Madame pursued her programme with indefatigable ardour and patience. She impressed again and again upon Rust's imagination a picture of herself sleeping unprotected, in a room not far distant from his own, while beneath her pillow reposed a paper precious and mysterious beyond words to describe. She even hinted that a dread of fire, from which she always suffered when sleeping at hotels, forbade the locking of her door. "I am not afraid to die," said she, "for what have I to bind me to life now that I can never visit the spot where repose the shattered fragments of my beloved Capitaine Guilbert? But to be burned, helpless, while rescue was cut off from me by a locked door! I shrink from so terrible a fate." Subtlety, she had discovered, was thrown away upon the obtuseness of Rust. She was compelled to be brutally plain, and so she drove into his thick head the tempting fact that nothing interposed during the hours of darkness between his eager hands and the paper which she had taught him to covet. If she awoke and mistook his motives—if she thought that he had ventured into her room with designs upon her honour—Rust felt sure that her kind heart would forgive him, by breakfast-time, though she would certainly dismiss him from her bedside with the most haughty of reproaches. If he could not find some other way before they separated for the night, he had almost decided to essay the venture. She slept very soundly, said Madame; she had not awakened in her appartement in Paris upon one night when a bomb from a Prussian aeroplane had exploded within two hundred yards of her house. Another way was still possible, and Rust, while he was dressing for dinner, determined to try it; it was a way, too, which thrilled him with pleasurable anticipation.
At dinner Madame declined champagne, which she said was a poor, feeble drink. Let them for once share a bottle of sparkling Burgundy, a royal wine, the Wine of Courage. The patron brought them the bottle himself, and lamented that they would not indulge themselves in a second. Madame had no desire that Rust should, under its influence, become too enterprising. The evening was warm, and afterwards they moved into the pleasant garden behind the hotel and sat together in a quiet corner. Other guests were in the garden, but it had become tacitly agreed among them that Madame and Rust—the "dear French things"—should be permitted to console one another in seclusion. No one could perceive that the black-sleeved arm of Rust had found a happy resting-place around Madame's black-covered waist, or that her glowing head was not far from his shoulder. Her Paris evening frock was cut low, though never by the fraction of an inch would Madame permit her couturier to exceed the limits of perfect taste. Looking down over her shoulder Rust could see, protruding from the white lace below her bodice, the corner of a paper. She talked little. It seemed to give her pleasure to lean against his shoulder and dreamily, half asleep, to rest there reposefully like a tired child. "But, mon ami" said Madame to me in relating these tender details with the greatest satisfaction, "I was very wide awake indeed."
Rust eyed that corner of paper and waited without speaking until his companion should become almost unconscious of his movements. Then gently he moved his right arm from her waist and placed it over her shoulder. She moved slightly, but it was only to nestle more closely against him. His dangling fingers moved little by little towards the opening of her corsage, they descended, and with his thumb and forefinger he gripped the paper. Madame did not move her body nor, to Rust, did she seem to suspect his intentions. But her right arm lifted slowly up, she gently grasped his hand in hers, pressed it kindly for a moment, and then, still holding it, removed his arm from her shoulder to her waist. "Your coat sleeve scratches my shoulder," she murmured. Rust, who had instantly released the paper when Madame took his hand, never again got an opportunity of touching it, for she kept her arm pressed over his during the whole time that they sat together. "I gave him the chance," explained Madame to me, "and it worked beautifully. But once was enough. From that moment I became really suspicious of Rust. Before I had only been puzzled. What he was I could not guess, but I was dead set on finding out before the night was over. Till then I had allowed only little freedoms, but when I rose to go into the hotel and he bent over me I let him kiss me on my lips. It was a severe disappointment, that kiss," added Madame contemplatively.
"Spare me the loathsome details," said I crossly.
When at last Madame Gilbert went to her room she was smiling gaily and showing no signs of fatigue at the tiresome exercises of the day. Though it was approaching midnight the faithful Marie was waiting to assist her toilet. "Ah, madame," sighed Marie in her frank Parisienne fashion, "le Capitaine is so beautiful and devoted. He regards you as one who would devour. I marvel that you have the heart to separate from him."
"Marie," said Madame, laughing, "you are a naughty girl, a corrupter of my youthful morals. I am afraid that le bon Capitaine must go hungry. For—" and then she pranced off upon that wearisome old story about the blown-up Territorial bore of le Grand Couronne. Fidelity to the scattered corpse of a husband—un mari assommant, mon Dieu, pas un amant joyeux!—seemed to Marie the most wasted of emotions. She, in common with all the other Frenchmen and women in the hotel, was an ardent partisan of Captain Rouille.
"If my bell rings in the night, come quickly, Marie," said Madame, as she dismissed the girl. "I shall need you a la grande vitesse."
Madame slipped the seductive paper and something else under her pillow, saw that the electric and the light switch were close to her hand upon the bedside table, and snuggled down contentedly. "The trap is set and baited," she murmured; "I hope that the bird will not keep me waiting."
An hour passed slowly. Rust has told me little of his feelings, but admitted that he was in the "devil of a funk." He had determined to make a daring shot at the paper and the solution of Madame's identity, but he shivered at the prospect of her wrath should she awake and catch him in the act. "She would have thought the worst of me, and, like you, Copplestone, I cherish her beautiful friendship as the most precious of privileges. On my honour I was only after the paper." Madame found the waiting time very tedious, but I am sure that her pulse did not quicken by a beat. She has a wonderful nerve.
At one o'clock, when the hotel was very quiet, and the boot-cleaner had made his round of collection, Madame heard the handle of her door move and the door itself push slowly open. Through her partly closed eyes she saw the momentary flash of an electric torch with which Rust took his bearings, and then she felt, rather than saw or heard, a figure draw gently towards her bed. Her right hand was under the pillow grasping that something, not the paper, which she had laid there in readiness. Rust approached, bent over her, and his fingers felt for the pillow. They touched her hair, and she knew that the moment for action had come. Out stretched her arm, holding the pistol well clear of his body, for she was loath to hurt him, and a sharp report within a couple of feet of his side frightened Rust more thoroughly than had the hottest of "crumps" in Flanders. He sprang away, and darted for the door; but in an instant the lights went up, and a loud, commanding voice—utterly unlike Madame's soft musical social tones—called to him to halt. "Halt!" cried Madame in English. "Right about turn! 'Shun!" The familiar words of command brought him round in prompt obedience, and there before him he saw Madame Gilbert sitting up in her bed, pointing a most business-like automatic pistol straight for his heart. Her hand held it true, without a quiver, and along the sights glittered an eye remorseless as blue steel. This was a woman wholly different from that kindly yielding creature whom he had embraced and kissed a couple of hours earlier!