Where the Pavement Ends Part 24

"What can he want?" demanded Mother Carron. "That blood-stained basket robber!"

And Zelie answered her very quietly.

"I suppose he brings me my message from M. de Nou."

You will remember in all my term at Noumea I had seen but once before this ign.o.ble under-servant of the guillotine. I could have preferred never to see him again. He did not improve on closer view.

He was one of those creatures somehow resembling insects: like the ciliate and noxious things that run about when you lift a damp rock. You know?... Very black. Very hairy, with hair overlaid in fringes curiously soft and glistening. With eyes very small, round and quick as beads. In person he was misshapen: bandy-legged: but with all that a powerful ruffian, whose long, crooked arms might have ended in nippers like a scorpion's.

There you have the fellow Bombiste, who presently slid in at the doorway and stood blinking through the light.

We regarded this type: and he us. Did I tell you he called himself a Pole? I cannot say. But certainly his speech was hardly to be comprehended. He spat something that could have pa.s.sed equally for a greeting or a curse. And so far he had the advantage of us: for any reply of ours would have been only the half of that.

To do her justice Mother Carron kept a bold front to him. But she was handling here a very different sort of brute--not to be reached by that singular influence she exerted on the convict community at large: himself an outcast among convicts: sharing the isolation of his detested master on Ile de Nou. When she demanded to know his affair--

"Official!" he snarled back, with his slit grin.

Indeed it must have been a rare errand for him: a rare jest. He affected in his manner a gratified swagger of contempt: natural enough for a man with whom the vilest felon would never willingly speak, you understand: natural enough for one whose only dealing with his fellows was to valet their shorn bodies on the scaffold and to gather their last poor trifles of property for the executioner's wage--"robbing the basket," as we say.

"What are you after?" persisted Mother Carron.

"Not you, old woman!" he retorted. "Not any of you," he added with brutal a.s.surance as his glance shifted past Bibi-Ri and myself. "But I come to see ... Mam'zelle here. And Mam'zelle alone!"

Well, we had had warning, to be sure. From this welter of evil portents some actual horror was due. And my faith, he wasted little time about it! He pa.s.sed us over as if we had been less than nothing. He removed his ragged straw hat to twirl on his finger. He sc.r.a.ped low before the calm-faced girl who still waited impa.s.sive on the stairs. And then and there he delivered himself of the message he had been taught. All at once. Even glibly. With a kind of d.a.m.nable sputtering eloquence.

"Mam'zelle Zelie--at your service--I bring you this word from my master: best respects and affections. He bids me say the civil ceremony will be for to-morrow, as planned. But he mistrusts your clever aunt--who might indeed try tricks to interfere. And so ... you see ... to-night: straightway: will be the wedding, Mam'zelle!

"The priest is here. In me behold one happy witness! For the other--" He grinned. "Perhaps Madame Carron will do." He thrust a thumb at Bibi-Ri.

"Or that young buck yonder. The master himself only delays his impatience a few moments formally to arrive when all is ready. Safely escorted, you can believe, in this place of so bad a reputation--from which, moreover, he promises to remove you at once."

To see the rascal strut, and what airs he took!

"Meantime, Mam'zelle--in attending--please will you put on your best frock and prepare yourself," he concluded. "And as your wedding gift ...

the master has pleasure to send you herewith the precious chains and jewels in this box and asks you to wear them for his sake!"

Throughout this stupefying recital none of the rest of us stirred, you will conceive. And when he had done we could still only stare. A picture, if you like! Zelie, the unfortunate child: and there, distorting himself in gallant gesture, offering tribute, that foul amba.s.sador! The glow of fallen embers in the fire smudged him with infernal fantasy--it lent her the softest flush, making her young beauty to quicken and to kindle. As if a guilty angel should stoop from the lower step of heaven to take a bribe of h.e.l.l. For she a.s.sented: make no mistake.... She was going to a.s.sent. He tendered her a small black box of leather: she had a hand outstretched to it--when a word dropped sheer and arresting in the silence as a pebble in a well.

It was not Mother Carron who spoke: our crafty hostess was far too burdened just then under the collapse of all her craftiness. Decidedly it was not me. Remained only Bibi-Ri. And in truth, he it was: though the fact appeared as one of those momentary incredibilities of intercourse.

"Zelie!"

Now I cannot pretend to know, what lay in the mind of that young girl.

Who could plumb such a depth? She had kept herself inscrutable. How she actually felt toward Bibi-Ri I had no guess. She had seen him pared like a carrot--humiliated as few could be--his little human folly and weakness exposed, his grand hopes and aspirations made sordid and slimy.

Even his one effort, his scheme of shuffling her away into a convent which must have seemed the sorriest cowardice, had surprised no motion from her. But how she regarded him now was plain. In the slow lift of her head, the heavy glitter of her eyes--plain to read.

"Zelie," he said. "You can't go on with it."

"No?" she inquired.... "No?"

Some way or other he had taken up position between the door and the stairs.... Oh, not with any sort of flash heroism--understand me. I am not giving you a feuilleton of melodrama. But there he put himself and there he stayed.

Of course that brute Bombiste had bristled at the first interruption.

With a sign Zelie checked him short.... She was ready for Bibi-Ri. She had been waiting for Bibi-Ri. One knew it. One knew this to be their real meeting, and finally one knew who was and who had been his real opponent. Here the issue was joined. Between the dream and the girl--as you might say--here stood the Red Mark.

"You can't go on with it," he repeated in a voice, after all emotions, that had become almost matter of fact. "It is unthinkable. You will not touch those presents."

"I wonder if I won't," she answered.

"They were stolen from dead men--"

"Not so wicked as stealing heart and faith," she said.

"For this crime: worse than murder--"

"Not so bad as killing a soul given into your hand," she said.

"By a man the lowest of a.s.sa.s.sins!"

"Not so low," she said, "but that you claim his name, his blood and his fortune for your own!"

Ah, they were striking at each other's naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s, those two. With naked weapons. And neither of them shirked it. Not the girl, who sent back as good as she got--not Bibi-Ri, who took even that last terrible thrust.

"Such things do not happen." You would have thought he was putting a form of statement. "All else aside--" he said, "all else aside, this does not happen."

"What can you do or say to prevent?" she asked, leading him by so much.

"Anything you want of me."

"I want nothing: it would only be false."

"Anything you want me to say."

"I want to hear nothing: it would only be lies."

"Zelie," he offered, "will you marry me?"

That must have been the test, you know. In the covert, unproclaimed struggle which had brought them both to this pa.s.s, that must have been the gauge. Whatever thrill of satisfied pa.s.sionate resentment she could have wished must have been hers there and then.

"Will you wed with me, Zelie?"

An exultant throb escaped her.

"Too late!" she said.

But he was beyond flinching.

"Let me be sure," he begged. "I was wrong, Zelie. I was blind and mad and heartless. I say so. But I give it up--I give up all that foolish gilded fancy of mine, for I see what true treasure it cost me.... Or look--pet.i.te--I give it up to you and we go seek the future together.

Heaven knows if it could ever be any worth to us after--after to-night.