The Tower of Oblivion Part 76

"Tout va bien, M'sieu'?" she asked with anxious sympathy.

"Oui, Madame. The coach will take away your Cendrillon immediately."

"Is it not as I said to my husband! And M'sieu' Arnaud also goes?"

"Naturally. They will depart in a few minutes. As for their account, it is I who will regulate that if you will prepare it for to-morrow. And one does not buy goodness of heart, Madame; nevertheless----"

Nevertheless, in the short struggle of hands in the darkness, the hand that proffered and the hand that refused, the hand that proffered was the victor. I re-ascended to their room.

The other time I had not knocked, but this time I did so. They were as I had left them--ready in what they stood up in. He carried the little black bundle of her necessaries and his own. They took a last look round that warped and wonderful and memory-haunted room....

But I had given them five minutes with its memories while I had negotiated with Madame....

"Ready?" I said.

We descended that interior crack for the last time.

There was a sudden hush in the kitchen as we entered. The blonde heads, the dark heads, turned above the tunics of black and horizon-blue, faces watched us round the stacked-up kepis on the table. But though probably little else had been talked of for the last hour, none was supposed to know that I was the Fairy G.o.dmother who had brought the coach for Cinderella. Derry took no farewell of the copains who, with sundry other nationalities, were the French population of France. Only Jennie ran towards Madame and was pressed for a minute against a bosom well able to sustain her weight. Derry got out the bicycles from behind the door.

Outside he walked ahead between them. Jennie and I followed him along the Rue de la Cordonnerie.

A quarter of an hour later I had asked Madame at my hotel to be so obliging as to allow me the use of her telephone. There was no telephone at Ker Annic, but there was one at the Beverleys' hotel, and I knew that Beverley would see to it that a message for Alec was delivered immediately. I did not think it necessary to tell Beverley what it was all about; I merely asked him to send word to the Airds that I wished to see them in Dinan to-morrow.

Then I engaged another room--an ordinary hotel bedroom, where a chambermaid would bring up hot water in the morning and a bath was to be had for stepping across the corridor--just an ordinary hotel bedroom--not a place of memories and romance like that tumbling old room over that cabaret in the Rue de la Cordonnerie that looked as if it had sunk a yard into the earth----

PART V

THE HOME STRETCH

I

The next day we were five at the Hotel de la Poste. We sat long after luncheon, on the creeper-awninged terrace that overhangs the Pet.i.ts Fosses. The other tables had long since been cleared, but the waiters, smelling thunder in the air, kept well away from ours.

My heart was sore for Alec too. Officially he had been driven to accept the sworn but unbelievable statement; in his heart he neither understood nor believed one single word of it. It was so unlike the engineering and Rugby football that he did understand. That to which his mind always returned was the plain meaning of these words: Treachery, Seduction and Falsehood.

Madge's reception of the incredible thing had been one of the most extraordinary experiences I ever had in my life. She and Alec had arrived in Dinan at nine o'clock and had come straight to my hotel. At a quarter past nine I had locked my bedroom door against the interrupting bootboys and chambermaids who busied themselves on staircases and landings. The morning stir also filled the courtyard below. Jennie and Derry I had told to keep out of the way until lunch-time. I had hastily covered my bed, and Madge had sat down on the edge of it. During the whole of the time I had talked, half a dozen Alecs in the various mirrors had met and re-met one another as he had paced the room.

First of all she had drawn an extraordinarily deep breath. Then slowly she had pressed her fingertips over her eyelids. Her lips had moved under the little eaves made by her hands. She had had the air of trying to see something anew, to see a succession of things anew, and to name them as they came. She had sat there for quite two minutes, eyes hidden, lips moving, seeing, repeating....

Then, "The Club----" she had breathed.

And then, "Queen's Gate----"

I had found myself nodding.

"His brother--Arnaud--sketching----"

She was well away now.

Then suddenly her hands had dropped, she had stared at me, and a shrill cry had broken explosively from her.

"The Beautiful Bear! Derwent Rose! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!...

George Coverham, tell me--is it? _Is_ it?"

"It is."

"That afternoon--looking at himself in the picture--his brother in Queen's Gate--Arnaud--Derwent Rose--I knew it, I knew it all the time----"

And she had slid with my coverlet gently to the floor.

And she did in fact recognise him--did pick out, as it were through some bright reversed telescope of time, that still-sealed but identical beauty of the grown man she had found so superb. He was like, as a son is like a father, as for a fleeting instant a newly-born babe may resemble a grandparent. She had wished to meet Derwent Rose. She had now met him, at this far end of a corridor of years.

And I had had to pick her up from where she crouched, on a coverlet on my bedroom floor.

But give her a little time--the time to pull herself together--and you could no more have persuaded Madge that it was not so than you could have got Alec to believe it was.

"But why wasn't I told all this at once?" he had demanded, not twice or thrice, but twenty times. "Are you telling me now, or am I wrong in my head? Why didn't you? Why didn't you? Then he could have been put where he belongs--in the asylum yonder----"

And again, and yet again: "You brought him to my house, you brought him to my house! You practically introduced him under a French name--you didn't contradict it anyway--you knew all about him--and I wasn't told--I'm only told after he's stolen my girl! Why didn't you tell me, Coverham?"

But I considered that I had less to reproach myself with than he thought. I had done everything in my power to isolate him, to keep her out of his path. Madge, not I, had asked him to Ker Annic. Madge had invited herself to his hotel in St Briac. He had given me his word, I had trusted to it, and he had broken it. And had I at any time told Alec the truth he would no more have comprehended it than he did now.

So he had railed bitterly on, turning the nightmare over and over again, meeting and re-meeting himself in the mirrors, very much as Derwent Rose had met and re-met himself in the windings of his marvellous life.

"Oh, we're mad! We're all mad! Any chance of our waking up? And you talk to me about somebody called Derwent Rose as if I ought to know all about the fellow the moment you mention his name! I never heard of a Derwent Rose in my life! Who the devil is Derwent Rose anyway?"

This at any rate Madge had been able to tell him.

"But he says he's never written a book in his life! Who should know if he doesn't?"

I made another attempt.

"The idea, Alec, is that that is a corroboration of the whole thing. He doesn't remember that he ever wrote a book, and I've a notion it would be safer not to try to make him remember. Another thing, Alec. You say I'm mad. But you can have absolutely independent evidence any time you like. Julia Oliphant's in Dinard. She knows nothing of what's happening in this room. Go to her and tell her, from me, that she's to tell you all she knows about a man called Derwent Rose. Then see what she says."

"And you say you're going to make a legal adoption of something that's shaped like a man but ought to be kept in a padded room?"

"I am if it's possible. The letter's written and in the box. All we can do is to wait till I've had a reply to it."

"Oh, we're all daft, we're all daft!" he had cried, his head in his hands.

And that was still his burden--that we were all daft. I will not deny that there seemed something to be said for it.

My letter to my solicitors had taken me the best part of the night to write. I wanted to be sure of the position without divulging too much.

Derwent Rose existed; the record of his birth was to be found in Somerset House among the files for the year 1875, and nowhere was there a certificate of his death. If Derwent Rose as he now in fact was ought properly to have been born in the year 1902 or thereabouts, the thought had come to me that this difference might be bridged by my own legal adoption of him. Discreetly I had asked for information on this point.

If the thing was feasible, Derry would then be George Coverham's son, and his marriage to Alec Aird's daughter would follow immediately. I had not seen what fairer offer I could make, and even Alec had grudgingly agreed--until the whole thing had once more overwhelmed him, and he had cried out that we were all daft and ought to be locked up.