CHAPTER XXII
A VOLUNTEER WAITER
Tom Bob had been waiting some while in a small room reserved for the use of callers on the ground floor of the house. The detective seemed extremely impatient, again and again he looked at his watch.
“Half after nine,” he muttered, “I cannot afford to waste time, yet I must make sure Ascott will not fail....” The man was frowning in evident anxiety, as he asked himself what sort of a reception the wealthy Englishman would accord him. Since the strange affair of the Pré Catalan, which had culminated so extraordinarily in the capsizing of the automobiles into the lake, Tom Bob had not seen Ascott again, save on very rare occasions. For this there were several reasons. In the first place the detective had been very much taken up—at any rate he said so—with the events that had occurred since his arrival in Paris, since he had officially declared his intention to devote himself to the pursuit and discovery of Fantômas. Moreover, the intrigue between Tom Bob and the Princess Sonia Danidoff was not, could not be, unknown to the members of the intimate little group of fellow-travellers that had come together on board the Lorraine on her passage across the Atlantic. Better than anyone, indeed, Ascott, who had been deeply smitten by the Princess, must be aware that in Tom Bob he had a fortunate rival, who had quickly won his lady’s favours. In truth, it required all the American’s calm effrontery thus, without any preliminary testing of his footing, to come calling on the young Englishman, who might very well be proposing to give him a highly unpleasant reception.
“True it is,” Tom Bob told himself, “that since he abandoned his unsuccessful wooing of the Princess Sonia, Ascott has had other amorous adventures that should surely at this time of day prevent his being jealous of me.” The affair at the Silver Goblet had, in fact, become a matter of general gossip, albeit not specially spoken about among the detective’s own circle of friends, and the American appeared to be perfectly well posted as to what was happening, as well as what was likely to come of it eventually.
At last Ascott’s man-servant, John, appeared, and invited the detective to follow him upstairs to his master’s study, where he found the Englishman seated at his desk, writing.
“Up already!” exclaimed the visitor cheerfully, “and ready for anything! Upon my word, my dear fellow, Paris has quite changed your habits. How are you this morning?”
Ascott turned half round in his chair, extending a careless hand to his visitor:
“Not so bad, and you, Tom Bob? To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Take a seat, pray!”
“Good!” thought the detective, “he is not over and above angry with me!” At the same time, remembering that time was flying with alarming swiftness, he announced:
“I have merely come to shake you by the hand, as I was passing your way.”
But Ascott, who appeared to guess the object of his visit, began to hunt through his pocket-book, from which he presently extracted a bank note. Holding this out to the detective:
“Here is my subscription,” he said: “will you be so obliging as to hand this thousand francs to the Grand Duchess Alexandra when you have an opportunity of seeing her.”
Tom Bob expressed his willingness with an almost imperceptible smile.
“Just fancy, my dear sir,” he remarked, “how timorous Parisian society is; to think that it is now a perfect mania, a fashionable craze, quite the correct thing in fact, to subscribe to this fund. They want to see Fantômas waxing fat!... ’pon my word! it is excruciatingly funny. Henceforth, I take it the light-fingered gentry will have an easy time of it when they want to make their fortunes. Instead of fagging themselves to commit crimes, they will only have to make it known through the newspapers that they are short of cash for the moment, and the money will come tumbling in straight away! Why, sir,” continued the detective, “it will be the ruin of the police; I ask you, what are we to do, my colleagues and I, when there are no more any culprits to hunt down, any criminals to arrest?”
Tom Bob had uttered his little speech in a tone of laughing irony well calculated to divert his host, but the latter declined to be amused.
“What do you think about it?” the detective insisted, “what impression does all this Fantômas business make on you?”
Ascott, rousing himself from a prolonged reverie, shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t care a fig about it,” he declared, “I am bored to death....”
The other feigned no little surprise.
“Well, that is just what struck me, my dear sir; you look tired, altered, you never go into society nowadays; have you had worries perhaps?”
Ascott nodded and was about to speak when the American broke in, making his question more definite:
“I’ve heard vaguely of some untoward adventure you were the hero of a while ago....”
“Rather say the victim,” put in Ascott.
The detective caught him up:
“The victim! come, that’s a big word; what did happen to you?”
The young Englishman seemed unwilling to explain his words.
“Oh! nothing,” he said, “or nothing much!”
Then, after a pause, and as if he had just come to a supreme decision, he got up, strode two or three times up and down the room, then standing before the detective with folded arms, he declared:
“Tom Bob, I should by rights be more angry with you than in fact I am, for you have played me a trick, a damnable trick, involuntarily, I am sure of that, but the fact remains, you have played me one of those tricks men find it hard to forgive, you have supplanted me in the affections of a woman I loved.”
The detective gave a gesture of protestation.
“Pooh! my good sir,” he said, “women and their ways! these things are never to be taken seriously.”
“That depends; no doubt, you will tell me I had for ages been courting the princess without winning the smallest favour from her, while it was enough for you to arrive on the scene to become instantly the darling of her heart ... well, be it so! I do not press the point, and you may have noticed this, that I never tried to compete with you. No, luck or ill luck decreed that at that very moment my affections took the field elsewhere....”
Tom Bob heaved a sigh of relief.
“I am delighted to hear it, I should have been grieved to give you pain.”
“Man!” pursued the young man, “you cannot imagine what happened next.”
Throwing off his indifference more and more, Ascott, glad of the opportunity to tell his troubles to another, confided to the detective his extraordinary adventure with Nini Guinon and the threats addressed to him; the consequences of a passing caprice had come to a head.
Tom Bob preserved his calm as he listened to the story.
“And then?” he asked, when Ascott stopped to take breath.
“Then,” declared the latter, “it is my duty to give you a piece of news, a great piece of news—I am getting married, I am marrying Nini Guinon!”
“Good luck!” cried the detective, “and when is it to be?”
“This morning, almost directly.”
“Bad luck!” ejaculated Tom Bob—“and I was just wanting to ask you to breakfast!”
“Yes,” went on Ascott, with an air of dejection, “in two hours’ time I shall be the lawful husband of an old usurer’s niece, Père Moche’s niece; oh! it is a fine kettle of fish!”
“Ascott,” put in Tom Bob, trying to console him, “you are marrying under French law; you know, don’t you? that divorce is allowed.”
Ascott shrugged his shoulders: “That would make things no better!”
“But why?”
The young man assumed a still more despairing look as he looked in the other’s face and announced:
“My dear Bob, I must tell you all; Nini Guinon is enceinte.”
Ascott looked so crestfallen that, for all his phlegm, Tom Bob all but burst out laughing. However, he dissembled his feelings with wonderful self-restraint; rising, he stepped up to the young Englishman with an air of heartfelt sympathy and pressed his hand.
“My dear sir,” he declared, “you are a good and honest man!”
But Ascott had no illusions. “Or an idiot!” he groaned.
A silence followed, which the detective broke to say: “You will please excuse me, I must be going,” adding with a spice of irony:
“I won’t press you to have breakfast with me; I take it that after the wedding, a reception ...”
“No!” Ascott interrupted, “don’t make fun of me, Tom Bob; the ceremony will be strictly private; naturally it does not call for any festivities; the mother, who has to signify her consent, only comes to the Mairie and to church, and I have definitely refused to invite to the breakfast anyone whatsoever besides the witnesses.”
“And you start, no doubt, on your wedding trip afterwards?”
“That is to say,” returned the young man, “I take to my heels, I go away to hide myself, also I go in order to try and get my wife away from the deplorable associations connected with her family and relations.”
As he reached the door Tom Bob turned for a last good-bye to his host: “As a matter of fact,” he questioned, “do you love her?”
“No!” replied the rich Englishman gloomily.
But, modifying his statement and blushing to the roots of his hair, he added:
“Still, I am bound to confess, there is something makes her not indifferent to me.”
Tom Bob raised his hand as if to invoke heaven, and in a thrilling voice:
“The child, perhaps ...” he suggested.
“Yes, that is it,” Ascott agreed, and hurrying over the good-byes, he returned to his working-table, while the detective took his departure.
* * * * * *
At the far end of the Bois de Vincennes, near the Saint-Mandé boundary of the park, is to be found, standing among trees, a restaurant of quite a rural aspect, and bearing the significant name of The Orange Blossom. Within are a number of vast rooms and outside in the gardens arbours of the like ample proportions. It is here in fact that the democracy resorts to make merry on the occasion of weddings after the religious or civil ceremonies, sometimes one, sometimes the other, occasionally both, have been rapidly despatched.
This morning evidently the landlord of The Orange Blossom was not expecting any great number of customers, for he had thrown open only the smallest of his salons. In the middle of the room he was laying the table for a very limited number of guests:
“Scurvy devils!” he was grumbling to himself, “what’s the good of folks who ask only the marriage witnesses to the breakfast—skinflints surely! True they’ve paid in advance without any bargaining much, still in my humble opinion we’d best keep a sharp eye lifting to see they don’t pocket the spoons; mostly indeed I keep the silver locked up. A breakfast for six at six francs a head, that don’t come to a couple of louis. However, let’s hope we’ll make it up on the drinks and cigars.”
The good man stopped in his work; someone had entered the room and was coming towards him.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but are you the landlord of The Orange Blossom?”
The innkeeper turned to his questioner and looked him up and down disdainfully. The newcomer was not of a distinguished appearance—middle-class evidently, soberly dressed in black, a man of thirty or thereabouts, wearing a very heavy beard.
“What do you want?” he asked him.
“Sir,” asked the stranger in return, “are you by way of engaging waiters?”
“Certainly not,” was the uncompromising answer, “and least of all to-day; why, there’s nothing to do—a meal for six at six francs a head—I and the maidservant will be amply sufficient to wait.”
“Still I should be very wishful ...”
“Nothing doing!”
“Not even if I paid?”
The innkeeper looked wonderingly at the man, surprised at such persistency.
“What d’you mean by that?”
“Look here,” the would-be waiter explained, “I’m very anxious to wait at table, to wait at this table, it’s a business I’m keen on. If you’d let me have the tips for myself, I’ll pay you twenty francs to make it up to you.”
The landlord of The Orange Blossom hesitated. The man’s offer was a good one for him, too good indeed; that was more or less what made him suspicious, for neither of the two could fail to know that the tips would never in the long run reach any such amount. To tell the truth, it was this very fact that inclined the innkeeper to look upon the unknown’s application in a favourable light. But he was still suspicious. Perhaps the fine fellow had some cute idea at the back of his head, or perhaps he wanted to kick up a disturbance. Was he a rejected lover, the bride’s fancy man, or possibly the brother or kinsman of a former mistress discarded by the bridegroom? One never knows, such queer things happen! Once more the innkeeper looked hard at this fellow who was so monstrously eager to take service with him; he saw the man was calm and composed enough and had not a bad face of his own.
“Look here,” the landlord of The Orange Blossom began again, “you’re not humbugging me? you want to pay a louis to wait at table, and you don’t mean to play any tricks?”
The unknown laughed frankly in the other’s face:
“Why, not a bit of it, sir, that I swear; I tell you, it amuses me to wait on these people, it’s as you might say, it’s ... it’s a wager I made with my pals.”
“The tips won’t be heavy,” the innkeeper was charitable enough to warn him.
“That’s all one to me.”
“Well, my fine fellow,” thought the landlord of The Orange Blossom, “you strike me as a mighty queer sort, but there don’t seem to be any harm in you; after all, what risk do I run?”
He accepted, and held out his hand to clinch the bargain. “Agreed,” he cried, “hand over your louis.”
“Here you are, sir!”
“Now, my lad,” continued the boniface, getting on very familiar terms, “go and fetch an apron and a jacket, I suppose you have a clean shirt-front; the meal’s ordered for half past twelve, but I don’t expect our customers before one o’clock; look’ee, here’s where we put the plates; about the glasses, you’d better polish ’em up a bit; as you’ve time to spare, that’ll give you something to do, my boy. By-the-by, what do they call you?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the new waiter named himself Daniel.
“Well, Daniel, get to work; work’s the cure for boredom, you know.”
No sooner was he left alone in the salon where the breakfast was to be served than this volunteer who had got himself taken on in so odd a fashion dropped into a chair and gave a long-drawn sigh!
“Ah!” he ejaculated; “here I am, but it’s an expensive treat; a louis! no doubt my poor watch, thanks to ‘my uncle’s’ generosity, raised me the money without over much difficulty—but when shall I ever get my dear ticker back?” Then: “Good Lord!” he groaned, “how this false beard does tickle; if only it don’t come ungummed while I’m waiting at table!”
He got up and went over to a mirror to make sure his disguise was holding firm. He gazed long at his reflection in the glass, his eyes full of melancholy.
“I did well to adopt this travesty,” he told himself, “I am absolutely unrecognizable”—and he was right. The new waiter of The Orange Blossom was, in fact, no other than Jérôme Fandor.
Ever since the dreadful trial he had gone through, since the day of Elisabeth Dollon’s death, the journalist had been plunged in a state of terrible prostration. Wild with grief, he had felt his sanity leaving him; all his high courage, his generous ardour, had departed, and again and again the thought of suicide had haunted his mind. It had called for all the energy that formed the basis of his character to stay him from proceeding to such dread extremities.
Little by little, however, as his will power mastered his dejection, a deep, fierce anger seized him and grew stronger every day. He had a mission to fulfill; this he realized, and his purposes grew clear and definite. Henceforth it was not solely his friend Juve he must rescue from his unhappy plight, but there was Elisabeth’s fearful death he was called upon to avenge. And as he considered these two duties, one as dear to his heart as the other, Fandor recognized that in reality he was pursuing one and the same object, for indeed the main author of all these calamities, the responsible agent, the being who by his sorceries had sown mourning and desolation round about him, was still and always the mysterious, the ever elusive Fantômas! Oh! to unmask the monster, to come face to face with him, to discover in which of the group among whom he worked and manœuvred was really and truly incarnate the mysterious malefactor, this was what the journalist swore to himself to achieve! At all costs he must get done with it; to make an end was necessary, indispensable, and that with the briefest possible delay.
Fandor was filled with a new hope. Though still in hiding from the police and living the life of a pariah, he was yet able to glean occasional information from casual conversations and newspapers, and he noted a certain veering round of public opinion in favour of his friend. It was impossible, people were saying, that Juve, a prisoner in the Santé, could be guilty of all the murders and robberies ascribed to the agency of Fantômas. To this was added Fandor’s definite and undoubted discovery of certain activities of the gang at whose head old Moche figured. Though kept somewhat at arm’s length by the members of this gang, the journalist did nevertheless succeed in learning a number of facts that enabled him to prosecute his investigations on clear and precise lines. Now he had lately acquired the certainty that Père Moche counted for much in the profitable enterprises engineered by Fantômas.
But where was Fantômas? Not far off, for certain! Yet, with equal certainty, more difficult to track down, more elusive than ever. Nor was it only Fandor who was at fault. The American detective Tom Bob was in the same predicament. In fact, the latter, despite his fine audacity and his first triumphs, had not continued his successes. For quite a long time now people had ceased to talk about him; he seemed to have lost interest in the war he had declared against Fantômas.
Furthermore Fandor had observed that the American, who on his first arrival had promised him his protection and support, had suddenly left off seeing him, indeed made little or no concealment of the fact that he no longer desired to be in touch with him. Why this change? with what object in view? Was Tom Bob ashamed to avow himself beaten? or was he hoping, alone, by himself, to run Fantômas to earth?
Such were the young man’s thoughts when the landlord of The Orange Blossom suddenly burst into the eating room.
“Daniel,” he cried, “you must make haste, my lad! here’s the wedding party coming, they’re not late after all; quick, put on your apron and jacket, breakfast will be served instanter!”
Two landaus had just drawn up at the entrance to the gardens, two simple, unpretending vehicles, with none of your wide plate-glass windows, none of your big carriage lamps at the four corners of the coach.