II
Fleurissoire did not utter a single cry. When he felt Lafcadio’s push and found himself facing the gulf which suddenly opened in front of him, he made a great sweep with his arm to save himself; his left hand clutched at the smooth framework of the door, while, as he half turned round, he flung his right well behind him and over Lafcadio’s head, sending his second cuff, which he had been in the act of putting on, spinning to the other end of the carriage, where it rolled underneath the seat.
Lafcadio felt a horrible claw descend upon the back of his neck, lowered his head and gave another push, more impatient than the first; this was followed by the sensation of nails scraping through his flesh; and after that, nothing was left for Fleurissoire to catch hold of but the beaver hat, which he snatched at despairingly and carried away with him in his fall.
“Now then, let’s keep cool,” said Lafcadio to himself. “I mustn’t slam the door to; they might hear it in the next carriage.”
He drew the door towards him, in the teeth of the wind, and then shut it quietly.
“He has left me his frightful sailor hat; in another minute I should have kicked it after him, but he has taken mine along with him and that’s enough. That was an excellent precaution of mine—cutting out my initials.... But there’s the hatter’s name in the crown, and people don’t order a beaver hat of that kind every day of the week.... It can’t be helped, I’ve played now.... Perhaps they’ll think it an accident.... No, not now that I’ve shut the door.... Stop the train?... Come, come, Cadio! no touching up! You’ve only yourself to thank.
“To prove now that I’m perfectly self-possessed, I shall begin by quite quietly seeing what that photograph is the old chap was examining just now.... Miramar! No desire at all to go and visit that.... It’s stifling in here.”
He opened the window.
“The old brute has scratched me ... I’m bleeding.... He has made me very ill. I must bathe it a little; the lavatory is at the end of the corridor, on the left. Let’s take another handkerchief.”
He reached down his portmanteau from the rack above him and opened it on the seat, in the place where he had been sitting.
“If I meet anyone in the corridor I must be calm.... No! my heart’s quiet again. Now for it!... Ah! his coat! I can easily hide it under mine. Papers in the pocket! Something to while away the time for the rest of the journey.”
The coat was a poor threadbare affair of a dingy liquorice colour, made of a harsh-textured and obviously cheap material; Lafcadio thought it slightly repulsive; he hung it up on a peg in the small lavatory into which he locked himself; then, bending over the basin, he began to examine himself in the glass.
There were two ugly furrows on his neck; one, a thin red streak, starting from the back of his neck, turned leftwards and came to an end just below the ear; the other and shorter one, was a deep scratch just above the first; it went straight up towards the ear, the lobe of which it had reached and slightly torn. It was bleeding, but less than might have been expected; on the other hand, the pain, which he had hardly felt at first, began to be pretty sharp. He dipped his handkerchief into the basin, staunched the blood and then washed the handkerchief. “Not enough to stain my collar,” thought he, as he put himself to rights; “all is well.”
He was on the point of going out; just then the engine whistled; a row of lights passed behind the frosted window-pane of the closet. Capua! The station was so close to the scene of the accident that the idea of jumping out, running back in the dark and getting his beaver back again, flashed, dazzling, on his mind. He regretted his hat, so soft and light and silky, at once so warm and so cool, so uncrushable, so discreetly elegant. But it was never his way to lend an undivided ear to his desires—nor to like yielding—even to himself. More than all, he hated indecision, and for ten years he had kept on him, like a fetish, one of a pair of cribbage dice, which Baldi had given him in days gone by; he never parted from it; it was there, in his waistcoat pocket.
“If I throw six,” he said to himself as he took it out, “I’ll get down.”
He threw five.
“I shall get down all the same. Quick, the victim’s coat!... Now for my portmanteau....”
He hurried to his compartment.
Ah! how futile seem all exclamations in face of the extravagance of fact! The more surprising the occurrence, the more simple shall be my manner of relating it. I will therefore say in plain words, merely this—when Lafcadio got back to his compartment, his portmanteau was gone!
He thought at first that he had made a mistake, and went out again into the corridor.... But no! It was the right place. There was the view of Miramar.... Well, then? He sprang to the window and could not believe his eyes. There, on the station platform, and not very far from his carriage, his portmanteau was calmly proceeding on its way in company of a strapping fellow who was carrying it off at a leisurely walk.
Lafcadio’s first instinct was to dash after him; as he put out his hand to open the door, the liquorice coat dropped on to the floor.
“Tut! tut! in another moment I should have put my foot in it.... All the same, that rascal would go a little quicker if he thought there was a chance of my coming after him. Can he have seen ...?”
At this moment, as he was leaning his head out of the carriage window, a drop of blood trickled down his cheek.
“Well! Good-bye to my portmanteau! It can’t be helped! The throw said I wasn’t to get out here. It was right.”
He shut the door and sat down again.
“There were no papers in my portmanteau and my linen isn’t marked. What are the risks?... No matter, I’d better sail as soon as possible; it’ll be a little less amusing perhaps, but a good deal wiser.”
In the meantime the train started again.
“It’s not so much my portmanteau that I regret as my beaver, which I really should have liked to retrieve. Well! let’s think no more about it.”
He filled another pipe, lit it, and then, plunging his hand into the inside pocket of Fleurissoire’s coat, pulled out: a letter from Arnica, a Cook’s ticket and a large yellow envelope, which he opened.
“Three, four, five, six thousand-franc notes! Of no interest to honest folk!”
He returned the notes to the envelope and the envelope to the coat pocket.
But when, a moment later, he examined the Cook’s ticket, Lafcadio’s brain whirled. On the first page was written the name of Julius de Baraglioul. “Am I going mad?” he asked himself. “What can he have had to do with Julius?... A stolen ticket?... No, not possible!... a borrowed ticket ... must be. Lord! Lord! Perhaps I’ve made a mess of it. These old gentlemen are sometimes better connected than one thinks....”
Then, his fingers trembling with eagerness, he opened Arnica’s letter. The circumstances seemed too strange; he found it difficult to fix his attention; he failed, no doubt, to make out the exact relationship existing between Julius and the old gentleman, but, at any rate, he managed to grasp that Julius was in Rome. His mind was made up at once; an urgent desire to see his brother possessed him—an unbridled curiosity to find out what kind of repercussion this affair would set up in that calm and logical mind.
“That’s settled. I shall sleep to-night at Naples, get out my trunk, and to-morrow morning return by the first train to Rome. It will certainly be a good deal less wise, but perhaps a little more amusing.”