By Perceval Gibbon
The velvet-footeda THE DARKENED PATH
The captain reached a hand forth and touched the mate’s arm.
“Sit down, James,” he said quietly.
The mate made a curious quick grimace and sat forthwith. “Shove off,” ordered the captain.
Johnny Cos, the yellow, woolly-haired boatman, plying his oars, sat perforce in face of his passengers and close to them. He would have preferred it otherwise; there had been something in the mate’s face which daunted him. He glanced at it again furtively as he pulled away from the square-sterned American schooner which had ridden over the bar in the twilight of dawn and anchored, spectral and strange, in Beira Harbor. The mate’s face was strong and sunburnt, the face of a man of lively passions and crude emotions; but as he sat gazing forth at the little hectic town across the smooth harbor, it had a cast of profound and desperate unhappiness. Johnny Cos had not words to tell himself what he saw; he only knew, with awe and a certain amount of fear, that he moved in the presence of something tragic.
“James,” began the captain again.
The mate withdrew his miserable eyes from the scene. “What?”
“There ain’t any reason why” began the captain, and paused and Hooked doubtfully upon the faithful Johnny Cos. “D’you speak English?”
“Yes, sar,” replied Johnny, ingratiatingly. “You want good ‘otel, Cap’n? Good, cheap ‘otel? I geeve you da card; ‘Otel Lisbon, sar. All cap’n go there.”
“No,” said the captain shortly. “We can talk better when we get ashore, James,” he added to the mate.
“Ver’ good ‘otel, Cap’n; ver’ cheap” coaxed Johnny Cos. “You want fruit, Cap’n: mango, banan’, coconut, orange, grenadeel, yes? I geeve you da card, Cap’n ver’ cheap!”
“That’ll do,” said the captain. “I don’t want anything. Get a move on this boat o’ yours, will you?”
Johnny Cos sighed and resigned himself to row in silence, only murmuring at intervals: “’Otel Lisbon; good, ver’ good, an’ cheap!” When that murmur, taking courage to grow audible, drew the mate’s eye upon him, he stopped short in the middle of it and murmured no more.
“You c’n wait to take me aboard again,” said the captain, when the wharf was reached; and the two men went slowly together into the town, along the streets of ankle-deep sand, towards the office of the consul.
It was an hour later that the loafers on the veranda of the Savoy Hotel observed their slow approach. They had done whatever business they had with the consul. They were deep in talk; the captain’s grizzled head was bent toward his shorter companion, and something of the mate’s trouble reflected itself in his hard, strongly-graven face. In the merciless deluge of sunlight, and upon the openness of the street, they made a singular grouping; they seemed to be, by virtue of some matter that engrossed and governed them, aloof and remote, a target set up by Destiny.
By the steps of the hotel the captain paused, wiping the shining sweat from his face. The eavesdroppers in the long chairs cocked their ears.
“James,” they heard him say; “it’s bad, it’s just as bad as it can be. But it ain’t no reason to go short of a drink with a saloon close handy.”
He motioned with his head towards the shade of the long veranda, with the bar opening from it and its bottles in view. The mate, frowning heavily, nodded, and the pair of them entered and passed between the wicker chairs with the manner of being unconscious of their occupants.
From within the bar their voices droned indistinctly forth to the listeners.
“Leavin’ you here,” they heard the captain say; “James, I’m sorry right through; but you said yourself.”
“Sure;” the mate’s voice answered hoarsely. “Here or Hell or anywhere, what’s the difference to me now?”
After that they moved to the window, and what they said further was indistinguishable. The loafers on the veranda exchanged puzzled looks; they lacked a key to the talk they had heard. When at last the two seamen departed they summoned forth the barman for further information. But that white-jacketed diplomat, who looked on from the sober side of the bar at so much that was salient to the life of Beira was not able to help them.
“I couldn’t make out what was troublin’ them,” he said, playing with the diamond ring on his middle finger. “They was talking round and round it, but they never named it right out. But it seems the younger one has been paid off. He looks bad, he does.”
“Well,” said a man of experience from his chair; “he’ll be drunk tonight, and then we’ll hear.”
“H’m!” The barman paused on his way back to his post. “When I see that feller drunk, I’m goin’ to climb a tree. I got no use for trouble.”
But the mate’s conduct continued to be as unusual as his words overheard on the hotel veranda. He did not accompany the captain back to the ship, and in the afternoon he was seen sitting on the parapet of the sea-wall, his face propped in his hands, staring out across the shining water of the harbor. The vehement sun beat down upon his blue-coated back and the hard felt hat that covered his head; he should have been in an agony of discomfort and no little danger, clad as he was; but he sat without moving, facing the water and the craft that lay at their anchors upon it. It was Father Bates, the tall Scottish priest, who saw him and crossed the road to him.
“My friend,” the priest accosted him, with a light tap on the shoulder. “You’ll die the sooner if you take your hat off. But you’ll die anyhow if you go on sitting here.”
At his touch the mate looked round sharply. The tall white-clad Father, under his green-lined sun umbrella, rested a steady look on his face.
“You’re in trouble, I’m afraid,” said the priest. “Is there anything a man can do for you?”
“No!” The word came hoarsely but curt from the mate’s throat. “Leave me alone!”
The tall priest nodded. “Nothing a man can do, eh?” he said. “Well, then you know who can help you, don’t you?”
The miserable rebellious eyes of the young man hardened.
“Leave me alone,” he growled. “Say, you’re a kind of a missionary, ain’t you? Well, I don’t want none of your blasted cant, see?”
The Father smiled. “I know how you feel. My name is Father Bates, and anyone will show you where I live. Bates don’t forget! And I really wouldn’t sit much longer in that sun, if I were you.”
A sound like a snarl was his answer as he passed on. Looking back before he turned the corner, he saw that the mate had returned to his old posture, brooding in his strange and secret sorrow over the irresponsive sea.
He was still there at sunset when the schooner went out, holding himself apart from the little group of Beira people who halted to watch her departure. Upon her poop a couple of figures were plain to sight, and one of these waved a hand towards the shore as though to bid farewell to the man they left behind. The mate, however, made no response. He watched unmoving while she approached the heads and glided from view, her slender topmasts lingering in sight over the dull green of the mangroves, with the sunset flush lighting them delicately. Then she was gone, like a silent visitor who withdraws a presence that has scarcely been felt.
The mate crossed the road and addressed the man who stood nearest.
“Where’s the deepo?” he demanded, abruptly. “The railway station.”
The other gave directions which the mate heard, frowning. Then, without thanking his guide, he turned to walk heavily through the foot-clogging sand in the direction indicated.
It was a hundred and fifty miles up the line that he next emerged to notice, at Mendigos, that outpost set in the edge of the jungle, where the weary telegraphists sweat through the sunny monotony of the days and are shaken at night by the bitter agues that infest the land.
The mate dropped from the train here, still clad as at Beira in thick, stifling sea-cloth and his hard hat, though his collar was now but a limp frill. He came lurching, on uncertain feet, into the establishment of Hop Sing, the only seller of strong drink at Mendigos. The few languid, half-clad men who lounged within looked up at him in astonishment. He pointed shakily towards a bottle on the primitive bar. “Gimme some of that,” he croaked, from a parched throat.
The smiling Chinaman, silk-clad and supple, poured a drink for him, watched him consume it, and forthwith poured another. With the replenished tumbler in his hand, the mate returned his look.
“What you starin’ at, you Chow?” he demanded.
The subtle-eyed Chinaman ceased neither to smile nor to stare.
“My t’ink you velly sick man. Two shillin’ to pay, please.”
“Sick!” repeated the mate. “Sick! You you know, do ye?”
The idle men who lounged behind were spectators to the drama, absorbed but uncomprehending. They saw the fierce, absurdly-clad sailor, swaying on his feet with the effects of long-endured heat and thirst, confronting the suave composure of the Chinaman as though the charge of being unwell were outrageous and shameful.
“Say,” he demanded hoarsely, “it, it don’t show on me.”
The Chinaman made soothing gestures. “My see,” he answered. “But dem feller belong here, him not see nothing. All-a-light foh him. Two shillin’ to pay, please.”
The mate dragged a coin from his pocket and dropped it on the bar. He turned at last to the others, as though he now first noticed them.
“What’s back of here?” he asked abruptly, motioning as he spoke to the still palms which poised over the galvanized iron roofs.
“How d’you mean?” A tall, willowy man in pajamas answered him surprisedly. “There’s nothing beyond here. It’s just wild country.”
“No white men?” asked the mate.
“Lord, no!” said the other. “White men die out there. It’s just trees and niggers and wild beasts and fevers.” He looked at the mate with a touch of amusement breaking through his curiosity. “You weren’t thinking of goin’ there in that kit were you?”
The mate finished his drink and set his glass down.
“I am goin’ there,” he answered.
“But look here!” The telegraphists broke into a clamor. “You’ve been too long in the sun; that’s what’s the matter with you. You can’t go up there, man; you’d be dead before morning.”
The tall man, to whom the mate had spoken first, had a shrewd word to add. “If it’s any little thing like murder, dontcher know, why the border’s just a few hours up the line.”
“Murder!” exclaimed the mate, and uttered a bark of laughter.
They were possibly a little afraid of him. He had the physique of a fighter and the presence of a man accustomed to exercise a crude authority. Their protests and warnings died down; and, after all, a man’s life and death are very much his own concern in those regions.
“D’you think he’s mad?” one of them was whispering when the mate turned to Hop Sing again.
“Set up the drinks for them,” he commanded. “I’ll not wait meself, but here’s the money.”
“You not dlink?” asked the Chinaman, as the mate laid the coins on the counter.
“No,” was the reply. “No need to spoil another glass.”
He gave a half nod to the other men, but no word, pulled his hard hat forward on his brow, and walked out to the aching sunlight, and towards a path that led between two iron huts to the fringe of the riotous bush. The telegraphists crowded to look after him, but he did not turn his head. He paused beneath the great palms, where the ground was clear; then the thigh-deep grass, which is the lip of the bush, was about him, grey, dry as straw, rustling as he thrust through it with the noise of paper being crumpled in the hands. A green parrot, balancing clown-like on a twig, screamed raucously; he glanced up at its dazzle of feathers. Then the wall of the bush itself yielded to his thrusting, let him through, and closed behind his blue-clad back. Africa had received him to her silence and her mystery.
“Well, I’m blowed!” The tall telegraphist stared at the place where he had vanished. “I say, you chaps, we ought to go after him.”
No one moved. “I shouldn’t care to come to my hands with him,” said another. “Did you did you see his face?”
They had all seen it; the speaker was voicing the common feeling.
“It’s like drinkin’ at a wake,” observed the tall man, his glass in his hand. “Well, here’s to his memory!”
“His memory,” they chorused, and drank.
But the end of the tale came later. It was told in the veranda of Father Bates’s house at Beira, by Dan Terry, as he lay on his cot and drank in the air from the sea in life-restoring draughts. He had been up in the region of lost and nameless rivers for three years of fever and ague and toil, and now he was back, a made man ready to be done with Africa, with square gin bottles full of coarse gold to sell to the bank, and a curious story to tell of a thing he had seen in the back country.
It was evening when he told it, propped up on his pillows, with the blankets drawn up under his chin, and his lean, leathery face, a little softened by his fever, fronting the long, benevolent visage of Father Bates. The Father had a deckchair, and sprawled in it at length, listening over his deep Boer pipe. A faint, bitter ghost of an odor tainted the still air from the mangroves beyond the town, and there was heard, like an undertone in the talk, the distant slumberous murmur of the tide on the beach.
“But how did you first get to hear of him?” the Father was asking, carrying on the talk.
“Oh, that was queer!” said Dan. “You see, I was making a cut clean across country to that river of mine, and, as far as I could tell, I was in a stretch of land where there hasn’t been one other white man in twenty years. Bad traveling it was swamp, cane, and swamp again for days; the mud stinking all day, the mist poisoning you all night, the cane cutting and scratching and slashing you. It was as bad as anything I’ve seen yet. And it was while we were splashing and struggling through this that I saw, lying at the foot of an aloe of all created things an old hat. I thought for a moment that the sun had got to my brain. An old, hard, black bowler hat it was, caved in a bit, and soaked, and all that, but a hat all the same. I couldn’t have been more surprised if it had been an iceberg. You see, except my own hat, I hadn’t seen a hat for over two years.”
Father Bates nodded and stoked the big bowl of his pipe with a practiced thumb.
“It might ha’ meant anything,” Dan went on; “a chap making for my river, for instance. So the next Kaffir village I came to I went into the matter. I sat down in the doorway of the biggest hut and had the population up before me to answer questions.”
“They were willing?” asked the Father.
“I had a gun across my knees,” explained Dan; “but they were willing enough without that. And a queer yarn they had to tell, too; I couldn’t quite make it out at first. It began with an account of a village hit by smallpox close by. Their way of dealing with smallpox is simple: they quarantine the infected village by posting armed men round it until all the villagers are starved to death or killed by the smallpox. Then they burn the village. It costs nothing, and it keeps the disease under. This village, it seems, was particularly easy to deal with, since it stood three hundred yards from the nearest water, and the water was placed out of bounds.
“It must have been about the third day after the quarantine was declared that the, the incident occurred. A man and a girl, carrying empty waterpots, had come out of the village towards the stream. The armed outposts, with their big stabbing assegais ready in their hands, ordered them back, but the poor creatures were crazed with thirst and desperate. They were pleading and crying and still creeping forward, the man first, the girl a few steps behind, mad for just water. What happened first was in the regular order of things in those parts. The fellows on guard simply waited, and when the man was up to them one stepped forward and drove the thirty-inch blade of a stabbing assegai clean through him. Then they stood ready to do the same to the girl as soon as she arrived.
“She had tumbled to her knees at the sight of the killing, and was still crying and begging piteously for water. They said she held out her arms to them, and bowed her head between. After a while, when they did not answer, she got to her feet and stood looking at the dead body stretched in the sun, the long blades of the spears, and the shining of the water beyond. It was as though she was making up her mind about them, for at last she picked up her waterpot and came forward towards her sure and swift death. The assegai-men were so intent on her that none of them seem to have heard a man who came out of the bush close behind them. One of them, as I was told, had actually flung back his arm for the thrust and the girl, she hadn’t even flinched! The thing was within an inch of being done; the stabbing assegai goes like lightning, you know; she must have been tasting the very bitterness of death. The man from the bush was not a second too soon. The first they knew of him was a roar, and he had the shaft of the assegai in his hand and had plucked it from its owner.
“He must have moved like a young earthquake, and bellowed like a full-grown thunderstorm. All my informants laid stress on his voice; he exploded in their midst with an uproar that overthrew their senses, and whacked right and left with fist and foot and assegai. He was a white man; it took them some seconds to see that through the dirt on him; he was clad in rags of cloth, and his head was bare, and he raged like a sackful of tiger-cats. He really must have been something extraordinary in the way of a fighter, for he scattered a clear dozen of them, and sent them flying for their lives. One man said that when he was safe he looked back. The white man, with the assegai on his shoulder, was stumping ahead into the infected village, and the girl she was lying down at the edge of the water drinking avidly. She hadn’t even looked up at the fight.”
Father Bates nodded. “Poor creatures,” he said. “Yes?”
“Well, the cordon being broken, those of the villagers who weren’t too far gone to walk on their feet promptly scattered, naturally, and no one tried to stop them. When at last the people from the neighboring kraals plucked up courage to go and look at the place, they found there only the bodies of the dead. The white man had gone, too. They never saw him again, but from time to time there came rumors from the north and east tales of a wanderer who injected himself suddenly into men’s affairs, withdrew again and went away, and they remembered the white man who roared. He was already passing into a myth.
“I couldn’t make head nor tail of the thing; but one point was clear. Since this white man had neither Kaffirs nor gear he couldn’t hurt my river, and that was what chiefly mattered to me just then. I might have forgotten him altogether, but that I came on his tracks again, and then, to finish with, I saw the man himself.”
“Eh?” Father Bates looked up.
“I’m telling you the whole thing, Padre. You keep quiet and you’ll hear.”
The sad evening light was falling, and the faint breeze from the sea had a touch of chill in it.
“Keep your blankets up, Dan,” said the Father.
“You bet,” replied Dan. “Well, about this fellow I’m telling you of! He must have been getting a reputation for uncanniness from every village he touched at. By the time I came up with the scene of his next really notable doings he was umtagati in full form supernatural, you know, a thing to be dreaded and conciliated. And I don’t wonder, really. Here was a man without weapons, bareheaded in the sun, speaking no word of any native language, alone and nearly naked, plunging ahead through that wild unknown country and no harm coming to him. You can’t play tricks of that sort with Africa; the old girl holds too many trumps; but this chap was doing it. It was against Nature.
“He’d made his way up to a place where I always expect trouble. There is, or rather, there was then a brute of a chief there, a fellow named N’Komo, who paid tribute to M’Kombi, and was sort of protected and supported by him. He was always slopping over his borders with a handful of fighting men and burning and slaughtering and raping among the peaceful kraals. A devil he was, a real black devil for cruelty and lust. He had just started on a campaign when this lonely white man arrived in the neighborhood, passing through a bit of district with N’Komo’s mark on it in the form of burned huts and bodies of people. A man N’Komo had killed was a sight to make Beelzebub sick. Torture, you know; mutilation beastliness! The white man must have seen a good many such bodies.
“N’Komo and his swashbucklers had slept the night in a captured kraal, and were still there in the morning when the white man arrived. I know exactly the kind of scene it was. The carcasses of the cattle slaughtered for meat would be lying all over the place between the round huts, and bodies of men and women and children with them. The place would be swarming with the tall, black spearmen, each with a skin over his shoulder and about his loins; there would be a fearful jabber, a clatter of voices and laughter and probably screams, horrible screams, from some poor nigger whose death they’d be dragging out, hour after hour, for their fun. Near the main gate N’Komo was holding an indaba with his chief bucks. I’ve seen him many times a great coal-black brute, six feet four in height, with the flat, foolish, good-natured-looking face that fooled people into thinking him a decent sort. I wish I’d shot him the first time I saw him.
“Well, the indaba, the council, you know was in full swing when up comes this white man, running as if for his life, and wailing, wailing! The Kaffir who told me had seen it from where he was lying, tied hand and foot, waiting his turn for the firebrands and the knives. He said: ‘He wailed like one who mourns for the dead!’ There was a burnt kraal not a mile away, so one can guess what he had been seeing and was wailing about. ‘His face,’ the nigger told me, ‘was like the face of one who has lived through the torment of N’Komo and is thirsty for death; a face to hide one’s eyes before. And it was white and shining like ivory!’ He came thus, pelting blindly at a run, into the midst of N’Komo’s war indaba.
“He picked out N’Komo as the chief man there in a moment; that was easy enough, and he broke into a torrent of words, gesticulating and pointing back in the direction from which he had come. Telling him of what he had seen, of course poor beggar! Can’t you imagine him, with those tall surprised black soldiers all round him and the great dangerous bulk of negro king before him, trying to make them understand, trembling with horror and fury, raging in homely useless English against the everyday iniquity of Africa? Can’t you imagine it, Padre?”
“Ssh! You’ll get a temperature,” warned Father Bates. “Yes; I can imagine it. It makes me humble.”
“You see, I know what had maddened him. The first work of N’Komo’s I ever saw was a young mother and a baby dead and and finished with, and it nearly sent me off my head. If I’d been half the man this poor beggar was I’d have had N’Komo’s skin salted and sun-dried before I slept. He he didn’t wait to mourn about things; he went straight ahead to find the man who had done them and deal with him.
“Probably they took him for a lunatic; at any rate, they soon began to laugh at him, shaking and talking in their midst. He was a new thing to have sport with, and N’Komo presently leaned forward, grinning, touched him on the arm, and pointed. The white man’s eyes followed the black finger to where a poor devil lay on the ground, impaled by a stake through his stomach. It was N’Komo’s way of telling him what to expect, and he understood. He stopped talking.
“The nigger who saw it all and told me about it said that when he had looked round on all the horrors he turned again towards N’Komo, and at the sight of his eyes N’Komo ceased to grin. His big brute face went all to bits, as a Kaffir’s does when he is frightened. But the white man made a little backward jerk with his hand that’s what it seemed like to the nigger who told me and suddenly, from nowhere in particular, a big pistol materialized in his grip. He must have been pretty clever at the draw. His hand came up, there was a smart little crack, a spit of smoke, and N’Komo, the great war chief, was rolling on the ground, making horrible noises like like bad plumbing, with half his throat shot away, and the man who had done it was backing towards the main gate with the big revolver swinging to right and left across the group of warriors.
“And he got away, too. That, really, is the most wonderful part of the whole thing. I expect that as soon as N’Komo was settled, the usual row and the usual murders began by various would-be successors. By night they had all started north again, on a hot-foot race to occupy and hold the head kraal, and the country was clear of them, and the white man’s credit as a magic worker stood higher than ever. He could have had anything he liked in any of the kraals for the asking; he could have been law-giver, king, and god. But he was off in the bush again, alone and restless and mysterious, with his ivory-white face and his eyes full of pain and anger.”
“Aye,” said Father Bates. “Pain and anger that’s what it was! And at last you saw him yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Dan. “I saw him. I was at my river then, combing the gold out of it, when a Kaffir trekking down told me of him. He was at a kraal fifty miles away two days’ journey, lying, up with a hurt foot. The gold was coming out of that river by the bottleful; it wasn’t a thing to take one’s eyes off for a moment; but a white man, the white man who had killed N’Komo well, I couldn’t keep away. I spun a yarn to my men about lion spoor that I wanted to follow, and off I went by myself and did that fifty miles of bush and six-foot grass and rocks in thirty hours, which was pretty good, considerin’. It was afternoon when I came through a patch of palms and saw the kraal lying just beyond.
“I hadn’t much of an idea what kind of man I expected to see. I rather fancy I expected to be disappointed to find him nothing out of the way after all, and to learn that nine-tenths of the yarns about him were just nigger lies. I was thinking all that as I stopped in the palms’ shade to mop the sweat out of my hat, and then I saw him
“He was passing between me and the huts, a strange lame figure, leaning on a stick, with a few rags of clothing bound about him. His head, with its matted thick hair, was bare to the thresh of the sun; he was thick-set, shortish, slow-moving, a sorrowful and laborious figure. I saw the shine of his bare skin, and even the droop and sorrow of his heavy face. I stood and watched him for perhaps a minute in the shadow under those great masts of palms; I saw him as clearly as I see you; and suddenly a light came to me and I knew I understood it all. His loneliness, his pain and anger, his wanderings in that savage wilderness, the wild misery of his eyes and the ivory-white of his stricken face I understood completely. He had run away from the sight of men of his own color he would have no use for me. So then and there I turned and went back through the palms and started on the trek for my own camp. It was all I could do for him.”
“But,” said Father Bates, “you’ve not said what it was that you saw.”
“Padre,” said Dan; “that poor, poor fellow, who loomed to the Kaffirs like a great and merciful god, he was a leper as white as snow!”
“Holy saints defend us!” The Father made a startled motion of crossing himself, staring at Dan’s lean, somber face in a blankness of consternation. “So that’s what it was, then! A leper!”
“That’s what it was,” said Dan. “I’ve seen it before in the East.”
“He said,” continued the Father “he said he had no use for my blasted cant. And he hadn’t, he hadn’t! He knew more than I.” rat-faced valet moved noiselessly in the bedroom, placing matters in order for his master’s toilet. He had drawn the curtains to admit the day and closed the window to bar out its morning freshness, and it was while he was clearing the pockets of the dress clothes that he became aware that from the alcove at his back, in which the bed stood, eyes were watching him. Without hurry, he deposited a little pile of coins on the edge of the dressing-table and laid the trousers aside; then, with his long thief’s hands hanging open in obvious innocence, he turned and saw that his master had waked in his usual uncanny fashion, returning from slumber to full consciousness with no interval of drowsiness and half-wakefulness. It was as if he would take the fortunes of the day by surprise. His wonderful white hair, which made him noticeable without ever making him venerable, was tumbled on his head; he looked from his pillow with the immobility and inexpressiveness of a wax figure.
To his valet’s murmured “good morning,” he frowned slightly, as if in some preoccupation of his thoughts.
“What sort of day is it?” he asked, without replying to the greeting.
“It is fine, M’sieur le Prince,” answered the valet; “a beautiful day.”
“H’m!” The Prince de Monpavon lifted himself on one silk-sleeved elbow to see for himself. The window was on the west side of the building, so that from the bed one looked as through a tunnel of shadow to a sunlight that hung aloof and distant. He surveyed it for a space of minutes with a face of discontent, then fell back on his pillows.
“Thought it was raining,” he remarked. “Something feels wrong about it. What time is it?”
“It is twenty minutes past eleven, M’sieur le Prince,” replied the servant. “I will fetch M’sieur le Prince’s letters. And M. Dupontel has telephoned.”
“Eh?” The Prince’s hard eyes came round to him swiftly, but not soon enough to see that movement of his right hand that gave him the appearance of deftly pocketing some small object concealed in the palm of it. “What does he say?”
“He will be here at noon, and hopes that M’sieur le Prince will go to take lunch with him.”
The Prince nodded slowly, and the valet, treading always as if noise were a sacrilege, passed out of the room to fetch the letters. The Prince lifted his head to pack the pillow under it more conveniently, and waited in an appearance of deep thought. Under the bedclothes the contour of his body showed long, and slender, and his face, upturned to the canopy of the bed, was one upon which the years of his age had found slight foothold. It had the smooth pallor of a man whose chief activities are indoors: it was wary, nervous, and faintly sinister, with strong, dark eyebrows standing in picturesque contrast to the white hair. The figure he was accustomed to present was that of a man established in life as in a stronghold.
He was neither youthful nor elderly, but mature. Without fortune or rich connections, he had contrived during nearly thirty years to live as a man of wealth; he had seen the game ecarte go out and bridge come in; and had so devised the effect he made that he was still more eminent as a personality than as a gambler. Though he played in many places, he was careful not to win too much in any of them, and rather than press for a debt he would forgive it.
The rat-faced valet reappeared, carrying a salver on which were some half dozen envelopes. The Prince took them, and proceeded to examine them before opening them, while the valet, still with his uncanny noiselessness, continued his interrupted preparations. Two of the letters the Prince tossed to the floor forthwith; he knew them for trifling bills. Of the others, there was one with the name of a Paris hotel printed on the flap which appeared to interest him. He had that common weakness for guessing at a letter before opening it which princes share with scullions; and in the case of this one there was something vaguely familiar in the handwriting to which he could not put a name. He stared at it thoughtfully, and felt again a momentary stirring within him of that ill ease with which he had waked from sleep, which had made him doubt that the day was bright. Like all gamblers, he found significance in things themselves insignificant. Impatiently he abandoned his speculations and tore the envelope open; then turned upon his elbow to look at the signature.
“Parbleu!” he exclaimed.
The valet turned at the sound, but his master had forgotten his existence. The man, his hands still busy inserting studs in a shirt, watched with sidelong glances how the Prince had thrown off his languor and leaned above his letter, startled and absorbed.
“MY DEAR MONPAVON [read the Prince]: For the first time since our parting, nearly a generation ago, I am once more in Paris, of which the very speech has become strange in my mouth. I return as a citizen of the United States, a foreigner; you will perhaps recognize me with difficulty; and I would hardly give you that trouble were it not for the engagement which is outstanding between us an engagement which you will not fail to recall. It was concluded upon that evening on which we saw each other last, when, having lost to you all that remained to me to lose, you offered me my revenge whenever I should choose to come for it. Well, I have come for it. I will call upon you as soon as possible. I hope such visits are still as welcome to you as once they were.”
And at the tail of the letter there sprawled the signature, bold and black: “JULES CARIGNY.”
“Tiens!” exclaimed the Prince.
The valet moved. “M’sieur le Prince spoke?” he queried.
“No!” said the Prince impatiently. He glanced up from his letter at the man’s sly, secret face. “But by the way have you ever heard of a Monsieur Carigny?”
It was with something like the empty shell of a smile that the man answered. “Everybody who knows M’sieur le Prince has heard of him,” he said suavely.
“H’m!” the Prince grunted doubtfully, but he knew it was true. Everybody had heard of Carigny and the revenge that was due to him; impossible to refuse it to him now.
There are incidents in every man’s life concerning which one can never be sure that they are closed; in such a life as that of the Prince de Monpavon there are many. The affair of Carigny, nearly thirty years before, was one of them. While he stared again at the letter, there rose before the Prince’s eyes a vision of the evening upon which they had parted in a great; over-ornate room with card-tables in it, and a hanging chandelier of glass lusters that shivered and made a tinkling bell-music whenever the door opened. It had been a short game. It was a season of high stakes, and Carigny, as a loser, had doubled and doubled till the last quick hand that finished him. He was a slim youth, with a face smooth and pale. He sat back in his chair, with his head hanging, staring with a look of stupefaction at the cards that spelled his ruin, his finish, and his exile. About him, some of the onlookers began to talk loudly to cover his confusion, and their voices seemed to restore him. He blinked and closed his mouth, and sat up. “Well,” he said, then, “there’s an end of that!”
The Prince had answered with some conventional remark, the insincere regrets of a winner for the loser’s ill fortune, and had added something about giving Carigny his revenge.
The other smiled a little and shook his head. “You are very good,” he had answered; “but at present that is impossible. Some day, perhaps.”
He paused. He had risen from his chair, and, though the evening was yet young, he had the look of a man wearied utterly. All the room was watching him; it was known that he had lost all.
“Whenever you like,” the Prince had replied.
Carigny nodded slowly. “It may be a long time,” he said. “I can see that it may be years. But, since you are so good, some day we will play once more. It is agreed?”
“Certainly; it is agreed,” said the Prince.
Carigny smiled once more. He had a queer, ironic little smile that seemed to mock its own mirth. Then, nodding a good night here and there, he had gone toward the door, tall and a little drooping, between the men who stood aside to give him passage, strangely significant and notable at that final moment. At the door he had turned and looked toward the Prince.
“Au revoir!” he had said.
And the Prince, concerned not to fail in his attitude, not to make the wrong impression upon those who watched, had matched his tone carefully to Carigny’s as he replied: “Au revoir!”
The thing had touched men’s imaginations. The drama of that promised return, years ahead, had made a story; it had threatened the Prince with notoriety. He had had to live dexterously to escape it to play little and with restraint for many months afterward. It had had to be suffered to exhaust itself, to die lingeringly. It had lain in its grave for nearly thirty years; and now, like a hand reaching out from a tomb, came this letter. The incident was not closed.
“No wonder,” said the Prince to himself, as he knotted his necktie before the mirror “no wonder the day felt wrong! There is bad luck in the very air. I must be very careful today.”
- Dupontel, waiting for him in the salon, saw him enter between the folding doors with a face upon which his distaste of the day had cast a shadow. Dupontel was no more than twenty-five, and the Prince was one of his admirations and his most expensive hobby. He rose from his seat, smiling, surveying, the other’s effect of immaculate clothing, fine bearing, and striking looks, and marking the set of his countenance.
“You look very correct today,” he remarked pleasantly.
The Prince nodded without humor. “It is one of my days for being correct,” he answered. “I feel it in the air it is a day to be on my guard. I have these sensations sometimes not often, mercifully! and I have learned to pay attention to them.”
Dupontel smiled again. “To me it seems a cheerful day,” he said. “And you begin it well, at any rate.”
“How, then?” The Prince, coaxing on his grey gloves, turned narrowed eyes upon him. “In what way do I begin it well?”
Dupontel produced a pocket-book from the breast of his coat. “I have to settle with you over last evening,” he said. “Two thousand, wasn’t it? I call that beginning any day well.”
He dropped the notes upon the little table where the Prince’s hat and cane lay.
The Prince picked up the notes.
“Thanks!” he said. He looked at the young man almost with curiosity.
“Sure it’s convenient?”
For answer, Dupontel showed him his pocketbook, with still half a dozen thousand-franc notes in it.
“I see,” said the Prince.
He still hesitated for a moment or two, as if touched by some compunction, before he put the notes into his pocket. It had occurred to him vaguely that he might propitiate his fortune by sacrificing this money make himself, as it were, by a timely generosity, the creditor of good luck. But it was not the kind of thing he was used to do.
“Eh bien!” he said, and put the notes out of sight.
“And now,” said Dupontel, “let us eat.”
“Yes,” said the Prince slowly. “That is the next thing, I suppose. And presently I will tell you a reason why this is a day to be careful of.”
In the elevator that bore them toward the street, he began of a sudden to search his pockets. Dupontel, watching, him in surprise, saw a real worry replace the customary lofty impassivity of his face.
“You have lost something?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered the Prince shortly. “Take us up again at once,” he ordered the attendant.
“I will not keep you a moment,” he said to Dupontel, when the elevator had reached his own floor again, and he entered his apartment quickly.
He found his valet still in the bedroom, putting it deftly in order, always with that secret and furtive quality of look and movement. The Prince, tall, notably splendid in person, halted in the doorway; the man, mean, little, shaped by servile and menial uses, stopped in the middle of the room and returned his gaze warily. There was an instant of silence.
“I had a coin,” began the Prince. “A gold coin, not a French one! I had it in my pocket last night. Where is it?”
Never was anything so shallow as the other’s pretence of distressed ignorance. It was as if he scarcely troubled to dissemble his amusement and malice.
“But I have not seen it, M’sieur le Prince,” he said. “If M’sieur le
Prince wishes, I will search. Doubtless.”
“I am in a hurry,” interrupted the Prince. “It is a Mexican coin worth ten francs only.” He held out a coin. “Here is a ten-franc piece. Be quick.”
They were equals for the moment; the relationship was plain to both of them. With no failing of his countenance, the valet drew the missing, piece from his pocket.
“Mexican?” he said. “I thought it was Spanish.”
The coins changed hands. Neither of them failed in his attitude; they were well matched.
The Prince rejoined Dupontel with his Mexican gold piece still in his hand.
“It was this I had left behind,” he said, showing the thin-worn gold disc. “It is well, a talisman of mine, a sort of mascot. I was nearly going without it. Rather than do that I would stay at home.”
Dupontel laughed. “You are superstitious, then?” he said lightly. “It is not much to look at, your talisman.”
The Prince shook his head; it seemed impossible to make him smile that morning.
“That is true,” he agreed, “but a man must put faith in something. When you have heard what I have to tell you, you will understand that.”
The streets, those lively streets of Paris that mask the keenness of their commerce with so festive a face, were sunlit as they passed on their way, and along the boulevards the trees were gracious with young green. They went at the even and leisurely pace which is natural in that city of many halting-places two men worth turning to look at, so perfectly did each, in his particular way, typify his world. Both were tall, easy-moving, sure and restrained in every gesture. Dupontel at twenty-five, for all the boyishness that sometimes showed in him, had already his finished personal effect; and the Prince, white-haired, dark-browed, with a certain austerity of expression, was as complete a thing as a work of art.
“Then what is it, exactly, that you fear from this Carigny?” asked Dupontel, when the Prince had told him of the letter. “I have heard the story, of course; but I never heard he was dangerous.”
“It is not he that is dangerous,” said the Prince.
“What, then?”
The Prince shook his head doubtfully. Such men as he seldom have a confidant, but he was used to speak to Dupontel with more freedom than to any other.
“Things are dangerous,” he answered. “There is bad luck about; I tell you, I feel it. And now, this business of Carigny cropping up, rising like a ghost of the past to demand a reckoning!” He shuddered; it was like the shudder of a man who feels a sudden chill. “A reckoning!” he repeated. “At this rate, one is never quit of anything.”
They were nearing the restaurant at which they were to lunch.
Dupontel touched his companion lightly on the arm.
“You are depressed,” he said. “You must gather your forces, Monpavon. You mustn’t let Carigny find you in a state like this; it would make things easy for him.”
The Prince made a weary little gesture of assent. “I shall be ready for him,” he said. “If only-”
“If only what?”
They were at the door of the restaurant. A page like a scarlet doll held open the door for them; a Swiss, ornately uniformed, stood frozen at the salute. The Prince’s somber eyes passed unseeing over these articles of human furniture.
“If only I don’t get a sign,” he said; “like going out without my
Mexican coin, you know that would be a sign. If only I can avoid that and a couple of other things I’ll be ready enough for Monsieur Carigny when he comes.”
“Tiens!” said Dupontel. “You and your signs, c’est epatant!”
He was amused, and even a little contemptuous. He had not yet been long enough at play to reach that stage when the gambler is the servant of small private fetishes when an incident at the beginning of the day can fill him with fears or hopes, and all life has a meaning which expresses itself in the run of the cards.
They took their places at the table reserved for them. Waiters stood aloof, effacing themselves, prepared to pounce upon their smallest need and annihilate it. Dupontel breathed a number as he sat down, and the rotund and reverend wine-waiter, wearing a chain of office, tried to express in his face respectful esteem for a man who could give such an order.
“You need a stimulant, an encouragement,” said Dupontel, leaning across to the Prince. “Therefore I have ordered for us.”
He had his hands joined under his chin and his elbows on the table. The Prince, with something like a crisp oath, snatched at the salt-cellar which his movement would have overset, and saved it saved it with grains of salt sliding on the very rim, but none fallen to the table. He made sure of this fact anxiously.
“That was a near thing,” he said, looking up at Dupontel. There was actually color in his face.
“Another fraction of a second and” His gesture completed the sentence.
“My dear fellow!” remonstrated Dupontel.
“That was the second,” said the Prince. “First I nearly left my coin at home that was my servant’s doing. Then the salt is all but spilled my friend does that. If I had a wife, I should expect to owe the third danger to her. Who will bring it to me, I wonder?”
“You are extraordinary, with your signs and dangers,” said Dupontel. “I never heard you speak like this before. And, in any case, you have averted two perils.”
“I have averted two,” agreed the Prince. “You are right; that in itself is almost a sign. It it gives me hope for the third the blind man.”
“Eh? The blind man? What blind man?”
The Prince took a spoonful of soup.
“Sometimes I forget how young you are,” he said. “A blind man, of course, is nothing to you. You give him an alms, touching his hand when you put the money into it, and go on to the club to play bridge. But if I, by any chance of the street, were to touch a blind man, I should go home and go to bed. I have my share of prudence me! and that is a risk I do not take. No!”
He interrupted himself to drink from his glass, while Dupontel sat back and prepared, with a gesture of utter impatience, to be contemptuous and argumentative.
“Carigny,” said the Prince, setting his glass down, “Carigny, in the old days, believed that too. But he was not prudent. That night we played, that last night of which he writes in his letter, there was a blind man who begged of him. And when he would have dropped a franc in his hand, the creature groped suddenly for the coin. We were walking to the club together, and I saw it, standing aside meanwhile. It was an old debris of a man, who begged in a voice that whispered and croaked, and his hand was shriveled and purple, and it wavered and trembled as he held it out. Because he was blind, with eyelids swollen and discolored, Carigny said, as he drew the money from his pocket: ‘Here is a franc, my friend!’ Then the old creature groped, as I have said, with a jerk of his inhuman claw, and grabbed the money from Carigny before he could let it fall, and I saw their hands touch. Carigny would not have played that night but that we had appointed to play.”
“You could have let him off till next day,” said Dupontel.
The Prince shook his head. “In those times,” he said, “it was not the custom to break one’s engagements neither to break them nor to allow them to be broken.”
“I should like to see this Carigny of yours,” said Dupontel thoughtfully. “When do you expect him to call on you?”
“His letter says ‘as soon as possible,’” answered the Prince. “That constitutes in itself an engagement which Carigny will not fail to keep. He will come this afternoon.”
Their meal achieved itself perfectly, like a ritual There arrived the time when the Prince set down his tiny coffee-cup and leaned back detachedly, while the waiter with the bill went through his celebrated impersonation of a man receiving a favor. Together they passed out between the great glass doors to the street.
“You will walk?” inquired Dupontel.
“As usual,” said the Prince. It was his custom to pass the time between lunch and the hour when he was likely to find a game of bridge in strolling; it served for exercise.
“But,” suggested the young man, “you might meet a blind man! Wouldn’t it be better to go straight to the club?”
“And meet one on the way there?” The Prince shook his head. “No, my friend. That is a chance one must take. One can, however, keep one’s eyes open.”
In the Place de la Concorde they actually did meet a blind man a lean, bowed man feeling his way along the curb with a stick deftly enough, so that, as he was on the wrong side of the sidewalk, it would have been easy enough to brush against him in passing. It was the Prince who first perceived him approaching. He touched Dupontel and pointed.
“Parbleu!” exclaimed Dupontel. He looked strangely at the blind bearer of fate and then at his companion. The Prince was smiling now, but not in mirth.
“Let us make room for him,” he said; and they stepped into the roadway to let him pass.
What was strange was that when he came abreast of them he paused, with his face nosing and peering in his blindness, and felt before him with an extended hand, as if he had expected to find something in his way. The hand and the skinny wrist, protruding from the frayed sleeve and searching the empty air, affected Dupontel unpleasantly; they touched the fund of credulity in him which is at the root of all men who believe in nothing. He watched the blind man like an actor in a scene till he moved on again, with his stick tracing the edge of the curb and his strained face unresponsive to the sunlight.
“What was he doing?” he asked, then.
The Prince’s wry smile showed again. “Doing?” he repeated, “why, he was feeling for me.”
Dupontel shrugged, but not in disapproval this time. His imagination was burdened with a new sense of his companion’s life, complex with difficulties, haunted by portents like specters of good and evil fortune.
“But, at all events, he did not touch you!” he said at last.
“No!” The Prince swung his cane, drawing up his tall, trim figure, and stepping out briskly. “No, he did not touch me. They dog me, these, these tokens of the devil; but I am not caught. It is I that save myself. After all, mon cher, it seems possible that this may be Carigny’s bad day not mine!”
Dupontel had not meant to accompany the Prince to his club that day; his purpose had been to leave him at the door and go elsewhere. But it was possible that his meeting with Carigny might be something which it would be well to have seen; and, besides, his affairs were gaining a strange hue; glamour was in them. He felt a little thrill when the massive club porter, approaching them in the hall, spoke Carigny’s name.
“Monsieur Carigny telephoned,” said the porter. “He particularly desired that Monsieur le Prince should be told, as soon as he arrived, that Monsieur Carigny would call at half-past four.”
The Prince nodded. “I shall be upstairs, in the card-room,” he answered, and passed on
In the card-room were several men of the Prince’s who had known Carigny in his Paris days, while there was scarcely a man present who had not heard some version of the Carigny story. To certain of them the Prince spoke of the visit he was expecting. He had decided that, since the meeting was not by any means to be avoided or hidden, it would best serve him to announce it to take his part in the drama and squeeze it of what credit he could. It spread through the room and through the club like a scandal. There was a throng in the room, expectant, hungry for the possibility of a scene. In the recess of a tall window, the Prince, superb in his self-possession, a figure in a world of players that was past, with his pale, severe face impassive under his white hair, made the crowd of them seem vulgar and raucous by contrast with him. Dupontel, watching him, had a moment of consternation; the Prince seemed a thing too supremely complete, too perfect as a product of his world, to risk upon the turn of the cards.
A club servant entered, bearing a card on a salver, and the talk stilled as he presented it to the Prince. He, in converse with a veteran who had known Carigny, took the card and held it in his fingers without looking at it while he finished what he was saying. All eyes were on him; it was a neat piece of social bravado. He glanced at the card at last.
“Announce Monsieur Carigny,” he said to the servant, and went on talking. Dupontel felt like cheering him. The talk resumed, in a changed key.
The door opened, and the servant was once more visible, standing back against it, not without a sense of his importance as, say, a scene-shifter in the play. His voice, rolling the r, was a flat bellow of ceremony.
“Monsieur Car-rigny,” he announced, “and Monsieur Georges Car-rigny!”
Every one turned. Through the door which the servant held open there advanced two men. The first was bearded, a large man, definitely elderly, who walked with a curious deliberation of tread and looked neither to the right nor to the left. The younger, following at his elbow, was possibly Dupontel’s age. In him, not the clothes alone, but the face, keen lipped, quiet-eyed, not quite concealing its reserves of vitality under its composure, proclaimed the American.
The men in the room, moving aside, made an avenue from the door to the window in which, the Prince stood. The Prince came along it to greet his guest. As they halted, face to face, Dupontel saw that the young stranger touched the elder on the arm.
The Prince seemed to have doubts. He remembered Carigny as a slim youth; the stranger was burly, with a bush of beard and a red face.
“It is Carigny?” inquired the Prince, hesitating.
The stranger smiled. “Yes,” he answered. “Monpavon, is it not?”
Even his French had changed, become the French of a foreigner.
“You have been a long time coming for your revenge,” said the Prince.
“But you are welcome always, Carigny.”
He held out his hand, and again the young man touched the elder. As if he hesitated to join hands with the Prince, Carigny gave his hand, slowly, awkwardly; but his grip, when he had done it, was firm. They stood, clasping hands, under the inquisitive eyes of the others.
“Since we are to play,” said Carigny, “you must allow me to present you to my son. He does not play; I have discouraged him. But he will read my cards for me. You do not object?”
Their clasped hands fell apart. The Prince looked his incomprehension. The young man was making him a bow of sorts.
“I am charmed,” he answered. “But read your cards? I don’t understand.”
Dupontel arrested an impulse to step forward, to interrupt, to interfere in some manner. He saw that Carigny smiled.
“Yes,” he answered. “Tell me which card is which, you know. You see,
Monpavon, for the last five years I have been blind!”
His voice, with its foreign accent rendering strange his precise and old-fashioned French, continued to explain. But Dupontel did not hear what it said. He was looking at the Prince. Save for an astonished knitting of the brows, he had not moved; he preserved, under those watching eyes, his attitude. The worst had come to pass the thing he feared had ambushed him? and he was facing it. But presently he raised his right hand, the hand that had touched Carigny’s, looked at it thoughtfully, and brushed it with his left. If he had any virtue, he was exhibiting it now. One could defeat him but not discountenance him.
“Certainly,” he was saying presently. “The right of choice is yours,
Carigny. Ecarte, since you wish it, by all means.”
Dupontel, to whom he had explained himself, knew what that handshake had meant. In the move toward the card-table, he caught his eye. The Prince smiled at him. “You see how useless it is to strive,” he seemed to say.
The pretence that the onlookers were present by chance was gone when the Prince and his adversary sat down opposite to each other at the little green table. The onlookers thronged about them, frankly curious. The young man, Carigny’s son, stood leaning over his father’s shoulder. Dupontel was at the back of his friend. He saw the green table across the Prince’s white head. The deal fell to the Prince.
He had the pack in his hand when he spoke across to Carigny.
“Carigny,” he said. The blind man lifted his face to listen. “The last game was a short one.”
The other nodded. “Make it as short as you like,” he said. “Make it one hand, if it pleases you, Monpavon. I shall be satisfied.”
“One hand!”
“Certainly; if that is short enough for you,” said Carigny. “But the stakes you remember them?”
He asked the question as if he would warn his adversary, and as if he himself were certain of the issue. He had the demeanor of a man who undertakes a problem of which he knows the answer.
“Be careful,” breathed Dupontel at the Prince’s back.
“You lost, let me see!” replied the Prince, unheeding Dupontel’s whisper. “It was four hundred thousand francs, I think.”
The bearded face opposite him smiled. “You have not forgotten, I see!”
The Prince nodded. “One hand, then!”
He proceeded to deal. He was certain of losing, or he would not have consented to such an outrage upon the game’s refinements. And yet, he had hopes; the spirit that presides over cards is capricious.
The young man had sorted the cards and placed them in his father’s hands, and was whispering in his ear. Then he stood upright. The Prince waited.
“You propose?” he inquired.
“No,” said the other; “I play.”
There was a movement among the spectators as some shifted in an endeavor to see the cards. Dupontel was edged from his post for a moment. When he had shouldered his way back to it, the play had already begun. It seemed to him almost indecent that such an affair should rest on a single hand of cards; it was making free with matters of importance. As he gained a sight of the table again, Carigny scored his second trick and the third card fell. The Prince trumped it. The young man smiled and whispered. Another card was played, and the Prince won again, He laid his last card face down on the table.
“Carigny,” he said.
“Have you played?” asked the other.
“No,” said the Prince. “Listen! I will make you a proposal. I do not know what your last card is; you do not know mine. It rests on that card, our four hundred thousand francs. I may win, in spite of everything. But I offer you half the stakes now, if you like; two hundred thousand instead of four and we will not play that last card.”
“Eh?” The blind man hid his card with his hand. His son bent over him, whispering. A man next to Dupontel nudged him. “What is Monpavon’s card?” he murmured. Dupontel did not know. The cards had been the least part of the affair to him. The Prince sat still, waiting.
“Very well,” said Carigny, at last. “I am willing, Monpavon. Two hundred thousand, eh?”
“Two hundred thousand,” corroborated the Prince.
He reached for the pack. Before anyone could protest, he had slipped his card into it and mingled it with the others beyond identification.
“We are quits, then,” he was saying to Carigny, and once more the ancient adversaries shook hands.
“But what was the card?” asked a dozen men at once.
The Prince let his hard, serene eye wander over them. He was walking toward the door, guiding Carigny with a hand on his arm. There was a flicker of a smile on his face. Without answering, he passed out. To this day, no man knows what card he held.