An interminable drive!—the whole length of the Avenue de la Grande-Armée and the Avenue de Neuilly, past the Seine and the Rond Pont de Courbevoie, until at last turning to the left into the wide and villainously paved road that leads to Rueil, Bougival, and St. Germain, the driver and David between them with difficulty discovered a side street which answered to the name Dora had several times given.
They had reached one of the most squalid parts of the western banlieue. Houses half built and deserted in the middle, perhaps by some bankrupt builder; small traders, bakers, charcutiers, fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures of lath and plaster, just run up and already crumbling; cabarets of the roughest and meanest kind, adorned with high-sounding devices,—David mechanically noticed one which had blazoned on its stained and peeling front, A la renaissance du Phénix;—heaps of rubbish and garbage with sickly children playing among them; here and there some small, ill-smelling factory; a few melancholy shrubs in new-made gardens, drooping and festering under a cruel sun in a scorched and unclean soil:—the place repelled and outraged every sense. Was it here that little Cecile had passed from a life of pain to a death of torture?
He rang at a sinister and all but windowless house, which he was able to identify from Dora's directions. John opened to him, and in a little room to the right, which looked on to a rank bit of neglected garden, he found Dora. A woman, with a scowling brow and greedy mouth, disappeared into the back premises as he entered.
Dora and he clasped hands. Then the sight of his face broke down even her long-practised self-control, and she laid her head down on the table and sobbed. But he showed little emotion; while John, standing shyly on the other side of the room, and the weeping Dora could hardly find words to tell their own story, so overwhelmed were they by those indelible signs upon him of all that he had gone through.
He asked them rapidly a number of questions.
In the first place Dora explained that she and John were engaged in putting together whatever poor possessions the house contained of a personal kind, that they might not either be seized for debt, or fall into the claws of the old bonne, a woman of the lowest type, who had already plundered all she could. As to the wretched husband, very little information was forthcoming. John believed that he had been removed to the hospital in a state of alcoholic paralysis the very week that Cecile was taken ill; at any rate he had made no sign.
The rest of the story which Dora had to tell may be supplemented by a few details which were either unknown to his informants, or remained unknown to David.
Louie, on her return to Paris with David's hundred pounds, had promptly staked the greater part of it in certain Bourse speculations. She was quite as sorely in need of money as she had professed to be while in Manchester, but for more reasons than one, as David had uncomfortably suspected. Not only did her husband strip her of anything he could lay hands on, but a certain fair-haired Alsatian artist a good deal younger than herself had for some months been preying upon her. What his hold upon her precisely was, Father Lenoir, her director, when David went to see him, either could not or—because the matter was covered by the confessional seal—would not say. The artist, Brenart by name, was a handsome youth, with a droll facile tongue, and a recklessness of temper matching her own. He became first known to her as one of her husband's drinking companions, then, dazzled by the wife's mad beauty, he began to haunt the handsome Madame Montjoie, as many other persons had haunted her before him,—with no particular results except to increase the arrogant self-complacency with which Louie bore herself among her Catholic friends.
In the first year of his passion, Brenart came into a small inheritance, much of which he spent on jewellery and other presents for his idol. She accepted them without scruple, and his hopes naturally rose high. But in a few months he ran through his money, his drinking habits, under Montjoie's lead, grew upon him, and he fell rapidly into a state of degradation which would have made it very easy for Louie to shake him off, had she been so minded.
But by this time he had, no doubt, a curious spell for her. He was a person of considerable gifts, an etcher of fantastic promise, a clever musician, and the owner of a humorous carillon of talk, to quote M. Renan's word, which made life in his neighbourhood perpetually amusing for those, at any rate, who took the grossness of its themes as a matter of course. Louie found on the one hand that she could not do without him, in her miserable existence; on the other that if he was not to starve she must keep him. His misfortunes revealed the fact that there was neither chivalry nor delicacy in him; and he learnt to live upon her with surprising quickness, and on the most romantic pretexts.