He stopped short. He had outdistanced his heavily-booted pursuers considerably. He was out of their sight behind that thick hedge. In a jiffy he pulled off the hat, stripped off the frock, and thrust them well down into the bottom of the overgrown ditch. Then he put on his fisherman’s cap, lit a cigarette, stuck his hands in his pockets, and went back the way he had come.
At the corner of the farm two breathless, bucketting detectives nearly ran into him.
“Hullo, fisherman! Have you met a woman—a woman in gray?”
“Yes. … A woman who was running, you mean? … A regular madwoman,” said Ralph.
“That’s her! … Which way did she go?”
“She went into the farm.”
“How?”
“Through the back gate.”
“How long ago?”
“Not more than a couple of minutes.”
The two men ran on. Ralph continued his descent of the slope, gave the policemen, who were struggling up it, a friendly greeting, walked briskly down to the ploughed field and across it, struck the road a little below the inn, close to the corner.
A hundred yards round it were the beeches and apple trees of the farmyard where the carriage awaited him.
Leonard was on the box, whip in hand. Josephine Balsamo, inside the carriage, held the door open.
Ralph said to Leonard: “Drive along the road to Yvetot.”
“What?” cried the Countess. “But it takes us past the inn!”
“The essential thing is that they should not guess that we came out of this place. If we go round the corner toward Yvetot, they will not know where we came from. Just a gentle trot, Leonard … about the pace of a hearse returning empty from a funeral.”
Leonard shook the reins, the horses trotted quietly round the corner along the road, past the inn. On its threshold stood Mother Vasseur. She just threw out her right hand sideways in a gesture of greeting and farewell and turned and went inside.
“That sets her mind at rest, poor old thing,” said the Countess. “Look!”
Against the skyline, up by the farm, stood the four policemen, conferring. From the liveliness of their gestures it was clear that they were not of the same opinion. They had drawn the farm blank and were debating what to do next.
“That’s all right,” said Ralph. “The carriage is the last thing they’ll connect with your flight, for they believe that you’re somewhere on the other side of that hill. In fact, they’d simply laugh if anybody told them you were in it.”
“They’re going to question Mother Vasseur pretty severely,” said the Countess.
“She’ll have to get out of it as best she can. We can’t help her,” he said with decision.
When they had passed out of sight of the policemen, he bade Leonard drive faster.
“I’m afraid the poor beasts will not go much further. How long have they been going already?” said Ralph.
“Since this morning, when we left Dieppe. I spent the night there.”
“And where are we going to?” he asked.
“The banks of the Seine.”
“Goodness! Between forty-five and fifty miles in a day, at this pace! But it’s a marvel!”
She did not say anything.
Between the two front windows of the carriage there was a strip of glass in which he could see her. She had put on a darker frock and a light toque from which a fairly thick veil hung down over her face. She pushed up the veil and took from the shelf fixed under the strip of glass a small leather bag which contained an old, gold hand-glass, and other toilet appurtenances, small, stoppered bottles, rouge, and brushes.
She took the hand-glass from it and gazed at her tired face in it for some time.
Then she poured some drops on it from a tiny crystal bottle and rubbed the wetted surface with a scrap of silk. Once more she looked at herself in the glass.
At first Ralph did not understand; he only observed the somewhat bitter and melancholy expression of a woman gazing at herself when she is not at her best.
Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, passed in this silence and in the manifestly intense effort of that gaze in which all her thought and will were concentrated. The smile appeared first, hesitating, timid, like a ray of winter sunlight. Presently it became bolder and revealed its action by little details which presented themselves in turn to the astonished eyes of Ralph. The corner of the mouth lost its droop. The skin filled again with color. The flesh appeared to grow firm again. The cheeks and the chin recovered their pure outline; and all the grace of youth once more illumined the beautiful and tender face of Josephine Balsamo.
The miracle was accomplished.
“Miracle?” said Ralph to himself. “Not a bit of it. Or rather, to be exact, a miracle of the will. The influence of a clear and tenacious thought which refuses to accept decay, and which reestablishes discipline where disorder and surrender reign. As for the rest the mirror, the little bottle, the wonderful elixir—just a comedy.”
He took the hand-glass, which she had set down beside her, and examined it. It was evidently the hand-glass described during the meeting of the conspirators at La Haie d’Etigues, that which the Countess of Cagliostro had used in the presence of the Empress Eugenie. The frame was engine-turned, the plate of silver at the back was all dented with blows.
On the handle was a count’s coronet, a date, 1783, and the list of the four enigmas.
Urged by a veritable, painful need to wound her, he said with a sneer: “Your father indeed left you a precious mirror. Thanks to its talismanic power one recovers from the most disagreeable emotions.”
“It’s a fact that I lost my head,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t happen to me often. I’ve kept it in far more serious situations than that one.”
“Oh come—more serious?” he said in a tone of incredulous irony.
She did
