Jason Part 11

Above, in the long, shallow front room of his flat, with the three windows overlooking the Gardens, Ste. Marie made lights, and after much rummaging unearthed a box of cigarettes of a peculiarly delectable flavor which had been sent him by a friend in the Khedivial household.

He allowed himself one or two of them now and then, usually in sorrowful moments, as an especial treat; and this seemed to him to be the moment for smoking all that were left. Surely his need had never been greater.

In England he had, of course, learned to smoke a pipe, but pipe-smoking always remained with him a species of accomplishment; it never brought him the deep and ruminative peace with which it enfolds the Anglo-Saxon heart. The "vieux Jacob" of old-fas.h.i.+oned Parisian Bohemia inspired in him unconcealed horror, of cigars he was suspicious because, he said, most of the unpleasant people he knew smoked cigars, so he soothed his soul with cigarettes, and he was usually to be found with one between his fingers.

He lighted one of the precious Egyptians, and after a first ecstatic inhalation went across to one of the long windows, which was open, and stood there with his back to the room, his face to the peaceful, fragrant night. A sudden recollection came to him of that other night a month before when he had stood on the Pont des Invalides with his eyes upon the stars, his feet upon the ladder thereunto. His heart gave a sudden exultant leap within him when he thought how far and high he had climbed, but after the leap it s.h.i.+vered and stood still when this evening's misadventure came before him.

Would she ever understand? He had no fear that Hartley would not do his best with her. Hartley was as honest and as faithful as ever a friend was in this world. He would do his best. But even then--It was the girl's inflexible nature that made the matter so dangerous. He knew that she was inflexible, and he took a curious pride in it. He admired it. So must have been those calm-eyed, ancient ladies for whom other Ste.

Maries went out to do battle. It was well-nigh impossible to imagine them lowering their eyes to silly revelry. They could not stoop to such as that. It was beneath their high dignity. And it was beneath hers also. As for himself, he was a thing of patches. Here a patch of exalted chivalry--a n.o.ble patch--there a patch of bourgeois, childlike love of fun; here a patch of melancholic asceticism, there one of something quite the reverse. A hopeless patchwork he was. Must she not shrink from him when she knew? He could not quite imagine her understanding the wholly trivial and meaningless impulse that had prompted him to ride a galloping pig and cast paper serpentines at the a.s.sembled world.

Apart from her view of the affair, he felt no shame in it. The moment of childish gayety had been but a pa.s.sing mood. It had in no way slackened his tense enthusiasm, dulled the keenness of his spirit, lowered his high flight. He knew that well enough. But he wondered if she would understand, and he could not believe it possible. The mood of exaltation in which they had parted that afternoon came to him, and then the sight of her shocked face as he had seen it in the laughing crowd in the Place Blanche.

"What must she think of me?" he cried, aloud. "What must she think of me?"

So, for an hour or more, he stood in the open window staring into the fragrant night, or tramped up and down the long room, his hands behind his back, kicking out of his way the chairs and things which impeded him, torturing himself with fears and regrets and fancies, until at last, in a calmer moment, he realized that he was working himself up into an absurd state of nerves over something which was done and could not now be helped. The man had an odd streak of fatalism in his nature--that will have come of his Southern blood--and it came to him now in his need. For the work upon which he was to enter with the morrow he had need of clear wits, not scattered ones; a calm judgment, not disordered nerves. So he took himself in hand, and it would have been amazing to any one unfamiliar with the abrupt changes of the Latin temperament to see how suddenly Ste. Marie became quiet and cool and master of himself.

"It is done," he said, with a little shrug, and if his face was for a moment bitter it quickly enough became impa.s.sive. "It is done, and it cannot be undone--unless Hartley can undo it. And now, revenons a nos moutons! Or, at least," said he, looking at his watch--and it was between one and two--"at least, to our beds!"

So he went to bed, and, so well had he recovered from his fit of excitement, he fell asleep almost at once. But for all that the jangled nerves had their revenge. He who commonly slept like the dead, without the slightest disturbance, dreamed a strange dream. It seemed to him that he stood spent and weary in a twilight place--a waste place at the foot of a high hill. At the top of the hill She sat upon a sort of throne, golden in a beam of light from heaven--serene, very beautiful, the end and crown of his weary labors. His feet were set to the ascent of the height whereon she waited, but he was withheld. From the shadows at the hill's foot a voice called to him in distress, anguish of spirit--a voice he knew; but he could not say whose voice. It besought him out of utter need, and he could not turn away from it.

Then from those shadows eyes looked upon him, very great and dark eyes, and they besought him, too; he did not know what they asked, but they called to him like the low voice, and he could not turn away.

He looked to the far height, and with all his power he strove to set his feet toward it--the goal of long labor and desire; but the eyes and the piteous voice held him motionless--for they needed him.

From this anguish he awoke trembling. And after a long time, when he was composed, he fell asleep once more, and once more he dreamed the dream.

So morning found him pallid and unrefreshed. But by daylight he knew whose eyes had besought him, and he wondered and was a little afraid.

IX

JASON GOES UPON A JOURNEY, AND RICHARD HARTLEY PLEADS FOR HIM

It may as well be admitted at the outset that neither Ste. Marie nor Richard Hartley proved themselves to be geniuses, hitherto undeveloped, in the detective science. They entered upon their self-appointed task with a fine fervor, but, as Miss Benham had suggested, with no other qualifications in particular. Ste. Marie had a theory that, when engaged in work of this nature, you went into questionable parts of the city, ate and drank cheek by jowl with questionable people--if possible, got them drunk while you remained sober (difficult feat), and sooner or later they said things which put you on the right road to your goal, or else confessed to you that they themselves had committed the particular crime in which you were interested. He argued that this was the way it happened in books, and that surely people didn't write books about things of which they were ignorant.

Hartley, on the other hand, preferred the newer, or scientific, methods.

You sat at home with a pipe and a whiskey-and-water--if possible, in a long dressing-gown with a cord round its middle. You reviewed all the known facts of the case, and you did mathematics about them with Xs and Ys and many other symbols, and in the end, by a system of elimination, you proved that a certain thing must infallibly be true. The chief difficulty for him in this was, he said, that he had been at Oxford instead of at Cambridge, and so the mathematics were rather beyond him.

In practice, however, they combined the two methods, which was doubtless as well as if they hadn't, because for some time they accomplished nothing whatever, and so neither one was able to sneer at the other's stupidity.

This is not to say that they found nothing in the way of clews. They found an embarra.s.sment of them, and for some days went about in a fever of excitement over these; but the fever cooled when clew after clew turned out to be misleading. Of course, Ste. Marie's first efforts were directed toward tracing the movements of the Irishman O'Hara, but the efforts were altogether unavailing. The man seemed to have disappeared as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a s.h.i.+fty-eyed person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening in Maxim's and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of money; whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O'Hara had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America, and that he had had a picture postal-card from him, some weeks since, from New York. The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet by way of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie was left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.

He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said: "That was a lie! The man lied!"

"Name of a dog, why?" demanded Ste. Marie; but the Englishman shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know," he said. "But I believe it was a lie. The man came to you--sought you out to tell his story, didn't he? And all the others have given a different date? Well, there you are! For some reason, this man or some one behind him--O'Hara himself, probably--wants you to believe that O'Hara is in America. I dare say he's in Paris all the while."

"I hope you're right," said the other. "And I mean to make sure, too. It certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that. I wonder, by-the-way, how he knew I'd been making inquiries about O'Hara.

I've questioned only two or three people, and then in the most casual way. Yes, it's odd."

It was about a week after this--a fruitless week, full of the alternate brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment--that he met Captain Stewart, to whom he had been, more than once, on the point of appealing.

He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the rue Royale.

Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop, devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amus.e.m.e.nt, observed, to ladies' hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he looked in an ill humor, and older and more yellow than usual. But his face altered suddenly when he saw the younger man, and he stopped and shook Ste. Marie's hand with every evidence of pleasure.

"Well met! Well met!" he exclaimed. "If you are not in a hurry, come and sit down somewhere and tell me about yourself."

They picked their way across the street to the terrace of the Taverne Royale, which was almost deserted at that hour, and sat down at one of the little tables, well back from the pavement, in a corner.

"Is it fair," queried Captain Stewart--"is it fair, as a rival investigator, to ask you what success you have had?"

Ste. Marie laughed rather ruefully, and confessed that he had as yet no success at all.

"I've just come," said he, "from p.r.i.c.king one bubble that promised well, and Hartley is up in Montmartre destroying another, I fancy. Oh, well, we didn't expect it to be child's play."

Captain Stewart raised his little gla.s.s of dry vermouth in an old-fas.h.i.+oned salute and drank it.

"You," said he--"you were--ah, full of some idea of connecting this man, this Irishman O'Hara, with poor Arthur's disappearance. You've found that not so promising as you went on, I take it."

"Well, I've been unable to trace O'Hara," said Ste. Marie. "He seems to have disappeared as completely as your nephew. I suppose you have no clews to spare? I confess I'm out of them at the moment."

"Oh, I have plenty," said the elder man. "A hundred. More than I can possibly look after." He gave a little chuckling laugh. "I've been waiting for you to come to me," he said. "It was a little ungenerous, perhaps, but we all love to say, 'I told you so.' Yes, I have a great quant.i.ty of clews, and of course they all seem to be of the greatest and most exciting importance. That's a way clews have."

He took an envelope from an inner pocket of his coat, and sorted several folded papers which were in it.

"I have here," said he, "memoranda of two--chances, shall I call them?--which seem to me very good, though, as I have already said, every clew seems good. That is the maddening, the heart-breaking, part of such an investigation. I have made these brief notes from letters received, one yesterday, one the day before, from an agent of mine who has been searching the bains de mer of the north coast. This agent writes that some one very much resembling poor Arthur has been seen at Dinard and also at Deauville, and he urges me to come there or to send a man there at once to look into the matter. You will ask, of course, why this agent himself does not pursue the clew he has found. Unfortunately, he has been called to London upon some pressing family matter of his own; he is an Englishman."

"Why haven't you gone yourself?" asked Ste. Marie.

But the elder man shrugged his shoulders and smiled a tired, deprecatory smile.

"Oh, my friend," said he, "if I should attempt personally to investigate one-half of these things, I should be compelled to divide myself into twenty parts. No, I must stay here. There must be, alas! the spider at the centre of the web. I cannot go; but if you think it worth while, I will gladly turn over the memoranda of these last clews to you. They may be the true clews, they may not. At any rate, some one must look into them. Why not you and your partner--or shall I say a.s.sistant?"

"Why, thank you!" cried Ste. Marie. "A thousand thanks! Of course, I shall be--we shall be glad to try this chance. On the face of it, it sounds very reasonable. Your nephew, from what I remember of him, is much more apt to be in some place that is amusing, some place of gayety, than hiding away where it is merely dull, if he has his choice in the matter--that is, if he is free. And yet--" He turned and frowned thoughtfully at the elder man. "What I want to know," said he, "is how the boy is supporting himself all this time? You say he had no money, or very little, when he went away. How is he managing to live if your theory is correct--that he is staying away of his own accord? It costs a lot of money to live as he likes to live."

Captain Stewart nodded.

"Oh, that," said he--"that is a question I have often proposed to myself. Frankly, it's beyond me. I can only surmise that poor Arthur, who had scattered a small fortune about in foolish loans, managed, before he actually disappeared (mind you, we didn't begin to look for him until a week had gone by)--managed to collect some of this money, and so went away with something in pocket. That, of course, is only a guess."

"It is possible," said Ste. Marie, doubtfully, "but--I don't know. It is not very easy to raise money from the sort of people I imagine your nephew to have lent it to. They borrow, but they don't repay." He glanced up with a half-laughing, half-defiant air. "I can't," said he, "rid myself of a belief that the boy is here in Paris, and that he is not free to come or go. It's only a feeling, but it is very strong in me. Of course, I shall follow out these clews you've been so kind as to give me. I shall go to Dinard and Deauville, and Hartley, I imagine, will go with me, but I haven't great confidence in them."

Captain Stewart regarded him reflectively for a time, and in the end he smiled.

"If you will pardon my saying it," he said, "your att.i.tude is just a little womanlike. You put away reason for something vaguely intuitive. I always distrust intuition myself."

Ste. Marie frowned a little and looked uncomfortable. He did not relish being called womanlike--few men do; but he was bound to admit that the elder man's criticism was more or less just.