XXI
The Marquis Gaspard hitched about in his chair; and, as his body lay back in the deep cushions, I noticed, on either of the arms of gilded wood, a small withered hand, the desiccated skin of which, faultlessly manicured, was as glossy as ancient ivory. The Count François and the Vicomte Antoine, whether of their own accord or in imitation of their respective parent and grand-parent, relaxed into similar comfortable positions, their hands also, broader and less wasted, likewise resting on their carved chair-arms—which they quite encircled, what with fingers and palm. I could not help observing these details; for a clear, definite conviction mysteriously seized upon my mind that those talons, of such innocent and genteel exteriors, had their nails somehow buried in every part of my tortured flesh.
The marquis was again speaking: “Monsieur le capitaine, I consider you an intelligent man; and I will not do you the injustice of supposing for an instant that you have failed to divine the nature of the restriction which I have always been careful to introduce expressly into all my offers of service and hospitality. The time has come—believe me, I am more pained than you thereat—for us to touch more directly upon this restriction. As I have repeatedly assured you, Monsieur le capitaine, our house is wholly, entirely, absolutely at your disposal; but you will understand, knowing what you know, that you will never be allowed to depart from it. Everything here is yours for the asking, everything! Everything save one single thing: your freedom!
“In thus detaining you against your will, our sorrow, Monsieur le capitaine, knows no bounds, no bounds whatever. I say that in behalf of the three of us; for I know that the count here, and the vicomte, feel the same regret as I. But what else can we do? In our heart of hearts, we regard ourselves as absolutely not responsible for any of the consequences that may result from your visit to our abode. Chance, and your own—very pardonable—curiosity, are to blame. A thousand to one chance—and it went against you! It was your ridiculously unreasonable misfortune to have seen last evening something that no mortal man could be allowed to see: Madame de X.... on the Col de la Mort de Gauthier. But your bad luck did not end even there. In your rambling search for your lady, it was your second mischance to come dangerously near our refuge. From that point on we were helpless. Knowing, perhaps, that we exist, knowing perhaps where we live, knowing perhaps the kind of visits we are occasionally obliged to receive, you know far too much, Monsieur le capitaine; for the Secret preserves its efficacy only so long as it remains a Secret. It must, by nature, be the exclusive appanage of a few Living Men. Let the generality of Mortals even suspect its existence, and it is finished. Our Secret, you see, Monsieur, is an essentially aristocratic one. Its exercise presupposes the subservience of a great number of inferior creatures, who must endure labor, suffering and fatigue for the profit and welfare of a few master beings. I need not remind you that the humanitarian prejudices, the democratic sentimentality, of the present age would not take kindly to such a notion. Your politicians, who flatter and fawn on a vulgar demos more vilely than any of my comrades, the royal pages, ever courted the Roi Bien Aimé, would tear their hair in oratoric indignation if they ever discovered that for the past hundred and seventy-five years one man has been allowing himself to avoid death in defiance of all equalitarian principles. So much so, Monsieur le capitaine, that we three, among the most well-intentioned gentlemen in the Kingdom, as I boasted not long since, find ourselves obliged to hide like brigands in this out-of-the-way spot, and behind a labyrinth of boulders, precipices and thickets certain to keep all intruders away.
“In the circumstances, our embarrassment should not be hard to understand. You have happened on us, Monsieur le capitaine, much as a wasp might strike into a spider’s web, tearing everything to pieces. If you were left at liberty to return whence you came, carrying the shreds of our Secret in your pockets, it would be the jolly end of us, now would it not? I am speaking, as you well realize, without a trace of exaggeration.
“Consider a moment, Monsieur le capitaine! Try to imagine the prodigies of prudence and cunning we have had to perform, the limitless sacrifices we have had to make, to ensure our safety and our independence in the various countries where we have had to live. For one thing, we have always been moving from this place to that. The business of a Wandering Jew would be child’s play compared with our many flights and migrations. But the discomforts attendant on such things have been the least of our troubles. Monsieur le capitaine, when my master died, I was still a comparatively young man, and François here was a mere boy. His mother I had married twenty years before, in France—still young and beautiful she was, and as strict in her loyalty to her husband as conjugal happiness demands—neither too much nor too little, that is. I loved her dearly; and my great joy, at first, was to think of taking her along with me to share the new destiny I had in store. But then I reflected: was it wise, was it prudent, to entrust to a woman a Secret on the keeping of which depended whether I should come to be another Count de Saint Germain, and perhaps, indeed, an older and a more learned one? Could I stake, on a female’s discretion and wisdom, the outcome of a game to last for years and years, when winning would make us literally immortal, and a single uncautious word would spell certain ruin? Alas! You understand: I could not! I submitted accordingly, Monsieur le capitaine, to the torture of seeing the mother of my only child perish before my very eyes, while, all along, I could have preserved forever the smile of her lips and the sweetness of her caresses. Such a price the continuance of our lives as Living Men exacted. And twenty years thereafter, my son, in his turn, to prevent the Secret of Long Life from becoming entangled in skirts, sacrificed his wife. Such facts will enable you, Monsieur le capitaine, to estimate the value of this formidable knowledge, which we have preferred to two lives no less precious, you must admit, than your own. I have said two lives, with a view to a reasonable statistic. There may have been more. A few moments ago you saw how pale and weakened your friend, Madame de X...., appeared. It is no simple matter to give up some eight or ten pounds of living substance to another person.... Then, there are the accidents to take account of.... We have had such lamentable occurrences to regret, unfortunately ... though very few, very very few.... In any event, you can see that the ransom of our lives must be a heavy one, though a capricious Circumstance has decreed that others should pay it for us.... Alas, Monsieur le capitaine! You surely will not be surprised if it has fallen to you now to assume a portion of the cost....
“You must, in short, pay something; and I am certain I can rely, in such a matter, on your liberality as a gentleman of parts.... What puzzles me rather is the kind of currency that might be passed between us....”
At this point he broke off, and looked first at the one and then at the other of his two companions, who, first one and then the other, wagged their heads in doubt. A moment or so must thus have passed.
“Monsieur le capitaine,” the marquis suddenly resumed; “if we were living a hundred years earlier, in 1808 instead of 1908, our difficulties would be easily superable. For, I must tell you: this is not the first time we have been embarrassed by the inconvenient presence with us of an intruder—living or dead as the case may be. Forgive my using such a term for you; it is accurate, however seemingly discourteous. Yes, I remember, to mention only one such episode, a poor Neapolitan who, some eighty odd years ago, died in our house most inopportunely. We were living in Naples at the time. The police service of the Bourbons was a pretty ramshackle affair; none the less I was afraid of considerable annoyance, should it ever occur to the Gentlemen of the Guard to ask how that particular person happened to be found dead so far from his own home. I decided to anticipate any indiscrete inquisitiveness. A felucca from Malta happened to be lying in port. We went aboard long before any one in town could possibly have begun to work up interest in the death of that unfortunate man. The felucca set sail; and no one found any objection to raise against the departure of three kind-hearted old gentlemen noted for the promptness with which they paid their bills. From Malta we took another boat to Cadiz; and from Cadiz we went on to Seville, where we were sure no citizen of the Two Sicilies would ever suspect our presence.
“But nowadays, alas, the earth has become much smaller, and the telegraph, especially, has seriously complicated our manner of living. Take your case, Monsieur le capitaine. I have no doubt that in the course of the next few hours, any number of official dispatches will be sent out over all this region, broadcasting the news that you are missing and asking light on the mysterious failure of your mission. There is another difficulty. At the time of our settling here, I was obliged, through the obnoxious provisions of French law, to make a declaration before your magistrates, in order to acquire legal title to this homestead. So you see, the authorities know who I am; or at least they think they know who I am. You can rely upon it: if you were to drop out of sight, an army of detectives would come looking for you, and turn this house upside down from cellar to attic. You know that I am right. Well, there we are, in a blind alley as it were. We cannot let you go away, alive and free, as you came. Nor can we keep you here, a prisoner—or a corpse....”
Again he broke off. Then inclining his head slightly to one side, and pushing his lips forward into a grimace of amusement, he laughed once more in the same thin, high-pitched, crackling tone.
“I seem to note a movement of surprise in you,” he now continued. “I imagine you are thinking of your friend, Madame de X...., and you are objecting that she comes here, goes away, comes back again, and that others, doubtless, of our contributors do likewise without any untoward consequence resulting. And you are right. But do you suppose that she or any one of her co-workers knows the slightest thing about us and about what we are doing, that any one of them is in the least conscious of the philanthropic service he or she is rendering? Monsieur le capitaine, our disposition to solitude has always inclined us to choose very secluded spots for our abode in whatever neighborhood we are living. The road to our door is necessarily a long one, and our guests would have good reason to complain had we not, from the very outset, devised a means of sinking them into an hypnotic slumber which spares them all consciousness of fatigue. On such a system, for that matter, our security itself depends, as you can readily see. By virtue of it, we are able, whenever we set up our household for ten or twenty years in some hospitable region, to survey the inhabitants for their strongest and most robust members, to select, in the end, those who are freest and most independent in their habits and manner of living. These latter, only, become collaborators in our Secret. And may I, in this connection, reassure you, in case there should be some temptation to jealousy on your part: Madame de X.... was not chosen by us for her pretty eyes, though these may, I grant you, be the brightest pair in the world; but because she lives, for most of the time, quite apart from any relatives, and because her country house, situated at some distance from Toulon, requires frequent protracted absences from the city; and her occasional disappearances are not, therefore, likely to cause uneasiness in her husband or in any of her friends. I hope, now, Monsieur le capitaine, that your mind is at rest on that point....
“ ... as I wish mine were on the issue of your adventure! We have reached this conclusion in our talk thus far: that you cannot leave this place alive and free; on the other hand, you cannot remain here a prisoner, and much less a corpse. Oh, of course, we might conceivably take unfair advantage of the situation you are in, kill you, and carry your body to some place where no possible suspicion could fall upon us. But for all you may be thinking or may actually have said, we are not murderers, Monsieur le capitaine, nor anything resembling murderers. For that reason we shall not kill you, even were the temptation to do so to be very great indeed....
“Such being the case, our problem is to discover some way of not killing you ... a problem which I regard as difficult enough to merit consulting the views of each of us, yours included, Monsieur le capitaine!”
The marquis once more opened his snuff-box and offered a pinch first to the count and then to the vicomte. Then he helped himself; and this time he sneezed, voluptuously, into his handkerchief.