The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 6

"No, no; I mean I thought the portrait was the Princess's."

Madame la Proprietaire laughed. "She told you so?"

"No, no; but--but I imagined so."

"Without doubt, she gave you the idea. _Quelle farceuse!_ I don't believe there ever was a Princess. The family was always inflated."

All Madame Depine's world seemed toppling. Somehow her own mistake added to her sense of having been exploited.

"Still," said Madame la Proprietaire with a shrug, "it is only three weeks' rent."

"If you lose it, I will pay!" Madame Depine had an heroic burst of faith.

"As you please. But I ought to have been on my guard. Where did she take the funds for a grey wig?"

"Ah, the brown wig!" cried Madame Depine, joyfully. "She must have left that behind, and any _coiffeur_ will give you three weeks' rent for that alone."

"We shall see," replied Madame la Proprietaire, ambiguously.

The trio mounted the stairs, and hunted high and low, disturbing the peaceful spider-webs. They peered under the very bed. Not even the old block was to be seen. As far as Madame Valiere's own chattels were concerned, the room was indeed "empty as an egg-sh.e.l.l."

"She has carried it away with the three weeks' rent," sneered Madame la Proprietaire. "In my own carpet-bag," she added with a terrible recollection.

"She wished to wear it at night against the hard back of the carriage, and guard the other all glossy for the wedding." Madame Depine quavered pleadingly, but she could not quite believe herself.

"The wedding had no more existence than the Princess," returned Madame la Proprietaire, believing herself more and more.

"Then she will have cheated me out of the grey wig from the first,"

cried Madame Depine, involuntarily. "And I who sacrificed myself to her!"

"_Comment!_ It was your wig?"

"No, no." She flushed and stammered. "But _enfin_--and then, oh, heaven! my brooch!"

"She has stolen your brooch?"

Great tears rolled down the wrinkled, ashen cheeks. So this was her reward for secretly instructing the _coiffeur_ to make the "Princess's" wig first. The Princess, indeed! Ah, the adventuress! She felt choking; she shook her fist in the air. Not even the brooch to show when her family came up from Tonnerre, to say nothing of the wig.

Was there a G.o.d in the world at all? Oh, holy Mother! No wonder the trickstress would not be escorted to the station--she never went to the station. No wonder she would not sell the royal secrets to the journalist--there were none to sell. Oh! it was all of a piece.

"If I were you I should go to the bureau of police!" said Madame la Proprietaire.

Yes, she would go; the wretch should be captured, should be haled to gaol. Even her half of the Louis Quinze timepiece recurred to poor Madame Depine's brain.

"Add that she has stolen my carpet-bag."

The local bureau telegraphed first to Tonnerre.

There had been the wedding, but no Madame Valiere. She had accepted the invitation, had given notice of her arrival; one had awaited the midnight train. The family was still wondering why the rich aunt had turned sulky at the last hour. But she was always an eccentric; a capricious and haughty personage.

Poor Madame Depine's recurrent "My wig! my brooch!" reduced the official mind to the same muddle as her own.

"No doubt a sudden impulse of senescent kleptomania," said the superintendent, sagely, when he had noted down for transference to headquarters Madame Depine's verbose and vociferous description of the traits and garments of the runagate. "But we will do our best to recover your brooch and your wig." Then, with a spasm of supreme sagacity, "Without doubt they are in the carpet-bag."

XV

Madame Depine left the bureau and wandered about in a daze. That monster of ingrat.i.tude! That arch-adventuress, more vicious even than her bejewelled sister! All the long months of more than Lenten rigour recurred to her self-pitiful mood, that futile half-year of semi-starvation. How Madame Valiere must have gorged on the sly, the rich eccentric! She crossed a bridge to the Ile de la Cite, and came to the gargoyled portals of Notre Dame, and let herself be drawn through the open door, and all the gloom and glory of the building fell around her like a soothing caress. She dropped before an altar and poured out her grief to the Mother of Sorrows. At last she arose, and tottered up the aisle, and the great rose-window glowed like the window of heaven. She imagined her husband and the dead children looking through it. Probably they wondered, as they gazed down, why her head remained so young.

Ah! but she was old, so very old. Surely G.o.d would take her soon. How should she endure the long years of loneliness and social ignominy?

As she stumbled out of the Cathedral, the cold, hard day smote her full in the face. People stared at her, and she knew it was at the brown wig. But could they expect her to starve herself for a whole year?

"_Mon Dieu!_ Starve yourselves, my good friends. At my age, one needs fuel."

She escaped from them, and ran, muttering, across the road, and almost into the low grey shed.

Ah! the Morgue! Blessed idea! That should be the end of her. A moment's struggle, and then--the rose-window of heaven! h.e.l.l? No, no; the Madonna would plead for her; she who always looked so beautiful, so _convenable_.

She would peep in. Let her see how she would look when they found her.

Would they clap a grey wig upon her, or expose her humiliation even in death?

"A-a-a-h!" A long scream tore her lips apart. There, behind the gla.s.s, in terrible waxen peace, a gash on her forehead, lay the "Princess,"

so uncanny-looking without any wig at all, that she would not have recognised her but for that moment of measurement at the hairdresser's. She fell sobbing before the cold gla.s.s wall of the death-chamber. Ah, G.o.d! Her first fear had been right; her brooch had but added to the murderer's temptation. And she had just traduced this martyred saint to the police.

"Forgive me, _ma cherie_, forgive me," she moaned, not even conscious that the attendant was lifting her to her feet with professional interest.

For in that instant everything pa.s.sed from her but the great yearning for love and reconciliation, and for the first time a grey wig seemed a petty and futile aspiration.

CHa.s.se-CROISe

I

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