“These crystals were some of them equal in size to the largest diamonds known in the trade,” said Mr. Mosheh. “They would have been a tremendous haul for a thief, if they had been real.”
He gave the date of the man’s visit, which was within a week of La Chicot’s murder.
“Could you identify the man who called upon you with those stones?” asked the magistrate.
“I believe I could.”
“Was he the prisoner?”
“Certainly not. He was a man of between fifty and sixty years of age.”
“Has anybody a photograph of Desrolles?”
Yes, there was a photograph in court. Mrs. Evitt had furnished the police with two, which Desrolles had given her upon different occasions. One was in court, the other had been taken by the detective who was looking for Desrolles.
The photograph was shown to the witness.
“Yes,” said Mr. Mosheh, “I believe that to be the same face. The man who came to me wore a large gray beard. All the lower part of the face was hidden, and the beard made him look older. I conclude that it was a false beard. But to the best of my belief that is the same man. The upper part of the face is very striking. I don’t think I could be deceived in it.”
After this evidence Mr. Leopold urged that there was no ground for any longer detaining John Treverton. The magistrate, after some little discussion, agreed to this, and the prisoner was discharged.
XLV
The Hunt for Desrolles
When Desrolles left the village under the shadow of Dartmoor, after bargaining for a handsome annuity, he meant to enter upon a new and delightful stage of existence. The world was changed for him. Assured of a handsome income, he felt as it were, newborn. He would rove, butterfly-like, from city to city. He would sip of one sweet, and then fly to the rest. All that was fairest upon earth was at his command. The loveliest spots in southern Europe should be the cradle of his declining years. He would leave off brandy, and live decently. Henceforward he would have a full purse, and freedom from care; for what tortures can conscience have in reserve for a man who has set it at nought all his life?
Mr. Desrolles considered Paris as the first stage in that voyage of pleasure which he had planned for himself; but once having entered Paris, with money in his pocket, and a sense of independence, all his schemes became as nothing when weighed against the fascinations of that wonderful city. He had spent some of his most reckless years in Paris; he knew the city by heart, with all her charms, with all her vices, all those qualities which she possesses in common with the courtesans who spring from her soil. Paris for Desrolles in his decline had all the delights she had offered him in his youth. She stretched out her many arms to detain and hold him, like an octopus. Her life of the streets and the café, her dancing places—where the dancing began at eleven at night and ended only at some unearthly hour of the morning—her singing places, where bare-necked brazen women sat smiling in the glare of the gas—her wine shops at every corner—her billiard rooms over every café—all these were charms which for Desrolles proved irresistible. There was an all-pervading note of dissipation in the place that delighted him. In London he had felt himself a scamp. In Paris he fancied himself little worse than his fellow men. There were differences, perhaps; but only differences of degree.
Desrolles had come to Paris with the intention of curing himself of brandy. He carried out this resolve with laudable firmness. He cured himself of brandy by taking to absinthe. He entered Paris with ninety-five pounds in his pocket, and a promise of a thousand a year. With the future so amply provided for, he was naturally somewhat reckless as to his expenditure in the present. He was not a man who cared for pomp or show. He had outlived his taste for the refinements of life. With his purse full of money he had no inclination to put up at Meurice’s, or the Bristol. The elegant luxury of those establishments would have seemed fade to his perverted taste, just as brandy without the addition of cayenne pepper used to seem tasteless to a luckless English marquis, who burned life’s brief candle at both ends, and brought it to speedy extinction.
Desrolles, like the hare, wound back to his old form. Years ago he had lodged in the students’ quarter, and drunk at the students’ cafés, and lost his money among those profane young reprobates from whom were to issue the future senators, doctors, and lawyers of France. The lodging had been dirty and disreputable twenty years ago. It was so much the more dirty and no less disreputable after the lapse of twenty years. But Desrolles was grateful to Providence and the Prefect of the Seine for having left his old quarters standing.
The house, beneath whose weatherworn roof he had spent such wild nights of old, had been spared from demolition by accident only, and was soon to be numbered with the things of the past. Its doom was fixed, it existed only on sufferance, pending the complete reconstruction of the quarter. A mighty boulevard, marching on with progress as relentless as Juggernaut’s car, had cut the narrow, dingy old street across, at right angles, letting daylight in upon all its shabbiness, its teeming life, its contented poverty, its secret crime, squalid miseries, and sordid vices.
The house in which Desrolles had lived had but just escaped demolition. It stood at the corner of the broad new boulevard, where mighty stone palaces were being raised upon the ashes of departed hovels. Its next door neighbour had been razed to the ground, and the gaudy papers that had lined the
