had passed between our meetings.

Tombarel’s evocation of Patignon reminded me that I had noticed a curious nick out of the top of his left car, surrounded by a pale scar. Well, nearly every man who went through the war has a nick or two somewhere about him, so I thought no more about it; but from Tombarel’s account it appeared that the nick in Patignon’s ear was a factor in the story.

It was the result of a duel long before the war, when Patignon was young and well-favoured, and viewed with gaiety the flowery path through the world that lay before him. Even at Marien’s, where every latitude in attire was indulgently tolerated, he dressed himself with a certain spruceness. Perhaps the only conversation with him during those far-off days which I can recall, was on this topic of personal appearance.

“To be a successful portrait painter,” said he, “one must have the air of one accustomed to move in the salons of the wealthy, and one can’t attain it without cultivating the habit of wearing a clean collar and nicely polished shoes.”

From every point of view I naturally agreed with him.

He carried out his programme, learned, by much assiduity, how to comport himself in drawing-rooms, won gold medals and things, exhibited at the Salon, and sprang, as it were, with one bound to the middle rungs of our heart-breaking ladder. His was the rare case of genius being favoured by the gods.

As I have just said, I never really liked the fellow. I found him plausible, untrustworthy and unsympathetic. That was why, in spite of a certain charm, I did not cultivate his society. Once he borrowed a hundred francs from me, pleading dire necessity. A hundred francs, in those days, were worth their weight in four golden sovereigns, and I had very few sovereigns to scatter abroad. I learned afterwards that he had spent it all in a night’s squalid debauch. He never repaid me. I only mention this incident by way of throwing a side-light on the man who, in the course of twenty years, degenerated from the brilliant painter, frequenting the salons of the wealthy, into the filthy outcast to whom I had given alms.

The duel? Well, a woman was in it.

“Comme toujours,” declared Tombarel, the venerable bachelor. Only when one says “woman,” one thinks of maturity, arts of seduction; a woman in practically the physiological sense of the word. Here, however, it was a young girl, as charming and fresh a young girl as it ever was Tombarel’s lot to know. He himself—“Moi qui parle”—you can see the shrug, with uplifted hands, which finished the sentence.... How could a poor land surveyor, even then drifting into the bitter wisdom of middle age, sigh for the unattainable? What was the good of the prickly old thistle sighing for the rosebud, especially when he had first seen the rosebud fresh in her nurse’s arms? But rosebud she was. I must remember that. He kissed his finger-tips. An Englishman, knowing the ordinary French young girl of five and twenty years ago, is peculiarly unimpressed when an old Frenchman kisses his finger-tips and calls her a rosebud. I suppose it is a matter of ideals.

At any rate, Rosalie Dufour was a rosebud, especially—according to Tombarel—when she dressed in green. A charming girl, perfectly brought up, the daughter of Alfonse Dufour, who made a fortune out of tinning sardines. “If you haven’t eaten the delicate ‘Sardines Dufour’ you haven’t lived,” said Tombarel. Personally, I must be in a state of nonexistence, as it has never struck me to look for the publisher’s imprint on my sardine; but that is by the way.

Now, it fell out that Jules Patignon had so far penetrated into opulent circles that he was commissioned by Monsieur Alfonse Dufour to paint the portrait of Mademoiselle Rosalie. The portrait, a masterpiece—so said Tombarel—was scarcely finished when painter and sitter found themselves vehemently in love. How they managed to convey the fact to each other, Heaven only knows, seeing that Madame Dufour sat dragon-wise behind the easel during all the sittings. But, seemingly, love laughs at dragons as it does at locksmiths. The pair arranged surreptitious meetings, thrilling in their danger; the most perilous in the gardens of the Dufours’ house at Passy.

Now Patignon’s état civil, which in France is the sacred declaration of birth, parentage, family status and personal history, was not calculated to allure the millionaire of the “Sardines Dufour.” “Father: chef de cuisine. Mother: domestic servant.” He dared not confess it even to Rosalie. As for his fortune, it was to be made—in oil, it is true, but by strokes of the brush. Monsieur Dufour only thought of oil as a commercial proposition in terms of sardines. A demand in marriage would have turned the amiable patrons of the arts into ravening beasts of the jungle. They would have torn him limb from limb.

It was while the enamoured pair, lost in each other’s arms in an obscure nook of the rose-scented and moonlit garden, were discussing romantic and unfilial possibilities, that André Dufour, Rosalie’s much older brother, discovered them. There was a dramatic scene. André likened Patignon to the least pleasing of creatures, and carried off a half-demented Rosalie. The next day Patignon, with a couple of friends as witnesses, sought out André Dufour at a café and smote him across the face.

Hence the duel. Dufour, the aggrieved, had the choice of weapons. Being short and squat, and recognizing that he had no swordsman’s chance against the long Patignon with his octopus reach, he chose pistols. The result was that Dufour nicked a bit out of Patignon’s ear, and Patignon missed Dufour altogether. Honour being technically satisfied, the duelling party broke up. Patignon went home to tend his damaged ear, and André Dufour returned to join the family conclave, in which it was decided to re-immure Rosalie, aged eighteen, in the Belgian convent whence, after completing her education, she had but lately emerged. Now, love cannot laugh at strictly instructed convents. Rosalie and Patignon were irremediably parted.

If you think that frustrated passion was the cause of Patignon’s downfall, I fear you are mistaken. In my own mind there is no doubt that he had a young man’s clean and honest love for Rosalie. Indeed, it is the only good thing I’ve heard about him. But he was a man in whose heart clean and honest love was easily fouled by baser appetites, and obscured by unregulated ambitions. He was not well parented. This we must remember. His father, the cook, for some criminal offence, had no longer civil rights in France; once he landed on French soil he would have been clapped into jail. His mother was a drunken Irish-woman. He had owed his start in life to a benevolent American who, having by chance discovered the boy’s talent, had financed his education and by a chance, this time unhappy, had died before he could enjoy the fruits of his benevolence.

Thus it seems to me that Patignon was a man, to use a painter’s jargon, without values. He was like a picture without the proportion and correlation of tones. He could weep over a dewdrop, paint you a strident portrait, talk politely at an afternoon reception, and get filthily drunk in some disgusting lupanar, all in the space of twenty-four hours. Most of us, by training, have a set of fixed principles by which we guide our moral lives. This is mere platitude. If I were a metaphysician I could, without doubt, state what is in my mind with more complicated opacity. But the ordinary man must have his own standards of conduct. If he departs from them, he does it either deliberately, knowing the consequences, or yielding to irresistible temptation. In either case he returns, none too happy, to his standards. Now Patignon differed from the ordinary man. He had no principles. He had no standards. What to the ordinary man is a more or less clearly defined consciousness, was to him chaos.

He lost his touch, his triumphant sureness of stroke; he claimed advances on commissions which he never executed. His crapulous atavism got him by the throat. The clean collar of his young schedule of ambition dwindled into an unclean rag. He besotted himself with cheap absinthe. He did every abominable thing that a brilliant portrait painter ought not to do. At last a bogus cheque landed him in prison. The war turned him out into the dreadful Bataillons d’Afrique, the Battalions of Discipline. He had not long been demobilized when he came to me.

From me he seems to have gone to seek out Tombarel, whom he had known in the far-off days. Indeed, he stayed at Creille as Tombarel’s guest. His cook father was a Marseillais and the Midi was in his blood, and its call sounded in his ears. He had actually equipped himself with the painter’s paraphernalia, and had tried to work.

“The results were horrible, my dear Fontenay,” said Tombarel. “When he was something, he was a portrait painter—a figure painter—he had the classical line.” Tombarel swept the painter’s curved thumb—he loved the gesture as though it proved his admission into the Freemasonry of the craft. “But a pleinairiste—no, especially in our sunshine. You have to paint sunshine, which only one man in a generation can do. Even your Constable, with his divine sense of values, what would he have done here? Nothing. He would have fabricated croûtes of absurdity like my poor Patignon. It takes a Claude Monet. Also one cannot drink a litre of brandy a day, to say nothing of another litre of fantastic varieties of alcohols at the Café Pogomas, and paint pictures. If there’s one man in the world who must be serious, it is the artist.... And then he became the scandal of the town. Ah, mon Dieu! Luckily my old hair was already white and couldn’t grow whiter.”

He must have led his protector, the Mayor of Creille, a devil of a dance. Then, his thousand francs exhausted, his score with the good Marius Pogomas unsettled, he disappeared from Creille. The days between this flight and his reappearance in the world of men must have been spent like those of a wolf outcast by the pack, in the byways of the mountains.

We come again to a definite picture of him.

Between Cannes and Grasse this gaunt tatterdemalion, with eyes now bloodshot, struck a vicinal road, and presently came to a pair of iron gates with a gilt coronet woven into the scrollwork, opening on a broad gravel path which, after a few yards, diverged in two directions. These arms, each bordered by broad flower-beds, embraced a plantation of mimosa and palm and acacia in milk-white blossom, with an undergrowth of laurel. A lodge beside the gates seemed deserted. The path to the left lay in deep, cool shade; and there were flowers, broad bands of them in the riot of May. They wound like rivers of splendour as far as his eye could reach. Begonias, cinerarias of all the purples, and along the garden walls an orgy of wisteria and convolvulus. And each bed was edged with deep turquoise grass.

The midday sun beat down on Patignon’s head. The cool walk to the left was like an oasis to a desert wanderer. He gave a glance at the shuttered windows of the lodge, and stole into the shade of the garden. He had been living in the aridness of the mountains of eastern Provence, among olives and stony vineyards and pines, all austere things, and suddenly, as though guided by God, he had come upon this glimpse of Paradise. He walked a little distance and threw himself prone on the soft grass and inhaled the fragrance of the garden with open mouth and nostrils. His painter’s eyes feasted on the colour.

He had wandered from Creille in the vague direction of Marseilles, where animal instinct rather than hope suggested he might find a means of livelihood. At Creille he had provided himself with an immense sausage—he was an old campaigner—wherewith he could satisfy his hunger. He had slept on the crisp warm beds beneath the pine woods. Water for his thirst he could obtain at any cottage, or from any mountain stream. Once a day his few remaining francs had assured him a draught of wine at some remote estaminet.

But he was tired and sun-stricken and foot-sore, and he lay for an hour, fouling with his weight the delicate turquoise grass, quivering with the consciousness of one who, transformed by witchcraft into a wild beast, gradually recovers a human form. The artistic sense that, during his strange life, had led him into a thousand paradoxes of conduct, at last aroused him from his languor. He must explore further this garden of enchanted loveliness. He stood, stretched himself and followed the winding path.

At last a break in the central plantation showed him the red-tiled roof, the green-shuttered windows of the top story of the château. One window was open, and a faint spiral of smoke curled from a chimney. He barely noticed this, for his eyes, at the turn of the path, were compelled to a garden of roses—the last roses of the southern spring. They grew dwarf with all the charm of scientific disregard of mingled varieties. Old and new blended in breathless discords and harmonies, from the black crimson of the Victor Hugo to the buttercup purity of the Golden Chalice. The ground was strewn with petals as for a fairy wedding.

Now, you must not dismiss Patignon as a vagabond sentimentalist. If you do, I’m done. There was less sloppy sentiment about Patignon than about any man with whose history I’ve been acquainted. But Patignon was a painter, and a painter is a queerly gifted creature who can’t help being affected by beauty when beauty gets up and parades herself naked before him. It was not the sentimentalist but the instinctive lover of beauty that impelled him, he knew not why, to step into the rose-bed, and with the clasp-knife which he had lately employed in the careful slicing of his sausage, to cut, at long stem, the only half-opened perfect bloom—a dreamy pink Caroline Testout—that remained.

He picked his way back to the path, rose in hand. A man, springing from he knew not where, confronted him.

“Qu’est-ce que vous faites là?”

He was a gross man—a square-headed, sanguine-complexioned man. Patignon, who knew his France, put him down as a Norman. He wore an ultra-English golfing costume.

“What are you doing there?” he repeated.

“You see,” said Patignon. “I have only picked a rose.”

“Give it back. Fous le camp. Get out!” cried the angry proprietor, and he made a grab at the flower in Patignon’s hand.

Thus arose as idiotic an altercation between two sane men as has ever brought about tragical consequences. The red-faced Norman accused the dilapidated Patignon, not without reason, of entering his grounds with felonious intent. Patignon protested his innocence. What kind of a thief was it who, entering the grounds of a house, prefaced his villainy by stealing a rose? The lord of the château lost his head. He was determined to dispossess the thief of his booty. During a hand-to-hand struggle the gaunt and bony Patignon swung his adversary staggering back among the flower-beds, and sprang forward to complete his victory.

The other scrambled to his feet, and from his hip pocket drew a small automatic pistol. He was too late. Patignon gripped his wrist with one hand, wrenched away the pistol with the other and, holding it in his clenched fist, butt downwards, brought it down with all his force on the man’s head.

He dropped on the gravel path like a pole-axed bullock and lay sprawling on his back. Patignon looked at him for a few moments, rather bewildered. He had had no desire to kill the man. He felt himself the most aggrieved of mortals, pursued by divine injustice. His plucking of the rose was, perhaps, the most exquisitely innocent action of his life. Well, if it was murder, so much the worse. It was the affair of le bon Dieu, and not of him, Jules Patignon.

The man lay with his coat lapels wide open. From the inside breast pocket peeped the top edge of a note-case. Patignon peered cautiously around. There was not even a butterfly for witness. He stooped and plucked out the note-case. It was filled with notes. He thrust it into his pocket. From the waistcoat he drew watch and chain. A diamond ring glittered on the man’s finger. Why leave it? He drew himself up on his knees. That was done, finished, irrevocable. He had stolen note-case, watch and chain and diamond ring. What was the good of half measures? He went systematically through the pockets of the gross and unconscious man. He brought out an Eldorado—ten packets of thousand-franc notes, each tied up by a slim elastic band, and a jeweller’s case from the side pocket, which, on a hasty glance, proved to contain a blinding dazzle of emeralds.

He bent down over his victim. His skull might be cracked—but he was not yet dead. Patignon had seen a good deal of death during his time with the Battalion of Discipline.... He rose to his feet. Well, it served the fool right.

A woman’s sharp cry, and the just captured flash of a white dress, broke any philosophic musings. He turned and fled at racing speed along the path and through the iron gates into the road; and plunged again, as soon as he could, into the hills.

Patignon worked his way, unmolested by justice, to Cannes, whence he travelled third-class to Marseilles. It was only when he found himself safe behind the locked door of a bedroom in a mean hotel by the quays that he dared bring into light the proceeds of his robbery. There were five distinct items. A gold watch and chain; a diamond ring; a well-stuffed note-case; a separate hoard of a hundred thousand francs; and an emerald bracelet whose wonder made his head reel.

On the dismal bed he spread out the contents of the note-case, which proved to be a kind of autobiographical museum. They gave him interesting information; both explicit and implicit. His unsought victim was the Marquis de la Crozière. He classified the documents with a grim smile. Admission cards to the casinos of Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes, and a neatly kept memorandum of losses and gains, led him to the inference that the Marquis de la Crozière was a gambler for high stakes. As no man walks about with a hundred thousand francs by way of casual pocket-money, he surmised that the Marquis de la Crozière had drawn that sum out of a bank that morning in view of the afternoon or evening play.

Of what sort or kind, legitimate or otherwise, was the châtelaine of the estate on which he had trespassed, he had at first no notion, though of such a one the cry and the flicker of white dress proclaimed the existence. At any rate, the emerald bracelet was not destined for the wrist of a Marquise de la Crozière, because there lay a violently perfumed letter with a Nice heading from one who, signing herself “Zozo,” was indubitably the intended recipient of the jewels. A newspaper cutting clinched the matter of the châtelaine. It recorded the statistics of a pigeon-shooting match at Monte Carlo in which the Marquis de la Crozière was the winner, and a dinner given in celebration of the victory by the Marquis and the Marquise de la Crozière.

An unpleasant letter, written in the familiar second person singular, dunned for the repayment of a sixty thousand franc loan. Examination of the gambling memorandum showed a considerable balance of gain. The inner rim of the diamond ring bore the inscription: “Souviens-toi toujours de notre amour. R. à C.” This was obviously a present from his wife, his own name, as indicated by his visiting-card, being Camille.

The more Patignon pondered over these revelations, the less compunction did he feel in having cracked the skull and rifled the pockets of the Marquis Camille de la Crozière. In his person he had shown himself an unsympathetic and truculent fellow. His record was that of an entirely unworthy member of society. He was dissipating a fortune in the gambling saloons of the Riviera; he turned a deaf ear to a poor, hard-up devil to whom he owed a large sum of money; in order to keep some vulgar little courtesan called Zozo in a good temper, he had wasted an angel’s ransom on an emerald bracelet; and there was a Marquise de la Crozière, personified by a cry and a flutter of white, whom he was treating abominably.

Patignon, contemplating the proceeds of his crime, glowed more and more with the sense of public duty accomplished. He had diverted wealth from corrupt channels leading to the cesspools of gambling-hells and the bottomless purses of the Daughters of the Horse-Leech, into the pure stream that might set working once more that great man Jules Patignon.

He slept that night the placid sleep of the man whose mind is conscious of right.

Of the ins and outs of Patignon’s existence for the next few months, Tombarel could give me meagre account. One factor, however, is certain. The author of the outrage on the Marquis de la Crozière, without taking peculiar pains, eluded the search of the police.

We have now to attune our minds, as Tombarel put it, to the conception of Patignon as a gentleman of fortune. For in this guise did he reappear meteorically, not in the salons, it is true, but in the resorts of the wealthy. In August, a week’s baccarat at Deauville brought him a couple of million francs. He vanished with his winnings. During that week of publicity I have learned, not only from Tombarel but from the frequenters of that paradise of vanity, that he lived the life of a solitary and sober sphinx. He emerged from the social darkness, the immaculate, point-device imitation man of the world of his boyhood’s dreams. But no little lady disturbed the austere tenor of his way. He sat alone at his meals and drank the most modest and light of wines.

“We must think of him,” said Tombarel—“we must get inside his soul if we can and think of him as a man driven for those few following months of autumn and winter, not by any emotion akin to remorse, not by any lashes of conscience, but by one terrifying desire—the desire to keep himself from the mud in which he had wallowed for twenty years. La boue, il en avait soupé. He had been fed up with mud.

“He was possessed by the fixed idea to assure himself for the rest of his days against misery and cold and degradation and starvation. What he did, where he went, how he lived I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.... The following January we see him in Monte Carlo.”

“A sweet, limpid place, totally free of mud,” said I.

“You shall hear,” said Tombarel. The long, inefficient fingers of the barren artist swept over his white mane of hair.

Patignon turned up, then, in Monte Carlo, tall, gaunt, clean-shaven, scrupulously trim, carrying himself reservedly with a distinguished air. Again the austerely sober man of loneliness. He sat solitary, day after day, at the trente-et-quarante table.

“To save my life, my dear Tombarel,” said I, “I can’t see where this new rigid morality of his comes in.”

“Attendez,” said Tombarel. “I tell you because I know. He had amassed a fortune of five million four hundred thousand francs. He had resolved to turn the odd four hundred thousand into one million and nothing more, or to lose them and nothing more. After that, never a stake for the rest of his life. You can take that as gospel; for I speak of things that I know.”

It appears that after a fortnight’s ups and downs of fortune, Patignon drew in the last winnings that brought him up to the six-million total.

He rose, thrusting the notes and counters into his pockets, when he found himself face to face with a woman who, as some queer sense told him, had been standing behind his chair and watching him for a long time. She was so close that in the act of rising he almost brushed her dress. A word of apology was succeeded by the shock of mutual recognition.

“Mademoiselle!”

“C’est vous?”

“Yes, it is I, Jules Patignon. It’s a long time, Mademoiselle ...”

Her lips moved in a smile. “Madame.”

“Alas,” said he; “I dared not guess it.”

They stood embarrassed. She waved ever so slightly a disdainful hand.

“You find pleasure in this game?”

“It is my last coup,” said he.

“For to-day?”

“For all my life. Yes, it’s true; why should I tell you if it weren’t?”

“Yet you have not lost.”

“On the contrary, I have won. A modest fortune. That is why I draw my pin from the game. I can retire now, and live in peace until I die.”

Unconsciously they had backed away into the free space between two thronged tables. He said: “You haven’t changed. Or, if you have, it is for the better.”

She laughed, coloured under the admiration in his eyes. “I’m getting an old woman.”

“Bah! You are not yet forty. If anyone should know your age, Madame, it should be I.”

She sighed. “It seems so long ago.”

“To me,” said he, “but yesterday. Can’t we sit and talk somewhere for five minutes?”

“Willingly.”

He led her into the long bar, to a small table at the far end away from the bar itself.

“Yes. It seems but yesterday. In a night you have bloomed from a girl into a beautiful woman.”

The tribute was socially justifiable, seeing that the last time he had seen her—although it was twenty years before—she had been snatched literally from his arms. It was justified, too, by her present beauty. The rosebud of Tombarel’s sentimental ecstasy had developed into the rose at its prime of womanhood. She was tall, with the utmost roundness of delicate figure that the folly of the present day allowed. Her dainty features had the colouring of dark rose. To the girlish languor of her dark-brown eyes was added a glint of irony. Her lips, the only pure lips the man had ever kissed in the whole of his existence, held the same childish appeal.

She smiled. “I’m glad you think so. But you? What has become of you during all these years?”

He looked at her with knitted brow. “Ma foi. You ought to know. It was in all the newspapers. Scandal enough.”

She laid a quick touch on his arm. “Yes, yes. But that was long ago. Since then?”

“I went through the war—like everybody else. After that I occupied myself with the making of a little fortune; that’s all.”

“And your painting?”

“Lost.” He smiled wryly. “Art is a mistress to whom one must be faithful. I’ve not been faithful, and she has deserted me.”

“It’s a pity,” she said.

He acknowledged her sympathy with a shrug and a gesture. “One does what one can—or rather, what is permitted by the high gods of eternal irony.”

He was conscious since they had sat down, even before they had sat down, of some strange preoccupation at the back of her eyes which, as though fascinated, strayed perpetually from his. She soon simplified his growing perplexity.

“Pardon, Monsieur Patignon, for an indiscretion. But your ear—was that the war?”

He laughed. “It is my happiness that it wasn’t. It was a scar received in your service. The famous duel with your brother, André.”

“Yes, he told me afterwards,” she said with a shiver. “He said that you had the whole ear torn away—then modified the story.”

“I bear no malice,” said Patignon. “And the good André?”

The good André was dead. At Verdun. Her parents, too, were dead. She was alone.

“But your husband?”

“Yes, I have a husband,” said Rosalie, without enthusiasm of possession.

In his turn he said: “It’s a pity.”

In hers she sketched a shrug—a gesture.

“All this time we’ve been talking,” said he, “and I don’t know your name.”

“My husband,” she replied, “is the Marquis de la Crozière.”

The shock was so unexpected that all the twenty years’ training in the sudden vicissitudes of life availed him nothing. He gasped open-mouthed, felt his hair crinkle on his skull, and could not repress a foolish cry:

“What?”

“The Marquis de la Crozière. Did you know him?”

He gathered his wandering wits. “Why, no.”

“Then why are you so surprised?”

“The Marquis de la Crozière belongs to the old noblesse—an historic name,” said he, bolting up the first avenue to hand.

“And it astonishes you that Rosalie Dufour, of the ‘Sardines Dufour,’ should now be the Marquise de la Crozière?”

“Mais non. No prince of blood royal could be worthy of you.”

“Merci,” she said, with a little twist of her lips; and he was then aware of a hard questioning in her brown eyes. “We lived till lately in the Château Paradou, near Grasse. It was a beautiful garden. Have you ever seen the garden of the Château Paradou, Monsieur?”

“I’ve never heard the name of the Château Paradou in my life,” he replied.

“It is strange,” she said in a low voice, “but in the summer I saw in the garden a man with an ear like that—I have called him since by Edmond About’s title, ‘L’Homme à l’Oreille Cassée.’ He was a dreadful man—hairy and fierce and ragged. Do you know, Patignon, that you very much resemble that man? It was that man with the broken ear I was watching at the trente-et-quarante table.”

Taking his courage and his face in both hands, he bent across the table confronting her.

“And if it were I—what then?”

She sat motionless. “It would be a strange coincidence. You, the great painter whom I loved as a young girl, to be a common assassin—a robber of my husband.”

He shifted his position, and mechanically drained one of the glasses containing the conventionally ordered drinks, which neither had thought of tasting.

“Eh bien, Madame la Marquise, it was I. A robber, yes; if a famished wolf can be called a robber. But an assassin—no. Monsieur le Marquis threatened me with an automatic. I acted in self-defence. I tore it from his hand and brought down the butt on his head. Besides, he did not die. At the time I read Le Petit Marseillais with some interest.”

That palace of all the greeds and all the iniquities and all the despairs of the world, which is the gambling-hell of Monte Carlo, has rarely housed a pair united—or divided—by so unimaginable a story.

Rosalie de la Crozière sat fixed in her attitude. Even then the artist in the man noted the exquisite curves of arms and neck and bosom.

“And you are not ashamed to confess it?”

“No,” said he. “I buried shame a hundred years ago; and its ghost doesn’t arise to haunt me now. I am what I am.” He drew a cigarette from his case and lighted it. “You have my confession. It is in your power to denounce me. Do what you will.”

Her shoulders moved slightly. “It is too late. There would be no object ...”

“Thanks,” said he dryly. “But may I put a question?” He looked deep into her steadfast eyes. “You arrived on the scene. I heard a cry and caught sight of your white dress. You noticed my ear. Why didn’t you give my description to the police—L’Homme à l’Oreille Cassée? I should have been taken before I could get to Marseilles. Why didn’t you?”

“Because—because I saw more than the broken ear. The figure was familiar after all these years. I had a horrible dread that the man might be you ...” She passed her hands over her eyes and rose quickly. “I think we’ve talked enough. Accompany me to the door of the bar. I have some friends in the rooms.”

Just past the threshold of the Salle Privée, she turned.

“Adieu.”

He bowed gravely.

“Adieu,” said he.

“And that,” said Tombarel, “is the beginning of my story.”

“The beginning?” I cried. “What do you mean by the beginning?”

“If you are such a purist in language,” said he, “let us call it the preface to my story. We began by a reference to the monastery on the Island of St. Honorat. I said I would tell you the story of Frère Sylvain.”

“But you’ve told it to me, mon ami,” said I. “All that matters. After Patignon parted from Madame Rosalie he gave up the world and went into religion, and is now the pious Frère Sylvain.”

It is the only time I have ever seen my venerable friend completely bewildered.

“Qu’est-ce que vous chantez là?” he gasped. For him to derogate so far from his exquisitely polished French to ask me slangily what was I drivelling about, was evidence of loss of balance. “Patignon, Frère Sylvain? Jamais de la vie!”

“Then where does Frère Sylvain come in?”

“But, mon Dieu, haven’t you understood? It is the Marquis de la Crozière who is Frère Sylvain.”

“Oh!” said I, bewildered in my turn. “The devil he is!”

“Of course. Who else?” cried Tombarel with a triumphant gesture. “I had to tell you the story of Patignon in order to explain Camille de la Crozière. Don’t you see? Without Patignon he wouldn’t have received the blow on his head which fractured his skull, and he wouldn’t have entered into religion. It is so remarkable, the linking together of human destinies; the fatality, one might say, of Greek tragedy. Here was a man who treated his wife like the last of scoundrels, converted to the service of the bon Dieu by the old perfect lover of his wife acting the part of the blind agent of Nemesis. I find that extraordinary!”

Tombarel would have been disappointed by the exhibition of my entire lack of enthusiasm. To disappoint Tombarel when his eyes were alight and his delicate hands flashing all around his white leonine head would have been an outrage. I had to assume an appearance of absorbed interest.

“Extraordinary! And he didn’t know who his assailant was?”

“Of course not. Neither did Patignon know whom he was assassinating. That is the point of it. Merci, mon ami—mais merci, oui—the smallest drop.” He pushed his glass to the maître d’hôtel who, I am sure, came forward with the old bottle as a last ruse for getting rid of us, as we were the last customers left in the sunny restaurant.

“What was I saying? Ah! yes. The conversion of Camille de la Crozière. It’s a case of subtle psychology. Camille—I have known him from infancy—is of the old aristocracy—pur sang. The pure blood of the Crusaders runs in his veins. You see here the influences of heredity—the heredity of idea.

“When he recovered from his concussion, he began to think very seriously. The blow dealt a little to the right or left would have killed him. He was spared by a miracle. Although a bad man, he had always been a devout Catholic. That happens sometimes. He already had undergone spasmodic periods of remorse. Now his religion got him tight!” Tombarel clenched his hands in a strangle-hold.

“The bon Dieu, he was convinced, had something to do with it—in fact, the bon Dieu had everything to do with it. He reviewed his life. How had he treated the poor Rosalie Dufour whom he had married for her money? All the sardines, huile extra fine, of the Dufour factory, had slipped through his pockets. He had been a sinner and an execrable husband. Why had God spared him? That is the interesting question.”

Tombarel stretched out his hand across the table and tapped my arm. “Because he had committed the greatest sin. Remember, it’s his psychology I’m talking about. He had refused a human being the small charity of a rose. If he had said to the vagabond, ‘Take two, take three—and Heaven speed you on your path,’ the man would have thanked him humbly and gone away. It was the rose itself, plucked by Patignon, that drove him into religion. It’s droll, isn’t it?”

I acquiesced. Anything was possible for a man who was a throwback to the Crusaders. No doubt many of his ancestors, after weltering in innocent gore, had exchanged their blood-drenched raiment for the hair shirt of the monk. From what I had heard of the Marquis de la Crozière, he appeared to be of the same type as the overbearing, singularly unpleasant, yet superstitious baron of the Middle Ages.

We smoked a while in silence, Tombarel the epicure leaving me time to enjoy the flavour of his narrative. At last, after polite commendation, I came tactfully to the subject of my very real interest.

“And Rosalie?”

“She was only too happy to get free of him with the remnant of her fortune.”

“And Patignon?”

“Patignon? You wish to hear more about Patignon? ... Yes, perhaps you are right. After all, what I have told you is more the story of Patignon than of Frère Sylvain ... Patignon? Yes. I know all about him.”

“Tell me,” said I.

“I have a theory of life, my friend, which has stood me in good stead many times when I thought myself plunged in the depths of the black treachery of mankind—and it is this: that if you dig deep enough into the vilest soul of man, you will find one streak of sweetness. If a man discovers it for himself and follows it, he wins salvation. That one sweet streak was in Patignon—the young man’s pure love for Rosalie.... He and Rosalie are married.”

I jumped. “How on earth——?”

“They went to America. It seems he could claim American citizenship. Enfin. What do we know? There are places in America where you can buy a divorce for two sous and get married for nothing. Don’t ask me.” To a Frenchman like Tombarel, any foreign country is a barbaric waste where anything can happen. “All I know is that they are married, and perfectly happy.”

“But, good heavens!” I cried—I must confess to a sense of shock, of upheaval. “She, the flower of all the innocences, and he the poison-plant of all the vices!”

“Rhetorically, very good,” said he.

I disregarded his ironical interruption and went on: “Why, it’s monstrous! He stripped her own husband of a small fortune.”

“It didn’t belong to her husband,” said Tombarel. “It belonged to her. How could he restore it more honourably than by marrying her?”

“Go on,” said I. Sometimes the Latin view of morals is beyond me.

“There’s nothing more to say. Apparently my little Rosalie had loved her Patignon all her life—who can dive into the complexities of a woman’s heart? Certainly not an old bachelor like me. Once I tried to solve the enigma of woman. I almost lost my reason.... That’s another matter.... Yes, there they are in a pretty farmhouse near Roquebrune where, though they need not do so, they cultivate roses for the market.... You see, the rose was the symbol of his happiness. He explained it all, at length, only the other day.”

“You still see him?” I asked.

“Why, yes. They are great friends of mine. Would you like to meet them?”

“I don’t know,” said I. “Patignon sticks in my gizzard. I don’t see how he deserves all this.”

“It is the English Puritan that speaks,” said Tombarel, putting on his vast black felt hat. “Because a man has once been wicked, why should he always be wicked? Haven’t poets worn themselves to the bone trying to prove the purifying influences of a woman’s love? Besides, my dear friend, who are you and I to probe the recesses of a man’s soul and judge whether he deserves or doesn’t deserve what God has thought fit to mete out to him? I, Tombarel, have done things—and I am the Mayor of Creille, and I have the Légion d’honneur, and the very great privilege of your affection.”

He doffed his hat in the most courtly of bows, insisting that I should precede him out of the restaurant.