How was it that Martial had failed to discover or to suspect this state of affairs?
A moment’s reflection will explain this fact which is so extraordinary in appearance, so natural in reality.
The head of a family, whether he dwells in an attic or in a palace, is always the last to know what is going on in his home. What everybody else knows he does not even suspect. The master often sleeps while his house is on fire. Some terrible catastrophe—an explosion—is necessary to arouse him from his fancied security.
The life that Martial led was likely to prevent him from arriving at the truth. He was a stranger to his wife. His manner toward her was perfect, full of deference and chivalrous courtesy; but they had nothing in common except a name and certain interests.
Each lived their own life. They met only at dinner, or at the entertainments which they gave and which were considered the most brilliant in Paris society.
The duchess had her own apartments, her servants, her carriages, her horses, her own table.
At twenty-five, Martial, the last descendant of the great house of Sairmeuse—a man upon whom destiny had apparently lavished every blessing—the possessor of youth, unbounded wealth, and a brilliant intellect, succumbed beneath the burden of an incurable despondency and ennui.
The death of Marie-Anne had destroyed all his hopes of happiness; and realizing the emptiness of his life, he did his best to fill the void with bustle and excitement. He threw himself headlong into politics, striving to find in power and in satisfied ambition some relief from his despondency.
It is only just to say that Mme. Blanche had remained superior to circumstances; and that she had played the role of a happy, contented woman with consummate skill.
Her frightful sufferings and anxiety never marred the haughty serenity of her face. She soon won a place as one of the queens of Parisian society; and plunged into dissipation with a sort of frenzy. Was she endeavoring to divert her mind? Did she hope to overpower thought by excessive fatigue?
To Aunt Medea alone did Blanche reveal her secret heart.
“I am like a culprit who has been bound to the scaffold, and then abandoned by the executioner, who says, as he departs: ‘Live until the axe falls of its own accord.’”
And the axe might fall at any moment. A word, a trifle, an unlucky chance—she dared not say “a decree of Providence,” and Martial would know all.
Such, in all its unspeakable horror, was the position of the beautiful and envied Duchesse de Sairmeuse. “She must be perfectly happy,” said the world; but she felt herself sliding down the precipice to the awful depths below.
Like a shipwrecked mariner clinging to a floating spar, she scanned the horizon with a despairing eye, and saw only angry and threatening clouds.
Time, perhaps, might bring her some relief.
Once it happened that six weeks went by, and she heard nothing from Chupin. A month and a half! What had become of him? To Mme. Blanche this silence was as ominous as the calm that precedes the storm.
A line in a newspaper solved the mystery.
Chupin was in prison.
The wretch, after drinking more heavily than usual one evening, had quarrelled with his brother, and had killed him by a blow upon the head with a piece of iron.
The blood of the betrayed Lacheneur was visited upon the heads of his murderer’s children.
Tried by the Court of Assizes, Chupin was condemned to twenty years of hard labor, and sent to Brest.
But this sentence afforded the duchess no relief. The culprit had written to her from his Paris prison; he wrote to her from Brest.
But he did not send his letters through the post. He confided them to comrades, whose terms of imprisonment had expired, and who came to the Hotel de Sairmeuse demanding an interview with the duchess.
And she received them. They told all the miseries they had endured “out there;” and usually ended by requesting some slight assistance.
One morning, a man whose desperate appearance and manner frightened her, brought the duchess this laconic epistle:
“I am tired of starving here; I wish to make my escape. Come to Brest; you can visit the prison, and we will decide upon some plan. If you refuse to do this, I shall apply to the duke, who will obtain my pardon in exchange of what I will tell him.”
Mme. Blanche was dumb with horror. It was impossible, she thought, to sink lower than this.
“Well!” demanded the man, harshly. “What reply shall I make to my comrade?”
“I will go—tell him that I will go!” she said, driven to desperation.
She made the journey, visited the prison, but did not find Chupin.
The previous week there had been a revolt in the prison, the troops had fired upon the prisoners, and Chupin had been killed instantly.
Still the duchess dared not rejoice.
She feared that her tormentor had told his wife the secret of his power.
“I shall soon know,” she thought.
The widow promptly made her appearance; but her manner was humble and supplicating.
She had often heard her dear, dead husband say that madame was his benefactress, and now she came to beg a little aid to enable her to open a small drinking saloon.
Her son Polyte—ah! such a good son! just eighteen years old, and such a help to his poor mother—had discovered a little house in a good situation for the business, and if they only had three or four hundred francs——
Mme. Blanche gave her five hundred francs.
“Either her humility is a mask,” she thought, “or her husband has told her nothing.”
Five days later Polyte Chupin presented himself.
They needed three hundred francs more before they could commence business, and he came on behalf of his mother to entreat the kind lady to advance them.
Determined to discover exactly where she stood, the duchess shortly refused, and the young man departed without a word.
Evidently the mother and son were ignorant of the facts. Chupin’s secret had died with him.
This happened early in January. Toward the last of February, Aunt Medea contracted inflammation of the lungs on leaving a fancy ball, which she attended in an absurd costume, in spite of all the attempts which her niece made to dissuade her.
Her passion for dress killed her. Her illness lasted only three days; but her sufferings, physical and mental, were terrible.
Constrained by her fear of death to examine her own conscience, she saw plainly that by profiting by the crime of her niece she had been as culpable as if she had aided her in committing it. She had been very devout in former years, and now her superstitious fears were reawakened and intensified. Her faith returned, accompanied by a cortege of terrors.
“I am lost!” she cried; “I am lost!”
She tossed to and fro upon her bed; she writhed and shrieked as if she already saw hell opening to engulf her.
She called upon the Holy Virgin and upon all the saints to protect her. She entreated God to grant her time for repentance and for expiation. She begged to see a priest, swearing she would make a full confession.
Paler than the dying woman, but implacable, Blanche watched over her, aided by that one of her personal attendants in whom she had most confidence.
“If this lasts long, I shall be ruined,” she thought. “I shall be obliged to call for assistance, and she will betray me.”
It did not last long.
The patient’s delirium was succeeded by such utter prostration that it seemed each moment would be her last.
But toward midnight she appeared to revive a little, and in a voice of intense feeling, she said:
“You have had no pity, Blanche. You have deprived me of all hope in the life to come. God will punish you. You, too, shall die like a dog; alone, without a word of Christian counsel or encouragement. I curse you!”
And she died just as the clock was striking two.
The time when Blanche would have given almost anything to know that Aunt Medea was beneath the sod, had long since passed.
Now, the death of the poor old woman affected her deeply.
She had lost an accomplice who had often consoled her, and she had gained nothing, since one of her maids was now acquainted with the secret of the crime at the Borderie.
Everyone who was intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Sairmeuse, noticed her dejection, and was astonished by it.
“Is it not strange,” remarked her friends, “that the duchess—such a very superior woman—should grieve so much for that absurd relative of hers?”
But the dejection of Mme. Blanche was due in great measure to the sinister prophecies of the accomplice to whom she had denied the last consolations of religion.
And as her mind reviewed the past she shuddered, as the peasants at Sairmeuse had done, when she thought of the fatality which had pursued the shedders of innocent blood.
What misfortune had attended them all—from the sons of Chupin, the miserable traitor, up to her father, the Marquis de Courtornieu, whose mind had not been illumined by the least gleam of reason for ten long years before his death.
“My turn will come!” she thought.
The Baron and the Baroness d’Escorval, and old Corporal Bavois had departed this life within a month of each other, the previous year, mourned by all.
So that of all the people of diverse condition who had been connected with the troubles at Montaignac, Blanche knew only four who were still alive.
Maurice d’Escorval, who had entered the magistracy, and was now a judge in the tribunal of the Seine; Abbe Midon, who had come to Paris with Maurice, and Martial and herself.
There was another person, the bare recollection of whom made her tremble, and whose name she dared not utter.
Jean Lacheneur, Marie-Anne’s brother.
An inward voice, more powerful than reason, told her that this implacable enemy was still alive, watching for his hour of vengeance.
More troubled by her presentiments now, than she had been by Chupin’s persecutions in days gone by, Mme. de Sairmeuse decided to apply to Chelteux in order to ascertain, if possible, what she had to expect.
Fouche’s former agent had not wavered in his devotion to the duchess. Every three months he presented his bill, which was paid without discussion; and to ease his conscience, he sent one of his men to prowl around Sairmeuse for a while, at least once a year.
Animated by the hope of a magnificent reward, the spy promised his client, and—what was more to the purpose—promised himself, that he would discover this dreaded enemy.
He started in quest of him, and had already begun to collect proofs of Jean’s existence, when his investigations were abruptly terminated.
One morning the body of a man literally hacked in pieces was found in an old well. It was the body of Chelteux.
“A fitting close to the career of such a wretch,” said the Journal des Debats, in noting the event.
When she read this news, Mme. Blanche felt as a culprit would feel on reading his death-warrant.
“The end is near,” she murmured. “Lacheneur is coming!”
The duchess was not mistaken.
Jean had told the truth when he declared that he was not disposing of his sister’s estate for his own benefit. In his opinion, Marie-Anne’s fortune must be consecrated to one sacred purpose; he would not divert the slightest portion of it to his individual needs.
He was absolutely penniless when the manager of a travelling theatrical company engaged him for a consideration of forty-five francs per month.
From that day he lived the precarious life of a strolling player. He was poorly paid, and often reduced to abject poverty by lack of engagements, or by the impecuniosity of managers.
His hatred had lost none of its virulence; but to wreak the desired vengeance upon his enemy, he must have time and money at his disposal.
But how could he accumulate money when he was often too poor to appease his hunger?
Still he did not renounce his hopes. His was a rancor which was only intensified by years. He was biding his time while he watched from the depths of his misery the brilliant fortunes of the house of Sairmeuse.
He had waited sixteen years, when one of his friends procured him an engagement in Russia.
The engagement was nothing; but the poor comedian was afterward fortunate enough to obtain an interest in a theatrical enterprise, from which he realized a fortune of one hundred thousand francs in less than six years.
“Now,” said he, “I can give up this life. I am rich enough, now, to begin the warfare.”
And six weeks later he arrived in his native village.
Before carrying any of his atrocious designs into execution, he went to Sairmeuse to visit Marie-Anne’s grave, in order to obtain there an increase of animosity, as well as the relentless sang-froid of a stern avenger of crime.
That was his only motive in going, but, on the very evening of his arrival, he learned through a garrulous old peasant woman that ever since his departure—that is to say, for a period of twenty years—two parties had been making persistent inquiries for a child which had been placed somewhere in the neighborhood.
Jean knew that it was Marie-Anne’s child they were seeking. Why they had not succeeded in finding it, he knew equally well.
But why were there two persons seeking the child? One was Maurice d’Escorval, of course, but who was the other?
Instead of remaining at Sairmeuse a week, Jean Lacheneur tarried there a month; and by the expiration of that month he had traced these inquiries concerning the child to the agent of Chelteux. Through him, he reached Fouche’s former spy; and, finally, succeeded in discovering that the search had been instituted by no less a person than the Duchesse de Sairmeuse.
This discovery bewildered him. How could Mme. Blanche have known that Marie-Anne had given birth to a child; and knowing it, what possible interest could she have had in finding it?
These two questions tormented Jean’s mind continually; but he could discover no satisfactory answer.
“Chupin’s son could tell me, perhaps,” he thought. “I must pretend to be reconciled to the sons of the wretch who betrayed my father.”
But the traitor’s children had been dead for several years, and after a long search, Jean found only the Widow Chupin and her son, Polyte.
They were keeping a drinking-saloon not far from the Chateau-des-Rentiers; and their establishment, known as the Poivriere, bore anything but an enviable reputation.
Lacheneur questioned the widow and her son in vain; they could give him no information whatever on the subject. He told them his name, but even this did not awaken the slightest recollection in their minds.
Jean was about to take his departure when Mother Chupin, probably in the hope of extracting a few pennies, began to deplore her present misery, which was, she declared, all the harder to bear since she had wanted for nothing during the life of her poor husband, who had always obtained as much money as he wanted from a lady of high degree—the Duchesse de Sairmeuse, in short.
Lacheneur uttered such a terrible oath that the old woman and her son started back in affright.
He saw at once the close connection between the researches of Mme. Blanche and her generosity to Chupin.
“It was she who poisoned Marie-Anne,” he said to himself. “It was through my sister that she became aware of the existence of the child. She loaded Chupin with favors because he knew the crime she had committed—that crime in which his father had been only an accomplice.”
He remembered Martial’s oath at the bedside of the murdered girl, and his heart overflowed with savage exultation. He saw his two enemies, the last of the Sairmeuse and the last of the Courtornieu take in their own hands his work of vengeance.
But this was mere conjecture; he desired to be assured of the correctness of his suppositions.
He drew from his pocket a handful of gold, and, throwing it upon the table, he said:
“I am very rich; if you will obey me and keep my secret, your fortune is made.”
A shrill cry of delight from mother and son outweighed any protestations of obedience.
The Widow Chupin knew how to write, and Lacheneur dictated this letter:
“Madame la Duchesse—I shall expect you at my establishment to-morrow between twelve and four o’clock. It is on business connected with the Borderie. If at five o’clock I have not seen you, I shall carry to the post a letter for the duke.”
“And if she comes what am I to say to her?” asked the astonished widow.
“Nothing; you will merely ask her for money.”
“If she comes, it is as I have guessed,” he reflected.
She came.
Hidden in the loft of the Poivriere, Jean, through an opening in the floor, saw the duchess give a banknote to Mother Chupin.
“Now, she is in my power!” he thought exultantly. “Through what sloughs of degradation will I drag her before I deliver her up to her husband’s vengeance!”
A few lines of the article consecrated to Martial de Sairmeuse in the “General Biography of the Men of the Century,” give the history of his life after his marriage.
“Martial de Sairmeuse,” it says there, “brought to the service of his party a brilliant intellect and admirable endowments. Called to the front at the moment when political strife was raging with the utmost violence, he had courage to assume the sole responsibility of the most extreme measures.
“Compelled by almost universal opprobrium to retire from office, he left behind him animosities which will be extinguished only with life.”
But what this article does not state is this: if Martial was wrong—and that depends entirely upon the point of view from which his conduct is regarded—he was doubly wrong, since he was not possessed of those ardent convictions verging upon fanaticism which make men fools, heroes, and martyrs.
He was not even ambitious.
Those associated with him, witnessing his passionate struggle and his unceasing activity, thought him actuated by an insatiable thirst for power.
He cared little or nothing for it. He considered its burdens heavy; its compensations small. His pride was too lofty to feel any satisfaction in the applause that delights the vain, and flattery disgusted him. Often, in his princely drawing-rooms, during some brilliant fete, his acquaintances noticed a shade of gloom steal over his features, and seeing him thus thoughtful and preoccupied, they respectfully refrained from disturbing him.
“His mind is occupied with momentous questions,” they thought. “Who can tell what important decisions may result from this revery?”
They were mistaken.
At the very moment when his brilliant success made his rivals pale with envy—when it would seem that he had nothing left to wish for in this world, Martial was saying to himself:
“What an empty life! What weariness and vexation of spirit! To live for others—what a mockery!”
He looked at his wife, radiant in her beauty, worshipped like a queen, and he sighed.
He thought of her who was dead—Marie-Anne—the only woman whom he had ever loved.
She was never absent from his mind. After all these years he saw her yet, cold, rigid, lifeless, in that luxurious room at the Borderie; and time, far from effacing the image of the fair girl who had won his youthful heart, made it still more radiant and endowed his lost idol with almost superhuman grace of person and of character.
If fate had but given him Marie-Anne for his wife! He said this to himself again and again, picturing the exquisite happiness which a life with her would have afforded him.
They would have remained at Sairmeuse. They would have had lovely children playing around them! He would not be condemned to this continual warfare—to this hollow, unsatisfying, restless life.
The truly happy are not those who parade their satisfaction and good fortune before the eyes of the multitude. The truly happy hide themselves from the curious gaze, and they are right; happiness is almost a crime.
So thought Martial; and he, the great statesman, often said to himself, in a sort of rage:
“To love, and to be loved—that is everything! All else is vanity.”
He had really tried to love his wife; he had done his best to rekindle the admiration with which she had inspired him at their first meeting. He had not succeeded.
Between them there seemed to be a wall of ice which nothing could melt, and which was constantly increasing in height and thickness.
“Why is it?” he wondered, again and again. “It is incomprehensible. There are days when I could swear that she loved me. Her character, formerly so irritable, is entirely changed; she is gentleness itself.”
But he could not conquer his aversion; it was stronger than his own will.
These unavailing regrets, and the disappointments and sorrow that preyed upon him, undoubtedly aggravated the bitterness and severity of Martial’s policy.
But he, at least, knew how to fall nobly.
He passed, without even a change of countenance, from almost omnipotence to a position so compromising that his very life was endangered.
On seeing his ante-chambers, formerly thronged with flatterers and office-seekers, empty and deserted, he laughed, and his laugh was unaffected.
“The ship is sinking,” said he; “the rats have deserted it.”
He did not even pale when the noisy crowd came to hoot and curse and hurl stones at his windows; and when Otto, his faithful valet de chambre, entreated him to assume a disguise and make his escape through the gardens, he responded:
“By no means! I am simply odious; I do not wish to become ridiculous!”
They could not even dissuade him from going to a window and looking down upon the rabble in the street below.
A singular idea had just occurred to him.
“If Jean Lacheneur is still alive,” he thought, “how much he would enjoy this! And if he is alive, he is undoubtedly there in the foremost rank, urging on the crowd.”
And he wished to see.
But Jean Lacheneur was in Russia at that epoch. The excitement subsided; the Hotel de Sairmeuse was not seriously threatened. Still Martial realized that it would be better for him to go away for a while, and allow people to forget him.
He did not ask the duchess to accompany him.
“The fault has been mine entirely,” he said to her, “and to make you suffer for it by condemning you to exile would be unjust. Remain here; I think it will be much better for you to remain here.”
She did not offer to go with him. It would have been a pleasure to her, but she dared not leave Paris. She knew that she must remain in order to insure the silence of her persecutors. Both times she had left Paris before, all came near being discovered, and yet she had Aunt Medea, then, to take her place.
Martial went away, accompanied only by his devoted servant, Otto. In intelligence, this man was decidedly superior to his position; he possessed an independent fortune, and he had a hundred reasons—one, by the way, was a very pretty one—for desiring to remain in Paris; but his master was in trouble, and he did not hesitate.
For four years the Duc de Sairmeuse wandered over Europe, ever accompanied by his ennui and his dejection, and chafing beneath the burden of a life no longer animated by interest or sustained by hope.
He remained awhile in London, then he went to Vienna, afterward to Venice. One day he was seized by an irresistible desire to see Paris again, and he returned.
It was not a very prudent step, perhaps. His bitterest enemies—personal enemies, whom he had mortally offended and persecuted—were in power; but he did not hesitate. Besides, how could they injure him, since he had no favors to ask, no cravings of ambition to satisfy?
The exile which had weighed so heavily upon him, the sorrow, the disappointments and loneliness he had endured had softened his nature and inclined his heart to tenderness; and he returned firmly resolved to overcome his aversion to his wife, and seek a reconciliation.
“Old age is approaching,” he thought. “If I have not a beloved wife at my fireside, I may at least have a friend.”
His manner toward her, on his return, astonished Mme. Blanche. She almost believed she saw again the Martial of the little blue salon at Courtornieu; but the realization of her cherished dream was now only another torture added to all the others.
Martial was striving to carry his plan into execution, when the following laconic epistle came to him one day through the post:
“Monsieur le Duc—I, if I were in your place, would watch my wife.”
It was only an anonymous letter, but Martial’s blood mounted to his forehead.
“Can it be that she has a lover?” he thought.
Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage, he said to himself:
“And if she has, have I any right to complain? Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?”
He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling circumstances which so often decide a man’s destiny.
He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven o’clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly dressed—entirely in black—but her whole appearance was strikingly that of the duchess.
“It is certainly my wife; but why is she dressed in such a fashion?” he thought.
Had he been on foot he would certainly have entered the house; as it was, he slowly followed Mme. Blanche, who was going up the Rue Grenelle. She walked very quickly, and without turning her head, and kept her face persistently shrouded in a very thick veil.
When she reached the Rue Taranne, she threw herself into one of the fiacres at the carriage-stand.
The coachman came to the door to speak to her; then nimbly sprang upon the box, and gave his bony horses one of those cuts of the whip that announce a princely pourboire.
The carriage had already turned the corner of the Rue du Dragon, and Martial, ashamed and irresolute, had not moved from the place where he had stopped his horse, just around the corner of the Rue Saint Pares.
Not daring to admit his suspicions, he tried to deceive himself.
“Nonsense!” he thought, giving the reins to his horse, “what do I risk in advancing? The carriage is a long way off by this time, and I shall not overtake it.”
He did overtake it, however, on reaching the intersection of the Croix-Rouge, where there was, as usual, a crowd of vehicles.
It was the same fiacre; Martial recognized it by its green body, and its wheels striped with white.
Emerging from the crowd of carriages, the driver whipped up his horses, and it was at a gallop that they flew up the Rue du Vieux Columbier—the narrowest street that borders the Place Saint Sulpice—and gained the outer boulevards.
Martial’s thoughts were busy as he trotted along about a hundred yards behind the vehicle.
“She is in a terrible hurry,” he said to himself. “This, however, is scarcely the quarter for a lover’s rendezvous.”
The carriage had passed the Place d’Italie. It entered the Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers and soon paused before a tract of unoccupied ground.
The door was at once opened, and the Duchesse de Sairmeuse hastily alighted.
Without stopping to look to the right or to the left, she hurried across the open space.
A man, by no means prepossessing in appearance, with a long beard, and with a pipe in his mouth, and clad in a workman’s blouse, was seated upon a large block of stone not far off.
“Will you hold my horse a moment?” inquired Martial.
“Certainly,” answered the man.
Had Martial been less preoccupied, his suspicions might have been aroused by the malicious smile that curved the man’s lips; and had he examined his features closely, he would perhaps have recognized him.
For it was Jean Lacheneur.
Since addressing that anonymous letter to the Duc de Sairmeuse, he had made the duchess multiply her visits to the Widow Chupin; and each time he had watched for her coming.
“So, if her husband decides to follow her I shall know it,” he thought.
It was indispensable for the success of his plans that Mme. Blanche should be watched by her husband.
For Jean Lacheneur had decided upon his course. From a thousand schemes for revenge he had chosen the most frightful and ignoble that a brain maddened and enfevered by hatred could possibly conceive.
He longed to see the haughty Duchesse de Sairmeuse subjected to the vilest ignominy, Martial in the hands of the lowest of the low. He pictured a bloody struggle in this miserable den; the sudden arrival of the police, summoned by himself, who would arrest all the parties indiscriminately. He gloated over the thought of a trial in which the crime committed at the Borderie would be brought to light; he saw the duke and the duchess in prison, and the great names of Sairmeuse and of Courtornieu shrouded in eternal disgrace.
And he believed that nothing was wanting to insure the success of his plans. He had at his disposal two miserable wretches who were capable of any crime; and an unfortunate youth named Gustave, made his willing slave by poverty and cowardice, was intended to play the part of Marie-Anne’s son.
These three accomplices had no suspicion of his real intentions. As for the Widow Chupin and her son, if they suspected some infamous plot, the name of the duchess was all they really knew in regard to it. Moreover, Jean held Polyte and his mother completely under his control by the wealth which he had promised them if they served him docilely.
And if Martial followed his wife into the Poivriere, Jean had so arranged matters that the duke would at first suppose that she had been led there by charity.
“But he will not go in,” thought Lacheneur, whose heart throbbed wildly with sinister joy as he held Martial’s horse. “Monsieur le Duc is too fine for that.”
And Martial did not go in. Though he was horrified when he saw his wife enter that vile den, as if she were at home there, he said to himself that he should learn nothing by following her.
He, therefore, contented himself by making a thorough examination of the outside of the house; then, remounting his horse, he departed on a gallop. He was completely mystified; he did not know what to think, what to imagine, what to believe.
But he was fully resolved to fathom this mystery and as soon as he returned home he sent Otto out in search of information. He could confide everything to this devoted servant; he had no secrets from him.
About four o’clock his faithful valet de chambre returned, an expression of profound consternation visible upon his countenance.
“What is it?” asked Martial, divining some great misfortune.
“Ah, sir, the mistress of that wretched den is the widow of Chupin’s son——”
Martial’s face became as white as his linen.
He knew life too well not to understand that since the duchess had been compelled to submit to the power of these people, they must be masters of some secret which she was willing to make any sacrifice to preserve. But what secret?
The years which had silvered Martial’s hair, had not cooled the ardor of his blood. He was, as he had always been, a man of impulses.
He rushed to his wife’s apartments.
“Madame has just gone down to receive the Countess de Mussidan and the Marquise d’Arlange,” said the maid.
“Very well; I will wait for her here. Retire.”
And Martial entered the chamber of Mme. Blanche.
The room was in disorder, for the duchess, after returning from the Poivriere, was still engaged in her toilet when the visitors were announced.
The wardrobe-doors were open, the chairs were encumbered with wearing apparel, the articles which Mme. Blanche used daily—her watch, her purse, and several bunches of keys—were lying upon the dressing-table and mantel.
Martial did not sit down. His self-possession was returning.
“No folly,” he thought, “if I question her, I shall learn nothing. I must be silent and watchful.”
He was about to retire, when, on glancing about the room, his eyes fell upon a large casket, inlaid with silver, which had belonged to his wife ever since she was a young girl, and which accompanied her everywhere.
“That, doubtless, holds the solution of the mystery,” he said to himself.
It was one of those moments when a man obeys the dictates of passion without pausing to reflect. He saw the keys upon the mantel; he seized them, and endeavored to find one that would fit the lock of the casket. The fourth key opened it. It was full of papers.
With feverish haste, Martial examined the contents. He had thrown aside several unimportant letters, when he came to a bill that read as follows:
“Search for the child of Madame de Sairmeuse. Expenses for the third quarter of the year 18—.”
Martial’s brain reeled.
A child! His wife had a child!
He read on: “For services of two agents at Sairmeuse, ——. For expenses attending my own journey, ——. Divers gratuities, ——. Etc., etc.” The total amounted to six thousand francs. The bill was signed “Chelteux.”
With a sort of cold rage, Martial continued his examination of the contents of the casket, and found a note written in a miserable hand, that said: “Two thousand francs this evening, or I will tell the duke the history of the affair at the Borderie.” Then several more bills from Chelteux; then a letter from Aunt Medea in which she spoke of prison and of remorse. And finally, at the bottom of the casket, he found the marriage-certificate of Marie-Anne Lacheneur and Maurice d’Escorval, drawn up by the Cure of Vigano and signed by the old physician and Corporal Bavois.
The truth was as clear as daylight.
Stunned, frozen with horror, Martial scarcely had strength to return the letters to the casket and restore it to its place.
Then he tottered back to his own room, clinging to the walls for support.
“It was she who murdered Marie-Anne,” he murmured.
He was confounded, terror-stricken by the perfidy and baseness of this woman who was his wife—by her criminal audacity, by her cool calculation and assurance, by her marvellous powers of dissimulation.
He swore he would discover all, either through the duchess or through the Widow Chupin; and he ordered Otto to procure a costume for him such as was generally worn by the habitues of the Poivriere. He did not know how soon he might have use for it.
This happened early in February, and from that moment Mme. Blanche did not take a single step without being watched. Not a letter reached her that her husband had not previously read.
And she had not the slightest suspicion of the constant espionage to which she was subjected.
Martial did not leave his room; he pretended to be ill. To meet his wife and be silent, was beyond his powers. He remembered the oath of vengeance which he had pronounced over Marie-Anne’s lifeless form too well.
But there were no new revelations, and for this reason: Polyte Chupin had been arrested under charge of theft, and this accident caused a delay in the execution of Lacheneur’s plans. But, at last, he judged that all would be in readiness on the 20th of February, Shrove Sunday.
The evening before the Widow Chupin, in conformance with his instructions, wrote to the duchess that she must come to the Poivriere Sunday evening at eleven o’clock.
On that same evening Jean was to meet his accomplices at a ball at the Rainbow—a public-house bearing a very unenviable reputation—and give them their last instructions.
These accomplices were to open the scene; he was to appear only in the denouement.
“All is well arranged; the mechanism will work of its own accord,” he said to himself.
But the “mechanism,” as he styled it, failed to work.
Mme. Blanche, on receiving the Widow Chupin’s summons, revolted for a moment. The lateness of the hour, the isolation of the spot designated, frightened her.
But she was obliged to submit, and on the appointed evening she furtively left the house, accompanied by Camille, the same servant who had witnessed Aunt Medea’s last agony.
The duchess and her maid were attired like women of the very lowest order, and felt no fear of being seen or recognized.
And yet a man was watching them, and he quickly followed them. It was Martial.
Knowing of this rendezvous even before his wife, he had disguised himself in the costume Otto had procured for him, which was that of a laborer about the quays; and, as he was a man who did perfectly whatever he attempted to do, he had succeeded in rendering himself unrecognizable. His hair and beard were rough and matted; his hands were soiled and grimed with dirt; he was really the abject wretch whose rags he wore.
Otto had begged to be allowed to accompany him; but the duke refused, saying that the revolver which he would take with him would be sufficient protection. He knew Otto well enough, however, to be certain he would disobey him.
Ten o’clock was sounding when Mme. Blanche and Camille left the house, and it did not take them five minutes to reach the Rue Taranne.
There was one fiacre on the stand—one only.
They entered it and it drove away.
This circumstance drew from Martial an oath worthy of his costume. Then he reflected that, since he knew where to find his wife, a slight delay in finding a carriage did not matter.
He soon obtained one; and the coachman, thanks to a pourboire of ten francs, drove to the Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers as fast as his horses could go.
But the duke had scarcely set foot on the ground before he heard the rumbling of another carriage which stopped abruptly at a little distance.
“Otto is evidently following me,” he thought.
And he started across the open space in the direction of the Poivriere.
Gloom and silence prevailed on every side, and were made still more oppressive by a chill fog that heralded an approaching thaw. Martial stumbled and slipped at almost every step upon the rough, snow-covered ground.
It was not long before he could distinguish a dark mass in the midst of the fog. It was the Poivriere. The light within filtered through the heart-shaped openings in the blinds, looking at a distance like lurid eyes gleaming in the darkness.
Could it really be possible that the Duchesse de Sairmeuse was there!
Martial cautiously approached the window, and clinging to the hinges of one of the shutters, he lifted himself up so he could peer through the opening.
Yes, his wife was indeed there in that vile den.
She and Camille were seated at a table before a large punch-bowl, and in company with two ragged, leering scoundrels, and a soldier, quite youthful in appearance.
In the centre of the room stood the Widow Chupin, with a small glass in her hand, talking volubly and punctuating her sentences by copious draughts of brandy.
The impression produced upon Martial was so terrible that his hold relaxed and he dropped to the ground.
A ray of pity penetrated his soul, for he vaguely realized the frightful suffering which had been the chastisement of the murderess.
But he desired another glance at the interior of the hovel, and he again lifted himself up to the opening and looked in.
The old woman had disappeared; the young soldier had risen from the table and was talking and gesticulating earnestly. Mme. Blanche and Camille were listening to him with the closest attention.
The two men who were sitting face to face, with their elbows upon the table, were looking at each other; and Martial saw them exchange a significant glance.
He was not wrong. The scoundrels were plotting “a rich haul.”
Mme. Blanche, who had dressed herself with such care, that to render her disguise perfect she had encased her feet in large, coarse shoes that were almost killing her—Mme. Blanche had forgotten to remove her superb diamond ear-rings.
She had forgotten them, but Lacheneur’s accomplices had noticed them, and were now regarding them with eyes that glittered more brilliantly than the diamonds themselves.
While awaiting Lacheneur’s coming, these wretches, as had been agreed upon, were playing the part which he had imposed upon them. For this, and their assistance afterward, they were to receive a certain sum of money.
But they were thinking that this sum was not, perhaps, a quarter part of the value of these jewels, and they exchanged glances that said:
“Ah! if we could only get them and make our escape before Lacheneur comes!”
The temptation was too strong to be resisted.
One of them rose suddenly, and, seizing the duchess by the back of the neck, he forced her head down upon the table.
The diamonds would have been torn from the ears of Mme. Blanche had it not been for Camille, who bravely came to the aid of her mistress.
Martial could endure no more. He sprang to the door of the hovel, opened it, and entered, bolting it behind him.
“Martial!”
“Monsieur le Duc!”
These cries escaping the lips of Mme. Blanche and Camille in the same breath, changed the momentary stupor of their assailants into fury; and they both precipitated themselves upon Martial, determined to kill him.
With a spring to one side, Martial avoided them. He had his revolver in his hand; he fired twice and the wretches fell. But he was not yet safe, for the young soldier threw himself upon him, and attempted to disarm him.
Through all the furious struggle, Martial did not cease crying, in a panting voice:
“Fly! Blanche, fly! Otto is not far off. The name—save the honor of the name!”
The two women obeyed, making their escape through the back door, which opened upon the garden; and they had scarcely done so, before a violent knocking was heard at the front door.
The police were coming! This increased Martial’s frenzy; and with one supreme effort to free himself from his assailant, he gave him such a violent push that his adversary fell, striking his head against the corner of the table, after which he lay like one dead.
But the Widow Chupin, who had come downstairs on hearing the uproar, was shrieking upon the stairs. At the door someone was crying: “Open in the name of the law!”
Martial might have fled; but if he fled, the duchess might be captured, for he would certainly be pursued. He saw the peril at a glance, and his decision was made.
He shook the Widow Chupin violently by the arm, and said, in an imperious voice:
“If you know how to hold your tongue you shall have one hundred thousand francs.”
Then, drawing a table before the door opening into the adjoining room, he intrenched himself behind it as behind a rampart, and awaited the approach of the enemy.
The next moment the door was forced open, and a squad of police, under the command of Inspector Gevrol, entered the room.
“Surrender!” cried the inspector.
Martial did not move; his pistol was turned upon the intruder.
“If I can parley with them, and hold them in check only two minutes, all may yet be saved,” he thought.
He obtained the wished-for delay; then he threw his weapon to the ground, and was about to bound through the back-door, when a policeman, who had gone round to the rear of the house, seized him about the body, and threw him to the floor.
From this side he expected only assistance, so he cried:
“Lost! It is the Prussians who are coming!”
In the twinkling of an eye he was bound; and two hours later he was an inmate of the station-house at the Place d’Italie.
He had played his part so perfectly, that he had deceived even Gevrol. The other participants in the broil were dead, and he could rely upon the Widow Chupin. But he knew that the trap had been set for him by Jean Lacheneur; and he read a whole volume of suspicion in the eyes of the young officer who had cut off his retreat, and who was called Lecoq by his companions.