Monsieur Jonquelle (20 page)

His voice was oiled with vitriol.

“But I felicitate Monsieur. He has made a perfect bait about our wolf trap for the cheetahs, and he finds the necklace that the
Service de la Sûreté
could get no track of.… It was this necklace, Monsieur, that we were seeking; its purloiners have been always in the hollow of our hand … and Monsieur finds it for us, here in his great-aunt's house!”

I stammered in my profound amazement.

“My great-aunt's house!”

“Why,
certainement
!” He continued in his acid voice: “And in the very room in which she died, when she awoke to find the cherished gift of her long dead lover vanished!”

I stammered on:

“You mean … you mean … the Russian savant and his daughter robbed her!”

He put out his hands with a great gesture of rejection.

“Ah, no! How blind this love is! … The robbery was accomplished by old Dutocq, who used to be a concierge in the wing of Archeology at the Louvre, and the American actress, Greysmith, called ‘Dolly Deep Dimple' in the ‘Review of Toy Land.'”

The great drawing-room through which Monsieur Jonquelle advanced was empty.

But it was not silent. A vague music, like some weird conception of Hoffman, seemed to feel about the room, extending itself—a thing that crept blindly and disturbed as though it would escape from something that followed it tirelessly and invisibly.

It required the fingers of a master, on the board of a keyed instrument, to produce these sounds. They came from the room beyond, a second drawing-room looking out on the Bois de Boulogne.

Monsieur Jonquelle had not allowed the servant to announce him.

“One is not permitted to disturb Lord Valleys at this hour,” the servant had said.

Monsieur Jonquelle's card had added to the man's perplexity. One was also not permitted to deny an entrance, anywhere, at any hour, to the Prefect of Police of Paris. The man had made a hopeless gesture, like one resigning himself to the inevitable.

And so Monsieur Jonquelle had entered.

It was a beautiful house beyond the Arc de Triomphe, built by that extraordinary Brazilian who had married two princes, divorced them both, and gone elsewhere on her search for new sensations.

It was of pale rose-colored stone with a great court, a wide, circular stairway, and these exquisite drawing-rooms now empty but for the priceless furniture and this haunting music.

Monsieur Jonquelle, after the door had closed behind him, remained for some moments quite motionless in the eddy, as one might write it, of this strange, weird music, in which there was always a note of ruthless vigor—a note of barbaric vigor, harsh and determined.

Monsieur Jonquelle could not place the music in any remembered composition. It was not the work of any master that he knew. It was an improvisation of the fingers that produced it. And perhaps for that reason the Prefect of Police gave it close attention.

Presently he advanced into the room from which the music issued. He paused a moment in the doorway, watching the figure with white, nimble fingers hard as steel. Then he spoke.

“Your pardon, Monsieur,” said the Prefect of Police, “I am desolated to disturb you.”

The man at the piano sprang up and turned
swiftly as though his body accomplished the act with a single motion.

To the eye, the man was strange. His shoulders were very broad and stooped; his face was wide, massive—the face of a Slav. His hair was thick, close and heavy, but it was not long, and affected no mannerisms.

The man was very carefully dressed, after the English fashion, and with its well-bred restraint. But the impression he gave one was decidedly not English. It was that of a Slav adapted to an English aspect.

The eyes one did not see. One rarely saw them. They seemed to be hidden by heavy lids like curtained windows. And there was no expression in the face. The face was a mask. It seemed always in repose. The big nose, the square, brutal jaw, and the wide planes of the face were white as with a sort of pallor. Monsieur Jonquelle had a sudden, swift impression. The man before him was either the greatest criminal or the greatest genius that he had ever seen.

Jonquelle had also, a further impression of failure. He had meant to startle this man, and observe what followed. And he had startled him; but untrue to every experience, there was nothing to observe. The man's face remained without an expression; he was behind it hidden from every eye. It was a mask that could not be changed by
the will of another. Monsieur Jonquelle wondered in what manner it would change at the will of the man that it so admirably obscured. It was a thing he was not interested to discover.

It was only for an instant that the man was without expression. Then he smiled and came forward into the room. The smile began with a queer lifting of the lip and extended vaguely with but a slight changing of the man's features.

His voice, when he spoke, was low, well modulated and composed. His manner was easy and gracious.

“Ah!” he said, “it is Monsieur Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police of Paris. I am honored.”

He placed a great chair by the window. It was a carved, heavy chair upholstered in a superb tapestry, a chair that servants did not move in a drawing-room. But Lord Valleys placed it by the window easily, as though its immense weight were nothing to him.

He indicated the chair with a gesture and withdrew to another beyond the window—a little beyond the light of it, beside a curtain.

Monsieur Jonquelle removed his gloves; he sat a moment twisting them in his fingers like one in a certain embarrassment. His host, also seated, regarded him with the vague smile which appeared now as a sort of background on the mask of his face. The Prefect of Police hesitated.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I have called upon you for an opinion upon a problem which has always perplexed me. It is a problem upon which the opinions of persons without experience are wholly without value, and unfortunately, all those who have had experience and were, therefore, able to give me an opinion, have been always persons lacking in a certain element of intelligence. I have not had the opinion of a man of intelligence, who was also a man of experience, upon this problem.”

He paused. The man before him did not reply. He waited as in a profound courtesy for Monsieur Jonquelle to complete the subject with which he had opened his discourse. He had taken a small chair, and he sat in it as a man of great strength and vigor and of an unusual bulk rests his weight upon something which he is uncertain will support it. He did not move, but the expression in his face changed slightly. His eyebrows lifted as in a courteous inquiry. Monsieur Jonquelle went on. He seemed not entirely at ease.

“I shall not pretend an ignorance of your affairs, Monsieur. The law courts of England are brutal and direct. They have no consideration for any one, and the press of those islands has a less restraint. When one is charged with a crime in England, and comes into its courts, no humiliation is neglected. That one is innocent, means nothing; that this innocence is presently demonstrated
does not preserve one, in the events preceding such a verdict, from every imaginable humiliation.”

Monsieur Jonquelle continued to hesitate. But he went on.

“Monsieur,” he said, “out of this unfortunate experience you will have come, I feel, with a certain opinion upon the problem which disturbs me. And I am sure, Monsieur, you will not deny me the benefit of that opinion.”

The Prefect of Police looked up like one who with hesitation requests a favor from another.

Lord Valleys replied immediately.

“I shall be very glad to give you my opinion upon any point in the matter,” he said. “Surely I have been spared little. I have had every experience of humiliation. The criminal law of England is a bungling and cruel device. Those who find themselves concerned with it, I profoundly pity. There is no consideration of family or culture that in any way mitigates its severity or in any direction preserves one from odium, once the machinery of a criminal court of England is on its way. The experience of it is a horror to me, Monsieur; but if it can result in any benefit to you or to another, I am willing to recall it. What is the problem, Monsieur, upon which you would have my opinion?”

“It is this, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect of
Police. “Is it your conclusion, upon this experience of life, that there is a Providence of God that undertakes to adjust the affairs of mankind—to assist the helpless and to acquit the innocent—or do you believe that it is the intelligence of man that accomplishes this result? … What is it, Monsieur, that moves behind the machinery of the world—chance, luck, fortune or some sort of Providence?”

Lord Valleys seemed to reflect while the Prefect of Police was speaking, and he now replied with no hesitation.

“Chance, Monsieur,” he said, “is unquestionably the greatest and most mysterious factor in all human affairs, but it is modified and diverted by the human will.… Human intelligence, Monsieur, and chance are the two factors.”

The Prefect of Police continued to look down at his hands.

“I have been of a different opinion, Lord Valleys,” he said. “I think there is an intention behind events, a sort of will to justice, to righteousness, as one has said. It is not chance as we usually define the word, and the human will cannot circumvent it.… It is strange, as I see it, Lord Valleys. This thing we call human intelligence seems to be able to aid, to assist, to advance the vague, immense, persistent impulse behind events, and
to delay and to disturb it, but not ultimately to defeat it.

“Take the extraordinary events that have happened to you, Lord Valleys, and tell me, if you can, how they could have arrived by chance!

“Your uncle, Lord Winton, took the title and the whole properties of your family by the accident of birth. Your father, the second son, having no title and no fortune, entered the diplomatic service and was allotted to one of the little courts of southeastern Europe. He married your mother there, and you were born and grew up in the atmosphere of Serbia. There was little chance that you would ever have this fortune or title. Lord Winton had two sons; one of them married an American; the other remained unmarried. There were three lives between you and this title and its immense estates in England.… What chance was there, Monsieur, that these persons would be removed and these benefits descend to you?”

He paused.

“But they were removed, Monsieur, and the benefits have descended. The war appeared. Both sons of Lord Winton lost their lives in it; Lord Winton is himself murdered; and you come, Monsieur, from a paupered kingdom of southeastern Europe to be a peer of England with an immense estate. Even the American granddaughter
of Lord Winton takes nothing under this extraordinary English law of entail. Would you call this chance, Monsieur?”

Lord Valleys found no difficulty at all with the inquiry. He replied directly.

“Monsieur,” he said, “it was all clearly chance except the murder of Lord Winton. That was, of course, design—a design which the wise English authorities attributed to me, and which they spared no effort to fix upon me. That they were unable to do so is not, I think, attributable to this thing which you call Providence. It is attributable rather, I think, to the intelligence of my legal counsel and to myself.”

He looked directly at Monsieur Jonquelle. His big, placid face lifted; his voice was even and unhurried.

“I am not embarrassed to discuss it, Monsieur,” he continued. “When the war had ended with the death of Lord Winton's sons, I was, by virtue of what you have so aptly called ‘the accident of birth', next in succession to the title. I thought it both advisable and courteous to present myself to Lord Winton, and I went to England for that purpose.

“Lord Winton was an eccentric person. As he grew older, and after the death of his sons, his eccentricity became more dominant. I did not find him on his estates at Ravenscroft; he was at
this time in London in a little old house which the family has always owned in a street toward Covent Garden.

“On the night that I called to see Lord Winton, it was quite late. I found him alone in the house. He seemed disturbed to see me, but he was courteous, and I cannot complain of his welcome. He seemed, however, not to realize that I had grown into a man. He seemed to regard me as a queer, foreign lad to whom he owed some obligation of hospitality.”

Lord Valleys stopped. He leaned a little forward in the chair, and his voice took on a firmer note.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I am saying to you now a thing to which I testified at the English trial, and which was not believed. Lord Winton told me that he expected a person to call on him within a very few minutes and to remain for perhaps an hour. He asked me to return at the end of an hour. I got up to go. As I went down the stairway, a motor, entering the street from the direction of the City, stopped before the door. The door was closed but the sound was clearly audible.

“Lord Winton, who was behind me, also came down the steps. On a console in the hall were several candles which the servants, according to custom, had placed there. An idea came to Lord
Winton, for he stopped me as my hand was on the door to go out. He took up one of these candles in a tall brass candlestick, and touching me on the arm, handed it to me.

“‘Instead of going out,' he said, ‘suppose you go down into the wine cellar. There should be some bottles of Burgundy of a famous year stored there by your grandfather. See if you can find them, and we shall have a glass of wine with our talk. I have a great deal to say to you, my nephew. The wine will sustain us.'

“You will see, Monsieur, that this idea that I was merely a grown-up lad, come to visit an ancient relative, was quite fixed with Lord Winton. As the servants had gone out, he was sending me, as though I were a lad from Eton, to find the wine for our conversation. He gave me the key, a direction about the steps and doors. He even said there was a box of biscuit on the dining room table which I should bring up. It was all, you see, Monsieur, quite as though I were an under-graduate from some English public school.”