“No,” he said, “but I know the driver of the carriage she uses for her evening engagements, I engaged him regularly for her. I have always been so good to her! I will stop her carriage. I will punish her here in the street. It is her proper place, and I will tell her so.”
“You will not do that,” I interrupted him taking up a position in front of him and speaking in a low voice. Now I was afraid of the curiosity of the drivers who were sitting on the boxes of a long string of carriages.
“I will do it,” he replied, beside himself, and just at that moment the porter called a carriage and we heard a name which caused Molan to burst out into a laugh, that of Camille herself.
“I beg of you,” I said to the madman, “if you have no regard for Camille think of Madam de Bonnivet!”
“You are right,” he replied after a short silence, “I will control myself. But I must speak to her, I must. I will get into the carriage with her, that is all.”
“But if she will not allow it?”
“Allow it!” he said with a shrug of the shoulders. “You shall see.”
A carriage had left the rank while we were talking, a shabby hired brougham. Its commonness contrasted strangely with the other vehicles which were waiting in the long street. The time this carriage took to enter beneath the archway and emerge again from it seemed to me interminable. If my companion allowed himself to be disrespectful to Camille I had made up my mind what to do.
At last the carriage reappeared and a woman’s form was visible through the window, wrapped in a cloak with a high collar which I recognized only too well. It was Camille. Jacques called out to the driver, who recognized him, and was on the point of pulling up when the window was let down and we could hear the actress call out: “23, Rue Lincoln, don’t you hear me? Do you take your orders from that gentleman?” Turning to me she said: “Vincent, if you do not prevent that individual,” and she pointed to Jacques, “from trying to get into my carriage I shall call the police.” The silhouettes of two policemen appeared quite black in the light of the lamps, and though the dialogue had been short the sound of the voices had made some of the men sitting on the boxes of the other carriages lean forward. In the face of this threat Jacques dare not turn the handle of the carriage door on which he had his hand. He stepped back and the carriage drove away while Camille’s voice repeated in a tone I shall never forget—
“23, the Rue Lincoln, as fast as you can go.”