At that moment the shriek of the locomotive resounded. Immediately every pretense of waiting for the other train vanished. All three of them bolted for the exit to the garden. François rushed after them, bawling, “Your bill, Monsieur—the champagne—and the tip—” while the parrot, suddenly wakened from a nap, uttered a screech of demoniac laughter and began to yell after Papa Bouchard’s rapidly retreating figure:
“Bad boy Bouchard! bad boy Bouchard!”
Chapter III
ANYONE who saw Monsieur Bouchard a week after his adventures at the Pigeon House would have said that the excellent man had grown ten years older in that time. For he had endured more cares, anxieties, worries, vexations, apprehensions and palpitations in that one week in the Rue Bassano than in all his thirty years in the Rue Clarisse. Not that Monsieur Bouchard had the slightest desire to go back to his old life. Not at all. In the Rue Bassano he at least lived; in the Rue Clarisse he had merely vegetated.
In the first place, on his arrival at his apartment shortly after midnight on that fateful evening spent at Melun he had been unable to find out anything at all about Madame Vernet. The concierge had gone to bed when he got home, and he dared not disturb the whole house at that hour. He spent a sleepless night, with Pierre snoring peacefully in the next room. The fellow had not come home till two o’clock in the morning. Monsieur Bouchard utilized the watches of the night in making up a story to tell the concierge to account for the enquiries he meant to make concerning Madame Vernet. A concierge, he well knew, is the nearest approach to an omniscient being on this planet. It was comparatively easy to concoct a tale that would go on four legs, in the expressive phrase of his countrymen. Monsieur Bouchard was vastly pleased with his own shrewdness when he paused to think of the facility with which he invented his story. But to get it accepted at its face value—ah, that was another thing.
At six o’clock in the morning he tiptoed down stairs in his dressing gown and slippers. The concierge, yawning, was just opening the shutters in her little den.
“Can you tell me, my good woman,” said Monsieur Bouchard, in a manner calculated to allay any suspicions the concierge might have—if anything can allay the suspicions of a concierge—“whether Madame Vernet arrived here last night—in fact, if she is in the house at present? I ask because I promised her aunt and uncle out at Melun last evening to escort her in, and by some accident we became separated in the railway station, and I am considering what apology I shall make to her aunt and uncle—very worthy people at Melun.”
The concierge looked at poor Monsieur Bouchard, not with suspicion, but with certainty in her eye. The very expression of her face called him a liar and a villain, as she replied, coolly:
“Madame Vernet did come in last night and left the house at five o’clock this morning, to visit her aunt and uncle at Châlons.”
By which Monsieur Bouchard, who was no fool, found out three things: first, that Madame Vernet had been beforehand with the concierge; second, that Madame Vernet did not have an aunt and uncle at Châlons, although she seemed to have uncles and aunts in every town, village and hamlet in France; and third, that wherever she might be she certainly was not at Châlons.