“Conspiracy requireth a ready wit—and a readier exit.”
—Francis Gallup.
HE Marquis de la Carrabasse, secretary of the U. D. T.
League, and known in their circles as F. II, enters this history so near its end that I shall not stop to give a prolonged account of him. Yet he was a person so remarkable as to merit a few words of description. The inheritor of an ancient title, but little money; a Royalist to the point of fanaticism; a man of wide culture and many ideas, and of the most perfect simplicity of character and honesty of purpose, he had devoted his whole life to the restoration of the monarchy, alternated during lulls in the political weather by an equally feverish zeal for scientific inventions of the most ambitious nature. Yet, owing to the excess of his enthusiasm and fertility of mind over the more prosaic qualities that should regulate them, practical success had hitherto eluded this talented nobleman. His flying-machines had only once risen into the element for which they were intended, and then the subsequent descent had been so precipitate as to incapacitate the inventor for a month. His submarine vessel still reposed at the bottom of the Mediterranean, and the last I heard of his dynamite gun was that the fragments were to be found anywhere within a radius of three miles around its first discharge. As to his merits as a conspirator, my exile bears witness.
Yet he was a man for whom I could not but entertain a lively affection. Of medium height and slender figure, he had a large, well-shaped nose, a black mustache tinged with gray, whose vigorously upward curl had a deceptively truculent air at first sight, and a splendid dark eye, at times piercing and bright and at others dreamy as the eye of a somnambulist. Add to this a manner naturally courteous and simple, which, however, he was in the habit of artificially altering to one of decision and mystery, when he thought the rôle he was playing suited this transfiguration, and you have the Marquis de la Carrabasse, so far as I can sketch him.
We had only just seated ourselves in my room, when Halfred entered beaming with pleasure at the prospect of seeing me again.
“'Appy to see you back, sir,” he began, joyfully.