She was mad.
As she passed the café door where we were talking she glanced at Monsieur Roche, laughed and went on.
“That is Marianne Ribot,” said the old fellow, craning his neck to look after her, “daughter of Jacques Ribot, who came here a great many years ago, served his sentence and settled down, marrying a Malay woman. He sold tobacco in the Rue Austerlitz; he had two daughters by the woman: Marianne, whom you have seen, and Cerise. Twins and like as two cherries. They were beauties. There is a curious thing about races, if you have ever noticed it, monsieur. To a Frenchman or an Englishman two, shall we say, Japanese women will look pretty much alike; but if there exists a real likeness between two eastern women, even though it is not very strong to their fellows, a Westerner will be unable to distinguish between them; he will be unable to distinguish the little differences that count so much. It was so with the Ribot girls. Would Monsieur like to hear their story?”
This is the story in my own words.
Some fifteen years ago the Hawk, a seven-hundred-ton brig, came into the harbor of Noumea with a general cargo from Brisbane; the second officer was a young fellow named Carstairs, an exceedingly good-looking individual with a taking manner and a way with him where women were concerned.
Monsieur Roche, who was a philosopher, or at least a restaurant keeper who had always kept his eyes open, gave it as his opinion that it were better for a man to be born ugly than very good-looking, and a boor than a fascinator; better for himself and for others. However that may be, Carstairs, on account of his superficial qualities, made many friends among the town people, and the cargo of the Hawk, being French government stores and discharged by convict labor, he had plenty of time on his hands. He did no harm; he neither drank nor gambled, and his main amusements seem to have been fishing, excursions into the country, dining at cheap restaurants and drinking grenadines with fat Frenchmen on Coconut Square of an evening while the convict band discoursed sweet music beneath the flame trees.
Then one day, wanting a packet of cigarettes, he turned into the Maison Ribot.
Ribot had died the year before and the two girls carried on the shop. They were excellent business women, despite their youth and beauty, and they sold other things besides cigarettes: colored syrups, pipes, tobacco pouches, postage stamps, books and native baskets made of palm leaves. Their only help was an old woman, Marie Rimbaut, who lived like a licossa in the darkness of the back premises, helping at times in the shop.
The woman was of that terrible type whose central nervous system would seem to be compounded of the end organs of observatory nerves and little more. She was a spy serving no master but Inquisitiveness, a creature with one interest, the doings of others and more especially of the Ribot sisters; a recording instrument; what she did not see she heard, what she did not hear she guessed. If a ferret were trained for the purpose there is not a village where it would not dig you out at least one specimen of this tribe more or less perfect. Marie Rimbaut was perfect; she saw and recorded the whole of the Ribot story without putting out a hand to warn the protagonists, content to watch till the first snip of the scissors of Atropos.