An electric bell rang arrogantly, in warning that the curtain was about to rise, and some moments later the atrium was half deserted.
I told Faulkner what I had heard. He seemed in no way surprised.
“I thought it inadvisable to tell you this before,” he said after a pause, “but now that you have got wind of it I may as well tell you the rumours—or rather the chief one. The rest don’t matter. The Baronne de Coudron was known to be extremely rich, yet a few years ago she was quite poor. She bought the Château d’Uzerche recently. How and where she suddenly got the money is a mystery that has puzzled everybody, and rumours have been afloat that she obtained it by means which could lead her to penal servitude. But of course nobody knows anything definite—so nobody dares do more than insinuate.”
“The gendarmes seemed to know something definite,” I said.
“Yes, and much use they made of it! Paulton is most likely safely back in England by now.”
“They can arrest him there of course.”
“They can—but will they? Do you think officials capable of being hoodwinked as these gendarmes were, will have acumen enough to catch a clever man like Paulton? We must admit that he is clever.”
The more I saw of Faulkner, the more I grew to like him. Singularly undemonstrative in ordinary conversation, he recalled to my mind a blacksmith’s forge that is covered and banked up with cold, wet coal, but that burns so fiercely within. What had first attracted me to the lad had been his amazing coolness in the face of death, a coolness that amounted to indifference. I could picture him under fire, calmly rolling a cigarette and telling others what to do. Yet he was not a soldier. Like myself he was merely an idler. Leaving out the Houghton Park incident, I have myself only once been under fire. It was not on a battlefield, though not far from one—the field of Tewkesbury. It was during a big rabbit shoot, when two of the guns fired straight at me simultaneously, and the rabbit they killed rolled over on to my feet, dead.
My conduct was not heroic on that occasion I am afraid. With one bound I sprang behind a big elm, and, from that position of safety, hurled vituperation at my unintentional assailants, ordering them to desist. It took me some moments to convince myself I had not been hit, but the shock to my system was, I confess, considerable.
From the theatre we strolled through the big doors into the Salles de jeux. I tossed a hundred-franc note on the rouge and left it there. Red came up six times, and I gathered up my winnings.