last she seemed to have uttered something decisive; for Raoul quickly rose and opened a desk near the fireplace, from which he took a bundle of papers, and handed them to her.
“Well,” thought M. Verduret, “this looks bad. Can it be a compromising correspondence which the fair one wants to secure?”
Madeleine took the papers, but was apparently still dissatisfied. She again entreated him to give her something else. Raoul refused; and then she threw the papers on the table.
The papers seemed to puzzle M. Verduret very much, as he gazed at them through the window.
“I am not blind,” he said, “and I certainly am not mistaken; those papers, red, green, and yellow, are pawnbroker’s tickets!”
Madeleine turned over the papers as if looking for some particular ones. She selected three, which she put in her pocket, disdainfully pushing the others aside.
She was evidently preparing to take her departure, for she said a few words to Raoul, who took up the lamp as if to escort her downstairs.
There was nothing more for M. Verduret to see. He carefully descended the ladder, muttering to himself. “Pawnbroker’s tickets! What infamous mystery lies at the bottom of all this?”
The first thing he did was to remove the ladder.
Raoul might take it into his head to look around the garden, when he came to the door with Madeleine, and if he did so the ladder could scarcely fail to attract his attention.
M. Verduret and Prosper hastily laid it on the ground, regardless of the shrubs and vines they destroyed in doing so, and then concealed themselves among the trees, whence they could watch at once the front door and the outer gate.
Madeleine and Raoul appeared in the doorway. Raoul set the lamp on the bottom step, and offered his hand to the girl; but she refused it with haughty contempt, which somewhat soothed Prosper’s lacerated heart.
This scornful behavior did not, however, seem to surprise or hurt Raoul. He simply answered by an ironical gesture which implied, “As you please!”
He followed her to the gate, which he opened and closed after her; then he hurried back to the house, while Madeleine’s carriage drove rapidly away.
“Now, monsieur,” said Prosper, “you must tell me what you saw. You promised me the truth no matter how bitter it might be. Speak; I can bear it, be it what it may!”
“You will only have joy to bear, my friend. Within a month you will bitterly regret your suspicions of to-night. You will blush to think that you ever imagined Mlle. Madeleine to be intimate with a man like Lagors.”
“But, monsieur, appearances——”
“It is precisely against appearances that we must be on our guard. Always distrust them. A suspicion, false or just, is always based on something. But we must not stay here forever; and, as Raoul has fastened the gate, we shall have to climb back again.”
“But there is the ladder.”
“Let it stay where it is; as we cannot efface our footprints, he will think thieves have been trying to get into the house.”
They scaled the wall, and had not walked fifty steps when they heard the noise of a gate being unlocked. The stood aside and waited; a man soon passed on his way to the station.
“That is Raoul,” said M. Verduret, “and Joseph will report to us that he has gone to tell Clameran what has just taken place. If they are only kind enough to speak French!”
He walked along quietly for some time, trying to connect the broken chain of his deductions.
“How in the deuce,” he abruptly asked, “did this Lagors, who is devoted to gay society, come to choose a lonely country house to live in?”
“I suppose it was because M. Fauvel’s villa is only fifteen minutes’ ride from here, on the Seine.”
“That accounts for his staying here in the summer; but in winter?”
“Oh, in winter he has a room at the Hotel du Louvre, and all the year round keeps an apartment in Paris.”
This did not enlighten M. Verduret much; he hurried his pace.
“I hope our driver has not gone. We cannot take the train which is about to start, because Raoul would see us at the station.”
Although it was more than an hour since M. Verduret and Prosper left the hack at the branch road, they found it waiting for them in front of the tavern.
The driver could not resist the desire to change his five-franc piece; he had ordered dinner, and, finding his wine very good, was calling for more, when he looked up and saw his employers.
“Well, you are in a strange state!” he exclaimed.
Prosper replied that they had gone to see a friend, and, losing their way, had fallen into a pit; as if there were pits in Vesinet forest.
“Ah, that is the way you got covered with mud, is it?” exclaimed the driver, who, though apparently contented with this explanation, strongly suspected that his two customers had been engaged in some nefarious transaction.
This opinion seemed to be entertained by everyone present, for they looked at Prosper’s muddy clothes and then at each other in a knowing way.
But M. Verduret stopped all comment by saying:
“Come on.”
“All right, monsieur: get in while I settle my bill; I will be there in a minute.”
The drive back was silent and seemed interminably long. Prosper at first tried to draw his strange companion into conversation, but, as he received nothing but monosyllables in reply, held his peace for the rest of the journey. He was again beginning to feel irritated at the absolute empire exercised over him by this man.
Physical discomfort was added to his other troubles. He was stiff and numb; every bone in him ached with the cold.
Although mental endurance may be unlimited, bodily strength must in the end give way. A violent effort is always followed by reaction.
Lying back in a corner of the carriage, with his feet upon the front seat, M. Verduret seemed to be enjoying a nap; yet he was never more wide awake.
He was in a perplexed state of mind. This expedition, which, he had been confident, would resolve all his doubts, had only added mystery to mystery. His chain of evidence, which he thought so strongly linked, was completely broken.
For him the facts remained the same, but circumstances had changed. He could not imagine what common motive, what moral or material complicity, what influences, could have existed to make the four actors in his drama, Mme. Fauvel, Madeleine, Raoul, and Clameran, seem to have the same object in view.
He was seeking in his fertile mind, that encyclopaedia of craft and subtlety, for some combination which would throw light on the problem before him.
The midnight bells were ringing when they reached the Archangel, and for the first time M. Verduret remembered
