Part 32 (1/2)

Now, Joanna's father, Simon Rushworth, was a London solicitor in very fas.h.i.+onable practice; a man of false geniality, said Paragot, who smiled at you with lips but seemed always to be looking at some h.e.l.l over your shoulder. He also promoted companies, and the Comte de Verneuil, an Anglo-French financier, stood ever by his elbow, using him as his tool and dupe and drawer in general of chestnuts from the fire. The Comte wanted to marry Joanna, ”which was absurd, seeing that I was his rival,”

said Paragot simply.

One of Mr. Rushworth's companies failed. Mr. Rushworth's fas.h.i.+onable clients grew alarmed. He gave a party in honour of Joanna's engagement and invited all his clients. Ugly rumours spread among the guests. The presage of disaster was in the air. Paragot began to suspect the truth.

It was a hateful party. The band in the garden played selections from ”Orphee aux Enfers,” and the mocking refrain accompanied the last words he was to have with Joanna. The Comte de Verneuil called him aside, explained Rushworth's position. Ten thousand pounds of his clients'

money which he held in trust had gone in the failure of the company. If that amount was not at his disposal the next morning, he was finished, snuffed out. It appeared that no one in Paris or London would lend him the money, his credit being gone. Unless M. de Nerac could find the ten thousand pounds there was the gaol yawning with horrible certainty for M. de Nerac's prospective father-in-law. As Paragot's patrimony, invested in French government securities, was not a third of this sum, he could do nothing but wring his hands in despair and call on Providence and the Comte de Verneuil. The former turned a deaf ear. The latter declared himself a man of business and not a philanthropist; he was ready however to purchase an option on the young lady's affections.

Did not M. de Nerac know what an option was? He would explain. He drafted the famous contract. In return for Paragot's signature he would hand him a cheque drawn in favour of Simon Rushworth.

”_Nom de Dieu!_” cried Paragot, banging the marble table, with his fist, ”Do you see in what a vice he held me? He was a devil, that man! The only human trait about him was a pa.s.sion for rare apes of which he had a collection at Nevers. Thank Heaven they are dead! Thank Heaven he is dead! Thank Heaven he lost most of the money for which he preyed on his kind. He was a vulture, a scaly-headed vulture. He was the carrion kite above every rotten financial concern in London and Paris. That which went near to ruin my poor vain fool of a father-in-law filled his bulging pockets. I hated him living and I hate him dead!”

He tore open his frock coat and pushed the flat brimmed silk hat to the back of his head and waved his lemon kids in his old extravagant gestures.

”What did the stolen ten thousand pounds matter to him? It mattered prison to Rushworth, Joanna's father--think of the horror of it! She would have died from the disgrace--her mother too. And the devil jested, Asticot. He talked of Rushworth being smitten with the slings and black arrows of outrageous fortune. _Nom de Dieu_, I could have strangled him!

But what could I do? Two years! To go out of her life for two years as if I had been struck dead! Yet after two years I could come back and say what I chose. I signed the contract. I went out of the house. I kept my word. _n.o.blesse oblige._ I was Gaston de Nerac. I came back to Paris. I worked night and day for eighteen months. I had genius. I had hope. I had youth. I had faith. She would never marry the Comte de Verneuil. She would not marry anybody. I counted the days. Meanwhile he posed as the saviour of Simon Rushworth. He poisoned Joanna's mind against me. He lied, invented infamies. This I have heard lately. He confessed it all to her before the devil took him as a play-fellow. Of one who had so cruelly treated her all things were possible. She half believed them. At last he told her I was dead. An acquaintance had found me in a Paris hospital and had paid for my funeral. She had no reason for disbelief.

He pressed his suit. Her father and mother urged her--the fool Rushworth soon afterwards came to another crisis, and de Verneuil again stepped in and demanded Joanna as the price. She is gentle. She has a heart tenderer than that of any woman who ever lived. One day I heard she had married him. My G.o.d! It is thirteen years ago.”

He poured some water into the syrup gla.s.s and gulped it down. I remained silent. I had never seen him give way to violent emotion--save once--when he broke the fiddle over Mr. Pogson's head.

Presently he said with a whimsical twist of his lips:

”You may have heard me speak of a crusader's mace.”

”Yes, Master.”

”That's when I used it. I had an inspiration,” he remarked quietly.

”Master,” said I after a while, ”if Madame de Verneuil believed you to be dead, it must have been a shock to her when she saw you alive at Aix-les-Bains.”

”She learned soon after her marriage that her husband had been mistaken.

Her mother had caught sight of me in Venice. Madame de Verneuil never forgave him the lie. She is gentle, my son, but she has character.”

It was after that, I think, that the frozen look came into her eyes.

Thenceforward she was ice to the Comte de Verneuil, who for pleasant, domestic companions.h.i.+p had to resort to his rare apes. No wonder his madness took the form of the fixed idea that he had murdered Paragot.

”After all,” he mused, ”there must have been some good in the man. He desired to make amends. He sent me the old contract, so that his wife should not find it after his death. He confessed everything to her before he died. There is a weak spot somewhere in the heart of the Devil himself. I shouldn't wonder if he were devoted to a canary.”

”Master,” said I, suddenly bethinking me of the canary in the Rue des Saladiers, ”if you marry Madame de Verneuil, what will become of Blanquette?”

”She will come and live with us, of course.”

”H'm!” said I.

Respect forbade downright contradiction. I could only marvel mutely at his pathetic ignorance of woman. Indeed, his reply gave me the shock of an unexpected stone wall. He, who had but recently taught me the chart of Fanchette's soul, to be unaware of elementary axioms! Did I not remember Joanna's iciness at Aix-les-Bains when I told her of his adoption of my zither-playing colleague? Was I not aware of poor Blanquette's miserable jealousy of the beautiful lady who enquired for her master? To bring these two together seemed, even to my boy's mind, a ludicrous impossibility. Yet Paragot spoke with the unhumorous gravity of a Methodist parson and the sincerity of a maiden lady with a mission to obtain good situations for deserving girls; a man, so please you, who had gone into the holes and corners of the Continent of Europe in search of Truth, who had come face to face with human nature naked and unashamed, who had run the gamut of femininity from our rare princess Joanna to the murderer's widow of Prague; a man who ought to have had so sensitive a perception that the most subtle and elusive harmonies of woman were as familiar to him as their providential love of babies or their ineradicable pa.s.sion for new hats.