“I don’t think there’s the remotest chance of your hearing another word about it, unless you talk too much yourself. Look here, Archie, you’ve got to promise me never to go near that place again, and never on any account whatever to go hunting for that girl in green. I’ll tell you my reasons some day, but you can take it that they’re good ones. Another thing. You’ve got to keep out of Turpin’s way. I only hope you haven’t done him irreparable damage because of your idiocy last night.”
Archie was desperately penitent. “I know I behaved like a cad. I’ll go and grovel to old Turpin as soon as they let me up. But he’s all right—sure to be. He wasn’t lookin’ for a fight like me. I expect he only got shoved into the street and couldn’t get back again.”
I did not share Archie’s optimism, and very soon my fear was a certainty. I went straight from the hospital to Carlton House Terrace, and found Mr. Victor at breakfast. I learned that the Marquis de la Tour du Pin had been dining out on the previous evening and had not returned.
XV
How a French Nobleman Discovered Fear
I have twice heard from Turpin the story I am going to set down—once before he understood much of it, a second time when he had got some enlightenment—but I doubt whether to his dying day he will ever be perfectly clear about what happened to him.
I have not had time to introduce Turpin properly, and in any case I am not sure that the job is not beyond me. My liking for the French is profound, but I believe there is no race on earth which the average Briton is less qualified to comprehend. For myself, I could far more easily get inside the skin of a Boche. I knew he was as full of courage as a Berserker, pretty mad, but with that queer core of prudence which your Latin possesses and which in the long run makes his madness less dangerous than an Englishman’s. He was high-strung, excitable, imaginative, and I should have said in a general way very sensitive to influences such as Medina wielded. But he was forewarned. Mary had told him the main lines of the business, and he was playing the part she had set him as dutifully as a good child. I had not done justice to his power of self-control. He saw his sweetheart leading that blind unearthly life, and it must have been torture to him to do nothing except look on. But he never attempted to wake her memory, but waited obediently till Mary gave orders, and played the part to perfection of the ordinary half-witted dancing mountebank.
When the row with Archie started, and the scurry began, he had the sense to see that he must keep out of it. Then he heard Archie speak his real name, and saw the mischief involved in that, for nobody knew him except Mary, and he had passed as a Monsieur Claud Simond from Buenos Aires. When he saw his friend stand up to the bruiser, he started off instinctively to his help, but stopped in time and turned to the door. The man with the black beard was looking at him, but said nothing.
There seemed to be a good deal of racket at the foot of the stairs. One of the girls caught his arm. “No good that way,” she whispered. “It’s a raid all right. There’s another road out. You don’t want your name in tomorrow’s papers.”
He followed her into a little side passage, which was almost empty and very dark, and there he lost her. He was just starting to prospect, when he saw a little dago whom he recognised as one of the bartenders. “Up the stairs, monsieur,” the man said. “Then first to the left and down again. You come out in the yard of the Apollo Garage. Quick, monsieur, or les flics will be here.”
Turpin sped up the steep wooden stairs, and found himself in another passage fairly well lit, with a door at each end. He took the one to the left, and dashed through, wondering how he was to recover his hat and coat, and also what had become of Mary. The door opened easily enough, and in his haste he took two steps forward. It swung behind him, so that he was in complete darkness, and he turned back to open it again to give him light. But it would not open. With the shutting of that door he walked clean out of the world.
At first he was angry, and presently, when he realised his situation, a little alarmed. The place seemed to be small, it was utterly dark, and as stuffy as the inside of a safe. His chief thought at the moment was that it would never do for him to be caught in a raid on a dance-club, for his true name might come out and the harm which Archie’s foolish tongue had wrought might be thereby aggravated. But soon
