The Four Invisibles/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE FOREST OF MONTMORENCY
“DOUBT indulged,” as one learned in life's philosophy has written, “soon becomes doubt realized.” It was during the last stage but one on the weary, bone shaking, paved route royale from Calais to Paris that lowering doubt first arose like a cloud on the fringe of Ferrars' meditation.
The mysterious nature of the errand upon which he had permitted himself to be jockeyed assumed suddenly a new color. It was an errand, whatever way he looked at it, the issue of which was bound to be painful. Whether he failed altogether and came too late to prevent the mischief, or he succeeded, only to be brought into renewed relations that were intolerable to him; whether his father proved grateful, and through gratitude inclined to reconciliation—or—which was quite as likely—sullen in suppressed resentment, the meeting could only bring renewed bitterness.
But now, from one moment to the other, a strange sense of distrust—as if it were the sudden coalescence of many vague, elusive suspicions—encompassed him like some kind of intangible net. The fifteenth—what was it that hinged on that date which loomed at all points of the compass in this tenebrous affair? All at once a conviction asserted itself that the transaction of that day, whatever it might be, was as well known to the plausible baron as to Johnstone the attorney—aye, as to Sir Jasper himself. Stay—from the advice he had received, it might be quite as important to Sir Jasper's son to be in London on that day. And yet he was flying on God knew what bootless chase.
“By George,” thought Ferrars, “sent out of the way! But that letter?”
He pulled the sheet out of the wallet. Many a time, pondering over the incomprehensible affair which had hurled him upon his travels, had he conned it impatiently, in despair of ever fitting an acceptable explanation to it. But never before had it occurred to him to note that the address flap had been tom off the sheet. What proof was there—and at the thought he sat up rigidly in the jolting chaise—that it really came from France?
“You will, of course, show it to the Chef de la Sûreté,” the baron had said, as he had closed the carriage door at the start of this hustled journey. Was that a blind? What proof that the letter really came from Sir Jasper? The handwriting of a long letter can scarce be forged—but a mere signature.…
He looked at it again by the waning light. Yes—it was Sir Jasper's characteristic way of signing. And the rather uncertain tracing of some letters might be accounted for by the feebleness of a sick man, his alleged impaired eyesight—unless both the message and the signature were alike a fraud. Why, how well might the whole affair be a fraud! A plot. A clever plot, boldly devised, to send out of the way some inconvenient witness. Witness of what? There was no clue to that. But he had literally been jockeyed out of England—hustled away with a plausible tale. Plausible?
Nay; a palpable cock-and-bull story, a manifest rigamarole, that ought not to have taken in the veriest tyro in life's arena! And Ferrars was no tyro. But he had been blinded by the appeal to filial sacrifice—and never allowed an hour to think, to weigh. Hustled—aye, and duly shepherded! That servant, too, provided so obligingly, so pat, by the unknown baron—that Jacques, that smiling, well-mannered Jacques, who had looked so attentively after his charge.…
Now, thinking of it from a new standpoint, Jacques' face and manner, his voice especially, were hardly convincing. But, if not a servant, what?
It came back to Ferrars' puzzled mind that at Beaumont, the last posting change they had left, Jacques had seemed to be on odd terms of acquaintance with one of the postilions in waiting. He had insisted upon this particular man undertaking the last stage. There might be nothing in that, and again there might be—what? The traveler leaned forward to have a look through the front port-hole of the chaise at the countenance of the driver.
But dusk had gathered. And in the shadow of the Montmorency Forest, which the road was then skirting, all that could be seen was the outline of the two men with heads drawn together, apparently engaged in close confabulation. Presently Jacques rose to his feet on the box and turned round, as if to survey the road in the rear.
There is no saying what trifling gesture or word in one already suspected may be sufficient to reveal a sinister purpose. Something in the nod which after a moment the man gave to his companion brought a conviction to Ferrars that mischief was afoot. Instinctively he groped for and seized his sword-stick, a weapon upon which in his continental travels he had learned to rely. And, indeed, almost on the instant the mischief he had so inexplicably anticipated was about him.
It came with such bewildering rapidity that it was only some considerable time later that he was able to connect in their proper sequence the things he saw, what befell him and what he himself did during the next few seconds.
THE chaise was suddenly pulled up.
Amid shouts and curses from the two men outside the horses fell to frantic plunging and kicking. He was thrown off his seat. Before, in the confined space, he could straighten himself again, the door was torn open, and Jacques was dragging him out with fierce, unsparing hands and wild words of abjuration:
“Quick, sir! Quick—come away! The horses are mad. Not a second! He can not hold them another moment!”
Recovering his feet on the roadway, having been wrenched rather than helped out of the rocking chaise, the traveler could indeed, through the gloom, see the post-boy—who, like the other, had escaped from the box—straining, almost doubled up, at the long reins.
“He's out!” cried Jacques from behind.
On the words the other let go the reins and then did an unimaginable thing; he picked up the whip and furiously lashed at the horses, which, now released, leaped forward, almost overturning the carriage, still pursued into the darkness by the relentless flogging.
Ferrars, though dazed, turned round, impelled by a sense that the danger was now behind him—only just in time to avoid, by a swift instinctive jerk aside, the full force of a blow the nature of which he could not realize. It might have been the clawing of a panther but for its extraordinary weight—such a weight that, had it taken him on the forehead, it would infallibly have felled him to the ground.
As it was, it only tore his cheek and mercifully fell short of his shoulder. Something loose and dangling was in his assailant's hand. As it was savagely raised for a new crash, the young man, not inexpert in the arts of fight, sprang a pace sideways; out flashed the blade from the stick and swift, unerring even in the murk, whipped clean through the neck of Jacques the unknown.
The stricken man stopped short, his arm still uplifted; the weapon fell from his hand with an odd clatter on the ground. He swayed once or twice where he stood; then, with a fumbling motion, he drew from his side pocket something which bright silver mountings revealed as a pistol. But before, painfully striving, he could raise the flint, he swayed again. Rigid, like a falling post, dropped on his face and remained still.
The sound of the horses' gallop, the rattling of the chaise on the paving-stones, had ceased. For a few moments there was profound silence on the deserted road, broken only by the soughing of the wind amid the topmost branches. Ferrars stood motionless, his blade still poised against attack, striving to put some order in his ideas. He had killed a man, and that was a sickening sensation.
Presently came the sound of hurried footsteps, and it recalled him to a sense of peril still at hand. On an impulse he knelt by the figure on the ground, took up the pistol from the inert hand and cocked it. He had just succeeded in withdrawing another from the dead man's pocket when the footsteps stopped a few paces behind him. From the darkness, a voice—one of those horrible voices, husky dull and trailing, so peculiar to the French of the lowest class—called out, halting from want of breath, yet exultant:
“All in order, mon Capitaine. A number-one success, thunder! Horses in the ditch, carriage smashed to cinnamon, la la! And our Angliche stiffened to rights. I see. Ah! Bah, what is it? Aren't you pleased? A well-conditioned, first-class carriage accident, I call it. My job, though, was sacredly the more difficult.”
The post-boy came a step nearer, bending down to peer.
“Got the pocketbook? Pity we must leave the flimsy. Well, well, the farce is played.”
He gave a contented gurgle, which suddenly passed into a cry of surprize. The Englishman had risen to his feet and thrust the muzzle of his pistol into the ruffian's throat.
“Farce, brigand? I'll have it out with you at least! What is the game? Come, speak out if you have no taste for lead!”
But the other, with an exclamation of furious disappointment—“Raté! Coup raté, nom de Dieu!”—lashed out a kick which all but broke his captor's leg, wrenched himself free and bolted into the darkness of the wood. Raging, Ferrars sent a ball after him. A yell of angry pain told that luck had guided the flying shot. But that the scoundrel had only been winged was made clear by the sound, continued for a while, of his retreat through the crackling dead wood.
The young man passed his hand over his face; it was streaming with blood. He tried to take a step, but his injured knee gave way under him. As he crawled upon the ground, seeking some place against which he might rest, he passed the body of his unknown enemy, and the something white and limp that had dealt him so fearsome a blow caught his eye. He picked it up: a napkin, tied into a bag, filled with broken sharp-edged flints.
And now he understood. Death from such a tool or death from a fall upon the jagged stones of the causeway—the wounds would be the same. To minds unsuspicious—and why should there be suspicion—here had been nought but a fatal leap from a runaway carriage. Valet and postillion, thrown and shaken, but mercifully preserved. He saw it all with mind now singularly lucid.
“A well-conditioned accident,” and—but for God's mercy, “a number-one success!” No murder, no robbery: “pity we must leave the flimsy.” But then, why seek for the pocketbook? Ah, of course! The decoy letter. Englishman traveling for private purposes, killed in an accident. The decoy letter abstracted, but passport and other identifying pieces left. Walter Ferrars safely out of the way.
Nevertheless the mystery remained as closely veiled as ever. And it mingled now with that of Sir Jasper's disappearance, with that of the fantastic meeting at Stanton. Why was he to be put out of the way?
FOR a long while, propped against a milestone by the roadside, his pistol at hand—against the quite conceivable event of an attempt to make good the coup raté, the botched job—he grappled with the riddle. His brain was quite clear, though his hurts ached cruelly. But he could find no solution; he could come to no fresh surmise, save the horrifying one that Sir Jasper might well have already met with some similar fate to that so cleverly devised for the elimination of his son. And now, there were his own present affairs to consider. He had killed a man, and, whatever the issue might prove, there was no doubt immediate trouble ahead.
The highroads of France, busy enough by day, are at night strangely deserted. Of foot-passengers there were none; the purlieus of the forest of Montmorency had no good reputation for security. And of vehicles, an hour passed before the first made its appearance: a roulier's wagon. Unable to rise, Ferrars called out. But the roulier, after the custom of his tribe, was fast asleep; the horses, sagacious beasts, kept to the right side from long habit. The heavy machine rumbled by, unheeding.
The next to pass, half an hour later, was a fast-trotting carriole, which, on being hailed, simply hurried along at a faster rate, suggestive of fright. A few minutes later, however, it could be heard coming back.
“Was that your carriage, capsized over there by the bridge?” the driver sang out, pulling up.
“Yes. Are you the man I hailed?”
“Ah—I thought it might be a night-bird's trick. They pretend to be hurt, and, when one comes near—a bludgeon on the head, like as not! One knows a thing or two in Montmorency. But that carriage—it's different. What can one do for you? A lift?”
Ferrars had settled on his course.
“No—thank you. I must keep watch here on a dead man.”
“Dead man? Cristi!”
“What you can do for me, is to fetch the gendarmes. A louis d'or for you, if you come back with them and with your carriole to take the body and me, for I can't walk. Here, my friend, six francs of earnest money.”
The heavy coin rang on the pavement. The man jumped down, groped for a moment and, having found the faintly gleaming six-piece:
“At your service, milor. I say that, you know, because you speak like an Englishman. Shall I tell them”
“Tell them,” interrupted Ferrars with impatience, “that an Englishman has killed a man and waits for them to come. That's all. ”
“Cristi!” said the peasant again, mounted and hurried away.
Another hour elapsed, in the silent solitary vigil; in the blackness of
the forest huge
Incult, robust and tall, by nature's hand
Planted of old,
before the carriole returned, escorted by two mounted gendarmes.
“It's here,” shouted Ferrars from his milestone.
One of the gendarmes dismounted, heavy-booted, rattling with spurs and saber; he took up a lantern from the carriage and threw its fight upon the blood-smeared face.
“That is the man—over there,” said Ferrars calmly. “These are his own pistols. The sword-stick is mine. My other belongings are in the carriage. Now, if you will be so good as to help me into the cart, I shall be glad to be brought to the authorities.”