Monsieur Jonquelle (5 page)

The anxiety in the voice of the Prefect of Police could not be doubted. The Count de Choiseul suddenly threw up his head.

“Well!” he cried, “suppose this to be the true explanation then: A man of honor is in love with a married woman. In a cab in the night in the fog, like a gentleman he tells the husband of this woman and implores him to give her up. The husband refuses, and in despair the man undertakes to send a bullet into his own heart. The bullet is deflected by a rib, the man's arm is caught by his companion, and the second shot intended for himself kills the husband of the woman. What then? Does such an explanation fit your evidential facts?”

“Ah!” cried Monsieur Jonquelle, springing to his feet. “
Très bien
!” He remained a moment, his eyes bright and his face tense with reflection.

“It does fit them—it fits them like a key in a lock. Men have killed themselves for love since the world began. The motive is convincing, and the explanation tallies with every physical fact:
the position of the two persons, the direction of the wounds—even the very pistol on the cab floor. Nor does this explanation bar the Count de Choiseul from the regard of Madame. It is one thing to kill a woman's husband in cold blood, and quite another to kill him by inadvertence in an attempt to take one's own life for love of the woman. The latter becomes a sort of terrible compliment presently to be forgiven for its motive. My congratulations, Monsieur le Comte!”

He touched a bell. When the servant appeared the Prefect inquired if Sir James Macbain had arrived at the house. And being told that the baronet was below, directed that he be shown up immediately.

When the head of the department of London police entered Monsieur Jonquelle rapidly explained the situation. The baronet started and snapped his big iron fingers, then he listened with the closest attention. He did not speak until the Prefect was quite done with his recital. Then he turned to the Count de Choiseul. He was a huge man with an abrupt, decided manner.

“I do not believe this story,” he said; “I think it is wholly false. Nevertheless I will accept it as the true explanation of Lord Landeau's death if the Count de Choiseul will commit it to writing over his signature. I may add that for the examining magistrate also to accept it the Count must
include that he makes this statement at his own volition.”

Writing materials were brought and the wounded man wrote out his explanation of the tragedy. His face had changed. It was like the face of one who from subterranean perils has gained the upper air. When his statement was signed and witnessed the baronet put the folded paper into his pocket and the Prefect took up his hat and stick.

“Adieu, Monsieur le Comte,” he said. “I shall perhaps not see you again.”

“I will look you up in Paris!” replied the Count de Choiseul with a pleasant smile.

Monsieur Jonquelle paused a moment with his hand on the door.

“I fear not,” he said. “It is the law of England, Monsieur may be interested to know, that if in an attempt to take his own life one by accident kills another, he is guilty of murder.”

1

I parted from Monsieur Jonquelle at Marseilles. I might have gone on with him to Algeria, but I was only an aide-de-camp attached to the staff of the commanding general in this affair. It was the Paris branch of our house that had the thing in hand. But I was idling in that city of pleasant sin and they sent me with him. It was an honorable discharge I got at Marseilles, not a desertion.

“Run up to Nice,” the Prefect had said, “and amuse yourself, Monsieur. There is sun in Nice and the whole world to play with.
Diable
! If only one could be always young! … What is it that Chateaubriand says? ‘If man, physically made perfect, could unceasingly respond to a sentiment everlastingly renewed, he might very well live the life of the gods!'”

And he made a delicate gesture with his extended fingers.

“If there be a trim ankle in the whole of France
you will find it now upon the Promenade des Anglais.”

The head of the Department of Police in Paris is a gentleman. If you doubt it go into the Théâtre Vaudeville and see
La Prise de Berg-op-Zoom
.

“The head of the Department of Police in London is a baronet; you will remember that from the recent attempt of an assassin to shoot him down in the street before his house.

“You will therefore set aside, if you please, the type of persons observed to march at the head of parades in your strangely governed cities, and get, instead of that, a picture of a suave, gray man, who might be a minister of war in a book of memoirs.”

He gave me a further word at parting.

“You must live on the hills back of Nice,” he said; “the low quarters of the town are not healthy. Find a good hotel on the Boulevard des Cimiez.”

“And how shall I find it?” I said.

He laughed.

“Why, Monsieur, there is nothing easier in this world. The tram ascends from the Avenue de la Gare to Cimiez. Enter it
premier
if you like; but look through into the second-class compartment. You will see some dozen ladies of noble
birth there.” He paused a moment. “Observe where those ladies descend and follow them.”

He laughed again; then he added:

“Try the Imperial Palais; old Monsieur Boularde, from the Champs-Elysées, is proprietor. You will find
chauffage central
and a café to be decorated. Boularde's method when he employs a chef is that of a master, Monsieur. He goes in and orders a dinner from the card; when he has tasted it he summons its creator. ‘Monsieur,' he will say then, ‘you are a good chef—you are an excellent chef; but you are not the best to be had in France. I cannot employ you.'”

Then his shrewd face became serious.

“Remember, Monsieur, they are all children over there in Nice and this is the season of carnival. You will be bombarded with confetti, and driven by your coattails for a petit cheval, and hung with garlands.… Laugh, Monsieur! Never cease to laugh! Spend your money! Waste your time and forget this unpleasant business that we are on. I shall attend to that. There is a trap laid that they will eventually fall into—if not today, then to-morrow.” His face changed swiftly, like a mirror in moving lights. “But do you give it no further thought until I come upon you on some sunny morning. It will be all too soon—believe me—if you have got well into that enchanting frolic.”

He reached up and laid his hand upon my shoulder.

“But you will not be a fool, my friend.” And he looked at me with his keen gray eyes. “Eat the honey of your golden youth; but mind the bees, Monsieur! Kiss the
petite masque
that whispers ‘ 'Ello, dearie!' into your Saxon ear; but do not let your heart out of the bag. And do not believe all the words that we speak in France.
Mon Dieu
! Have we not a way of saying
fille de joie
when we mean the pit?”

And he turned back at the gangplank of his boat for a final word:

“Keep out of the chill at sunset,
mon cher ami
, and the game at Monte Carlo.”

If there is any sun in one's blood it will come out in France: the people are so genial. I traveled up to Nice on the express. An old Frenchman got into my compartment. He was big and stooped, and he had a wilderness of beard; but he was a suave and pleasant person. He read
La Patrie
through his big, dim spectacles, with his nose against the page; but when we were on the way, and he had got the news of Paris, he put it down, addressed me with a little courteous apology for the monotony and asperities of travel—and we fell into a pleasant talk.

He had a distressing weakness of the chest that ejected him out of Paris in the winter months, and
he was on his way to Mentone. He had the history of the Côte-d'Azur upon his fingertips, and he passed from the first days of the world into the last with a charming ease of manner. He pointed out the Roman monuments and the English golf course at Cannes. He spoke of Caesar and Lord Brougham in the same sentence, and the island where Paganini lay for so long unburied, listening to the great orchestra of the Mediterranean and the winds.

He envied me the holiday in Nice. To be an American, young, rich and traveling for his pleasure, was to have God's blessings bound together in a bundle. Had I a hostelry in Nice arranged for? The city would be crowded, now that the rains were ended. I told him I would go to the Imperial Palais on the Boulevard des Cimiez. Ah, I was very rich, then! And he coughed to lay dear the great contrast in our fortunes. He seemed depressed after that; and when I got out at Nice I left him huddled over in a corner of the compartment, his big shoulders shaking and his fingers pressed to his mouth, as though he feared a hemorrhage. The thing saddened me—thus to pass by age and its inevitable weaknesses as one entered into the gate of pleasure!

There had come on a little gust of rain and I went up through the city in a thin batter of white mud. I found the hostelry to be very nearly equal
to its name. It is in a great semicircle above rising terraces set with orange trees—formal, as though painted upon the scenery of a theater. The interior is upon a plan strikingly unique. The building is in segments opening into the arc of a corridor; each of these segments has its separate stairway and its tiny elevator that ascends in the open hollow of the stair—a little gilded and paneled cage, operated by electric buttons.

And here one has a curious experience of service. Every creature, from Monsieur Boularde descending, will run to fling open the doors to this dainty mite of a box, bow one in, close the doors, and send one on the way skyward. But one has to pilot this craft for himself and, when he has alighted, close the doors and return it. It is all cleverly worked upon a little nest of buttons. Each of the segments in the structure is a section of exquisite apartments.

The lower and larger ones were taken for the season; but I was shown two farther up, looking out over Nice, that were vacant—each with a balcony and some extravagances in mirrors that added a hundred francs. I chose the top one; and in the morning when I came out from my bath and flung open the long window, and the balmy air and the sun entered, I decided that the balcony was worth the hundred francs. One needed just that above this fairy city, with its clean, red roofs,
its mountains of dull-green olive trees, its inimitable sky, and the motionless sea with its vast changing patches of color. There was no breath of wind; there was no wisp of cloud. I stood before it as before some illusion of the senses. How could Nature stage a thing like that? Yes, this balcony was clearly worth the money. At that minute the window below opened and some one stepped out. I looked down.

A woman was standing there on the balcony. She wore a loose gown of delicate blue, and her hair hung to her waist in two wrist-thick plaits. I stared in a sort of wonder. The setting and my mood were agreeable to the entrance of some fairy creature. And here she was, as the painters were accustomed to present her in their pictures.

The very words of the old story-tellers were accurately descriptive—hair as yellow as gold and as heavy as gold; and she was little and dainty, like the fairy women. I knew that her eyes were blue like the cornflower before she looked up. I must have made some sound, but she did not see me; and in a moment she went back through the window.

I swallowed my breakfast—this is a practical world—and I made some inquiries of the servant who brought it up. The apartment was taken on this very morning. Madame Nekludoff and maid. A Russian then? “
Oui, Monsieur
.” A
princess then, perhaps? He shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands above my pot of coffee. How could one tell? If they said they were it was a sign against it! The coins were true and false! The latest princess of the blood was a dancer from Montmartre, with her hand in a banker's pocket. And a
nègre
from New York had traveled as a rajah! The truth was by contraries, he thought—like dreams. Since this new guest gave no title, she doubtless had one.

The old
femme de chambre
on the floor below was an expert in such matters, however. Monsieur understood? There were skilled dealers in jewels who, by the eye, could tell a spurious brilliant. It was long experience, maybe, or a sort of instinct—one could not say. Well, the ancient Eda was such a judge of the human jewel. Should he enlist her service for Monsieur? I declined, and we closed the incident with a coin of the republic.

I went down and smoked innumerable cigarettes upon the great terrace among the formal orange trees. Strolling singers came and sang, and children danced; but somehow my interest in events was not with them. I had an eye upon that balcony, but no god moved. I went in to luncheon, and after that to the vantage of my window. It was in vain.

Then, when I had given up and abandoned myself
to fortune, as Caesar used to do, the thing happened.

I was going down in that absurd gilt box of a lift, when, as I approached the floor below, a little voice called out: “
Ascenseur
!” I had trouble to select the proper button, but finally I got it, and after some endeavors brought the craft to dock, and got the doors open. I saw Madame Nekludoff for an instant before she recognized that I was not a servant.

She was not the mere child that she looked in her fairy costume, but she was young—one or two and twenty, I should say. Her face in repose was saddened, as though she had tasted life and found it bitter. She was all in black, but there were no extravagances of mourning in her dress. She had chosen that color, I thought, that she might be the less conspicuous; but it was a failure to that end. The somber background served only the more to bring out the lights in her hair and the fair, transparent skin.

She was in a panic of confusion when she saw that I was not a servant.

“Oh, pardon, Monsieur!” she said. “I thought it would be
le garçon
. I am sorry! Pardon!” And she turned to go back to her apartment.