“I was under the archway”—so ran those pitiful faint-spoken depositions—“when I saw an automobile stop quickly at the entrance in the dusk and rain. I moved to retreat; and instantly footsteps came following me, and a voice whispered close behind: ‘Mademoiselle Fréron, I think?’ I turned, and saw a man. His face was masked. I was too frightened to speak. And then suddenly there was a flash and shock, and another flash and shock, and everything went.”
Why was she in the archway at all? She had been nervous and restless because her friend, M. Dane, had not returned from a certain expedition, attested Madame Crussol, and had ventured out in her anxiety to look for him. She herself, ensconced in her logement, had not heard the stranger’s words: it was the sound of the double shot that had brought her hurrying out. Then she had seen the poor innocent’s body prostrate on the stones, and a man walking from it up the yard. He walked, very cool and deliberate, towards a lighted car that stood at the gate. She screamed; whereupon the man had turned, showing a masked face impossible to identify, and had pointed a pistol at her, terrifying her into silence. And in another moment he had jumped into the car and was gone.
But the reason why this girl had been deliberately, as it seemed, marked down for a victim to the prevailing Thuggism? Ah! that did not appear. There was something, said the police, of the nature of a vendetta in the methods of these bandits, and until its complications could be unravelled, its various provocations must be held only problematical. In the meantime all remained confusion and terror and perplexity. For me, I was content to let it rest at that, keeping to myself any theory I might have formulated as to a vengeance wreaked by a half-insane morphiomaniac, through vile emissaries quick to seize on opportunism, on the discovered head of a poor innocent instrument in his outwitting. There had been whispers of suspicious characters seen loafing in the neighbourhood some days before our return; there had been whispers——
But let it all pass. Theories are not evidence; nor was I interested in anything but the staring fact of my own desolation. A new Reign of Terror, and ten thousand decadent aristocrats chopped by the head in the Place de la Concorde, would not mend that inexorable fact. I was suffering only to shake free from all the inquiries, official and magisterial, that ensued—the siftings, the empty evidences, the procès verbals which left things after all precisely where they had started. It was known clearly at the end, and not much more was known, that I had been Mademoiselle Fréron’s friend and protector, and that I had been actually on my way to propose a formal emendation to that understanding, when the catastrophe occurred. The exposure, so to speak, was an acutely painful one to me—not because of its moral aspect, which from first to last to the Parisian was quite en règle, but because the inner holiness of our idyll seemed violated in the publicity it brought. But at last they set me free to go and suffer my utter loneliness unvexed; and with that and my memories I shut myself away.
CHAPTER XXIV
One day I was pacing my room in the restlessness that now seldom left me, when a knock sounded on my door; and, going irritably to open it, I saw my step-sister Marion. She looked at me and I at her for a full minute before either of us spoke; then “May I come in, Felix?” she said in a low voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You may come or you may go,” I said. “It is all one to me.”
I turned from her, and she closed the door and followed me. In the studio she sat down, while I continued my wild-beast pacing.
“You are not looking well,” she said suddenly.
“What does that matter—to you or any one?” I answered, and came to a quick stop before her. “Did you really call to enquire after my health?”