Hugo Part 26

I told Camilla I was going out, and that she must not leave that room, nor admit anyone into it, until I returned. I felt that Ravengar, what with disappointed love, and jealousy, and fear of the consequences of a past crime, had developed into a sort of monomaniac in respect to Camilla. I felt he was capable of anything. I should not have been surprised if he had hired a room opposite to us on the other side of that narrow street, and directed a fusillade upon Camilla.

When I reached the street he had disappeared--melted away.

It was quite early. However, I walked up the Rue de Grammont, and so to Darcy's, and I routed him out of bed. I gave him the entire history of the case. I convinced him of its desperateness, and I unfolded to him my scheme. At first he fought shy of it. He said it might ruin him. He said such things could not be done in London. I had meant to carry out the scheme in this flat. Hence the reason, Polycarp, of the clause in my will which provides for the sealing up of the flat in case I die within two months of my wedding. You see, I feared that I might be cut off before the plan was carried out or before all traces of it were cleared away, and I wanted to keep the place safe from prying eyes. As it happened, there was no need for such a precaution, as you will see, and I shall make a new will to-morrow.

Darcy said suddenly: 'Why not carry out your plan here in Paris; and now?'

The superior advantages of this alternative were instantly plain. It would be safer for Camilla, since it would operate at once; and also Darcy said that the formal details could be arranged much better in Paris than in London, as doctors could be found there who would sign anything, and clever sculptors, who did not mind a peculiar commission, were more easily obtainable in the Quartier Montparna.s.se than in the neighbourhood of the Six Bells and the Arts Club, Chelsea.

We found the doctor and the sculptor.

The hotel was informed that Camilla was ill, and that the symptom pointed to typhoid fever. Naturally, she kept her room. That day the sculptor, a young American, who said that a thing was 'bully' when he meant it was good, arrived, and took a mask of Camilla's head. By the way, this was a most tedious and annoying process. The two straws through which the poor girl had to breathe while her face was covered with that white stuff--! Oh, well, I needn't go into that.

The next day typhoid fever was definitely announced. Hotels generally prefer these things to be kept secret, but we published it everywhere--it was part of our plan. In a few hours the entire Rue St.

Augustin was aware that the English bride recently arrived from London was down with typhoid fever.

The disease ran its course. Sometimes Camilla was better, sometimes worse. Then all of a sudden a haemorrhage supervened, and the young wife died, and the young husband was stricken with trouble and grief. The whole street mourned. The death even got into the Paris dailies, and the correspondence column of the Paris edition of the _New York Herald_ was filled with outcries against the impurities of Parisian water.

It was colossal. I laughed, Polycarp.

My mind unhinged by sorrow, I insisted on taking the corpse to London for burial. I had a peculiar affection for the Brompton Cemetery, though neither her ancestors nor mine had been buried there. I insisted on Darcy accompanying me. The procession left the Rue St. Augustin, and the hotel was disinfected. This alone cost me a thousand francs. I gave the sculptor one thousand five hundred, and the doctor two thousand. Then there were the expenses of the journey with the coffin. I forget the figure, but I know it was prodigious.

But I was content. For, of course, Camilla was not precisely in that coffin. Camilla had not been suffering from precisely typhoid fever. In strict fact, she had never been ill the least bit in the world. In strict fact, she had been spirited out of the hotel one night, and at the very moment when her remains were crossing the Channel in charge of an inconsolable widower, she was in the middle of the Mediterranean on a steamer. The coffin contained a really wonderful imitation of her outward form, modelled and coloured by the American sculptor in a composition consisting largely of wax. The widower's one grief was that he was forced to separate himself from his life's companion for a period of, at least, a week.

A pretty enough scheme, wasn't it, Polycarp? We shall shortly bury the wax effigy in Brompton Cemetery, with the a.s.sistance of Hugo's undertakers, and a parson or so, and grave-diggers, and registrars of deaths, and so on and so on. Louis Ravengar will breathe again, thankful that typhoid fever has relieved him of an unpleasant incubus, and since Camilla is underground, he will speedily forget all about her. She will be absolutely safe from him. The inconsolable widower will ostentatiously seek distraction in foreign travel, and in a fortnight, at most, will, under another name, resume his connubial career in a certain villa unsurpa.s.sed, I am told, for its picturesque situation.

To-morrow or the next day I must make that new will, dispensing with the shutting-up of the flat. The secret instructions, however, will stand.

You may wonder why I confide all this to the phonograph, Polycarp. I will tell you. The record will be placed by me to-morrow in my safe in your vault. To-night I shall lock it up in the safe here. When I am dead, Polycarp, you will find that the secret instructions instruct you to realize all my estate, and to keep the proceeds in negotiable form until a lady named Mrs. Catherine Pounds, a widow, comes to you with an autograph letter from me. You will hand everything to that lady, or to her representative, without any further inquiry. But it has struck me this very day, Polycarp, that you, with your confounded suspicious and legal nature, when you see Mrs. Catherine Pounds, if she should come in person, may recognise in her a striking resemblance to Camilla. And you may put difficulties in the way, and rake up history which was not meant to be raked up. This phonographic record is to prevent you from doing so, if by chance you have an impulse to do so. Think it over carefully, Polycarp. Consider our situation, and obey my instructions without a murmur. The thought of the false death certificates and burial certificates, and of the unprofessionalism of Darcy, will abrade your legal susceptibilities; but submit to the torture for my sake, Polycarp.

You are human. I shall add to the letter which Mrs. Catherine Pounds will bring you a note to say that if you have any scruples, you are to listen to the phonographic records in the safe; if not, you are to destroy the phonographic records.

Do I seem gay, Polycarp?

I ought to be. I have carried through my scheme. I have outwitted Ravengar. I have saved Camilla from death at his hands. I can look forward to an idyll--brief, perhaps, but ecstatic--in a villa with the loveliest view on all the Mediterranean. I ought to be gay. And yet I am not. And it is not the knowledge of my fatal disease that saddens me.

No; I think I have been saddened by a day and a night spent with that coffin. It is a fraud of a coffin, but it exists. And when I saw it just now occupying the drawing-room, it gave me a sudden shock. It somehow took hold of my imagination. I was obliged to look within, and to touch the waxen image there. And that image seemed unholy. I did not care to dwell on the thought of it going into the ground, with all the solemnities of the real thing. What do you suppose will happen to that waxen image on the Judgment Day, Polycarp? Surely, someone in authority, possibly a steward, fussy and overworked, will exclaim: 'There is some mistake here!' I can hear you say that I am mad, Polycarp, that Francis Tudor was always a little 'wrong.' But I am not mad. It is only that my brain is too agile, too fanciful. I am a great deal more sane than you, Polycarp.

And I am trying to put some heart into myself. I am trying to make ready to enjoy the brief ecstatic future where Camilla awaits me. But I am so tired, Polycarp. And there's no disguising the fact that it's an awful nuisance never to be quite sure whether you won't fall down dead the next minute or the next second. I must go in and have another glance at that singular swindle of a coffin.

The phonograph went off into an inarticulate whirr of its own machinery. The recital was over. Tudor must have died immediately after securing the record in the safe in his bedroom, where Hugo had just listened to it.

'She lives!' was Hugo's sole thought.

The profound and pathetic tragedy of Tudor's career did not touch him until long afterwards.

'She lives! Ravengar lives! Ravengar probably knows where she is, and I do not know! And Ravengar is at large! I have set him at large.'

His mind a battlefield on which the most glorious hope struggled against a frenzied fear, Hugo rose from the chair in front of the phonograph-stand, and, after a slight hesitation, left the flat as he had entered it. Before dawn the pane had been replaced in the drawing-room window, and the side-door secured.

PART III

THE TOMB

CHAPTER XX

'ARE YOU THERE?'

The next morning Hugo's dreams seemed to be concerned chiefly with a telephone, and the telephone-bell of his dreams made the dreams so noisy that even while asleep he knew that his rest was being outrageously disturbed. He tried to change the subject of his fantastic visions, but he could not, and the telephone-bell rang nearly all the time. This was the more annoying in that he had taken elaborate precautions to secure perfect repose. Perfect repose was what he needed after quitting Tudor's flat. He felt that he had stood as much as a man can expect himself to stand. In the vault, and again in the flat, his life had been in danger; he had suffered the ignominy of the ruined sale; he had come to grips with Ravengar, and let Ravengar go free; he had listened to the amazing recital of the phonograph. Moreover, between the interview with Ravengar and the burglary of the flat he had summoned his Council of Ten, or, rather, his Council of Nine (Bentley being absent, dead), had addressed all his employes, had separated three traitorous shopwalkers, ten traitorous cashiers, and forty-two traitorous servers from the main body, and sent them packing, had arranged for the rehabilitation of Lady Brice (_nee_ Kentucky-Webster), had appointed a new guardian to the Safe Deposit, had got on the track of the stolen stoles, and had approved special advertis.e.m.e.nts for every daily paper in London.

And, finally and supremely, he had experienced the greatest stroke of joy, ecstatic and bewildering joy, of his whole existence--the news that Camilla lived. It was this tremendous feeling of joy, and not by any means his complex and variegated worries, that might have prevented him from obtaining the sleep which Nature demanded.

On reaching the dome at 2 a.m., he had taken four tabloids, each containing 0324 gramme of trional, and had drunk the gla.s.s of hot milk which Simon always left him in case he should want it. And he had written on a sheet of paper the words: 'I am not to be disturbed before 10 a.m., no matter what happens; but call me at ten.--H.'; and had put the sheet of paper on Simon's door-mat. And then he had stumbled into bed, and abandoned himself to sleep--not without reluctance, for he did not care to lose, even for a few hours, the fine consciousness of that sheer joy. He desired to rush off instantly into the universe at large and discover Camilla, wherever she might be.

Of course, he had dreamed of Camilla, but the telephone-bell had drowned the remembered accents of her voice. The telephone-bell had silenced everything. The telephone-bell had grown from a dream into a nightmare; and at last he had said to himself in the nightmare: 'I might just as well be up and working as lying throttled here by this confounded nightmare.' And by an effort of will he had wakened. And even after he was roused, and had switched on the light, which showed the hands of the clock at a quarter to ten, he could still hear the telephone-bell of his nightmare. And then the truth occurred to him, as the truth does occur surprisingly to people whose sleep has been disturbed, that the telephone-bell was a real telephone-bell, and not in the least the telephone-bell of a dream, and it was ringing, ringing, ringing in the dome. There were fifteen lines of telephone in the Hugo building, and one of them ran to the dome. Few persons called him up on it, because few persons knew its precise number, but he used it considerably himself.

'Anyhow,' he murmured, 'I've had over seven and a half hours' sleep, and that's something.'

And as he got out of bed to go across to the telephone, his great joy resumed possession of him, and he was rather glad than otherwise that the telephone had forced him to wake.

'Well, well, well?' he cried comically, lifting the ear-piece off the hook and stopping the bell.

'Are you there?' the still small voice of the telephone whispered in his ear.

'I should think I was here!' he cried. 'Who are you?'

'Are you Mr. Hugo?' asked the voice.

'I'm what's left of Mr. Hugo,' he answered in a sort of drunken tone.

The power of the sedative was still upon him. 'Who are you? You've pretty nearly rung my head off.'

'I just want to say good-bye to you,' said the voice.

'What!'

Hugo started, glancing round the vast room, which was in shadow except where a solitary light threw its yellow glare on the dial of the clock.

'Are you there?' asked the voice patiently once again.

'It isn't'--something prompted him to use a Christian name--'it isn't Louis?'

'Yes.'