For twenty minutes longer the landau rolled on; then it came to a halt under the broad porte-cochère of the Villa Irma, and two minutes after that Cleek and the count stood in the presence of Madame Tcharnovetski, her purblind associate, and her retinue of servant-guards.
A handsome woman, this madame, a woman of about two-and-thirty, with the tar-black eyes and the twilight-coloured tresses of Northern Russia; bold as brass, flippant as a French cocotte, steel-nerved and calm-blooded as a professional gambler. It had been her whim that all the women of the count's family should be banished from the house during her stay; that the great salon of the villa, a wondrous apartment, hung in blue and silver, and lit by a huge crystal chandelier, should be put at her disposal night and day; that the electric lights should be replaced with dozens of wax candles (after the manner of the ballrooms of her native Russia); that her one-eyed companion, with his wicker cage of screeching parakeets should come and go when and where and how he
listed, and that an electric alarm bell be connected with her sleeping apartment and his.
"Your hirelings will tamper with his birds and his effects in the night, I know that, Monsieur le Comte," she had said when she demanded this. "He is a nervous fellow, this poor Clopin; I wish him to be able to ring for help if you and your men go too far."
Clopin was sitting by the window chattering to his birds when Cleek entered, and a glance at him was sufficient to decide two points: first he was not disguised, nor was his partial blindness in any way a sham, for an idiot could have seen that the droop of the left eyelid over the staring, palpably artificial eye which glazed over the empty socket beneath was due to perfectly natural causes; and, second, that the man was indeed what the count had said he resembled, namely, a gutter-bred outcast.
"French," was Cleek's silent comment upon him. "One of those charlatans who infest the streets of Paris with their so-called 'fortune-telling birds,' who, for ten centimes, pick out an envelope with their beaks as a means of telling you what the future is supposed to hold. What has made a woman like this pick up with a fellow of his stamp? Hum-m-m! Puppy, I think you are a good move," stroking the ears of the mongrel dog; "a very much better move than a cage of useless parakeets that are meant to throw suspicion in the wrong direction and have a seed-cup so large and so obviously overfilled that it is safe to say there is nothing hidden in it and never has been. And madame has a fancy for wax lights," his gaze travelling upward to the glittering chandelier. "Hum-m-m! How well they know, these women whose beauty is going off, that wax-lights show less of Time's ravages than gas or electricity. Candles in the chandelier; candles in the sconces; candles on the mantelpiece. This room should be very charming when it is lighted at night."
It was—as he learned later. Just now things not quite so charming filled the bill, for madame was jeering at him in a manner not to be misunderstood.
"A police spy, that is what you are, monsieur!" she said, coming up to him and impudently snapping her fingers under his nose. "Such a fool this white-headed old dotard of a count, to think that he can take me in with a silly yarn about going to visit a nephew and bringing him back here to stay. Monsieur, you are a police spy. Well, good luck to you. Get what the Mauravanian king wants, if—you—can!"
"Madame," replied Cleek, with a deeply deferential bow and with an accent that seemed born of Paris, "Madame, that is what I mean to do, I assure you."